The Ultimate Logic of a Society Built on Mass Murder | Black Agenda Report

The Ultimate Logic of a Society Built on Mass Murder

19 Dec 2012

🖨️ Print Article

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“A culture that celebrates the annihilation of whole peoples, casually and without guilt or introspection, is devoid of human values at its very core.” Ultimately, such a society turns against itself. It’s not a sudden madness, but a long history of mass murder come full circle.

The Ultimate Logic of a Society Built on Mass Murder

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“Mass murder is at the core of the American national religion.”

As a native-born American, I grew up watching cowboy and Indian shoot-em-ups in which the highlight of the movie was when the white guys in the circled wagon train shot the Indians off their horses until all the red men were dead, and very silent. Indians didn’t do a lot of screaming in pain when they were shot; they just expired. Same thing with buck-toothed Japanese, line after line of them, charging into U.S. machine guns, falling instantly silent and dead. It was somehow quite clean, almost antiseptic, these cinematic rituals of death, all staged for the broadest popular consumption to demonstrate the inevitability – and cosmic justice – of ultimate white victory over the darker races.

This was mother’s milk to the white American nation – which is why Richard Pryor and kids like me rooted for the Indians. Mass murder is at the core of the American national religion, which is a celebration of a genocidal march across a continent filled with other, doomed human beings. America’s contribution to European culture was to invite “all the nations of Europe” to come to these shores and become fellow “white” citizens, whose status was defined by the enforced inferiority of Blacks and the remnants of the Indians. Ritual burnings of Blacks were organized as great public festivals, attended by thousands, staged in order to affirm whites’ collective right to commit murder. This monopoly on violence was what made them white Americans.

“The modern mass American murder is overwhelmingly a white phenomenon.”

U.S. foreign policy reflects the nation’s origins and ghastly evolution into a globe-strutting mob, that empowers itself to kill at will. A million dead Filipinos at the turn of the 20^th century; aerial bombing of Haitian villages less than a generation later; the totally unwarranted nuclear annihilation of two cities at the very end of World War Two; two million dead Koreans shortly thereafter; three million dead Vietnamese in the next decade,; and, since 1996, six million Congolese – all, and many, many more, slaughtered in the name of U.S. civilizational superiority – the ghastly opiate of the white American masses.

What kind of human beings does such a culture produce? To paraphrase the Bible, “By their massacres, ye shall know them.” The modern mass American murder is overwhelmingly a white phenomenon. Yet few whites ask the question, “What’s wrong with white America?” It is seems that white America lacks the capacity for self-examination. It cannot grasp the simple truth, that a culture that celebrates the annihilation of whole peoples, casually and without guilt or introspection, is devoid of human values at its very core. In the end, it turns against itself. That is the simple lesson of Newtown, and Columbine, and Aurora. The same cultural deformity creates a huge market for games like the very popular Assassin’s Creed, whose latest version integrates individual and group murder with events of the American Revolutionary War. American kids can simulate mass murder all day long, and feel patriotic and smart while doing it. Assassin’s Creed features an inter-racial cast of killers – possibly in deference to the brown guy in the White House who owns the ultimate Kill List. It’s the modern equivalent of the cowboys and Indians movies of my youth. The same sickness.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

listen

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20121219_gf_MassMurderNation.mp3

More Stories

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
Roe v. Wade and American Politics
06 May 2022
Pascal Robert is co-host of the This is Revolution podcast. He is also a long-time contributor to Black Agenda Report as well as to Newsweek. He joins us from Miami, Florida to discuss the recent…
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
Racist Immigration Policy in the UK
06 May 2022
Glenroy Watson is a Pan-African trade unionist who is Secretary of the Global Afrikan Congress, UK Chapter. He joins us to discuss the continuation of Hostile Environment immigration policies in the…
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
Workers' Struggle in Haiti
06 May 2022
Dahoud Andre is a member of KOMOKODA, the Community to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, and host of Eritye Papa Desalin, the Heirs of Jean Jacques Dessalines, a daily Haitian community radio…
Danny Haiphong and Margaret Kimberley
Censorship and the War on Black America
05 May 2022
Erica Caines, Editor of Hood Communist and Coordinating Committee Member for the Black Alliance for Peace, joins the stream to discuss the New McCarthyism and its implications.
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
The Poor Peoples Campaign Dishonors Martin Luther King
04 May 2022
It is disheartening to hear movement leaders say they are inspired by Martin Luther King while also supporting the U.S. proxy war against Russia. Like all wars it endangers the lives of…