PSEUDOHERO

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Paul Edwards

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In the fading brouhaha over Trump seizing Greenland—another of his juvenile fever dreams where threats stand in for actions—his Federal Gestapo murdered another innocent victim.

It was a vicious, cowardly gang killing, provoked and brutal, of an American citizen. This criminality is the signature of ICE and the Border Patrol, the Federal hit squads instigated, weaponized, and morphed to nightmare viciousness under our Capo in Chief.

(TRuMP final 10, by thomasfluharty.)

Of course, America has been operating without ethics or morality for decades, and such incidents mean little weighed against the millions our country has killed around the world. The Empire has been bullying, abusing, and destroying nations for decades with flagrant aggression, more evil and violent since the towers fell.

Wise men have long made clear that an empire cannot act with violence on those it controls and avoid employing its tactics of tyranny internally. Imperial violence—essential to it—cannot be imposed on victim peoples and not finally be inflicted on its own.

As empires decline, ever greater brutality is required in the fight to hold on, to survive. This increases violence at home, which is evident in the sadistic, inexcusable savagery of Trump’s assault teams of armed bullies ordered to terrorize aliens as criminals.

This descent of a law enforcement unit into a predatory gang of vengeful thugs is the expression of the unhinged will of an evil solipsist who embodies all the racist, sexist, and xenophobic elements that are so deeply embedded in American character.

These elements do not infect our whole people, but it would be dishonest to deny that they burn in a great part of it. There is nothing new in this. America has always had this vast, dark, dangerous underside of stupid, hillbilly, and furiously prejudiced people, their disease only confined by a cultural consensus that made perverted, twisted beliefs shameful and unacceptable.

That consensus was entirely reversed by Trump. As the ignorant vulgarian he is—proving wealth is unrelated to excellence—he succeeded by embodying the worst in the American character, making it safe to flaunt its most odious, contemptible qualities, and to boast a loathsome pride in darkest moral deficiencies.

In his ugly, tacit worship of brute punitive force, abroad in Gaza and Ukraine, and in predatory domestic policy, Trump conjures a long, deeply imbedded mythos of justified violence in America.

Because our beginnings were in genocide and human slavery, its rulers needed a moral cover story. This began with demonization of natives and denigration of blacks as inferior subhumans. Once defined as enemies and property, all forms of violence against them were deemed virtuous, and even heroic.

American actor John Wayne stands by the street sign honouring his name in Prescott, Arizona. Wayne embodied the infantile exceptionalist myth underlining so much American criminality against "the other". (Fox Photos/Getty Images).

In the wholly false and baseless Frontiersman/Cowboy myth, gun violence was celebrated and invested with high moral purpose. This egregious bullshit was later used to cover all our imperialist depredations, and injected into both World Wars as justification, and through the Cold War and its results in Korea and Vietnam it was supercharged to the level of sacred dogma.

The more wildly exaggerated it became—even as gun violence was killing ever more Americans at home—the greater was the exaltation of the soldier as “hero”, even though, as many of the best testify, they are nothing of the kind, and are actually hired murderers, trained to butcher millions of innocent, ignorant, poor people for the evil, voracious Capitalist Empire that rules us.

This horribly skewed and dishonest image of the “hero” who kills only bad men, or “bad guys”—the absurd term used by military brass pickled in chauvinism—and for noble and necessary ends, has become pervasive in our militarized culture.

The Empire has come far in technique from Penny Dreadfuls that created the gunslinging “hero” as a type, to the infantile, imbecile “Super Heroes” that cater to vacuous, defective minds today, but the intent is the same: to reinforce the notion that killing is always of “evil doers”, in Bush’s dimwitted term, and always virtuous.

It has been uphill work lately for American boomers to find their heroes, since The Empire’s recent record in mini-wars has been a long series of dead losses and expulsions, and this has led Trump, instead of boasting, to denigrate other nations’ soldiers.

He recently asserted that NATO troops tended to stay well back from risk in their minor role in Iraq and Afghanistan. This drew a backlash from England that caused him to recant and praise their troops as “heroes” comparable to ours.

The myth of virtuous, nobly motivated, dealers of death by the gun has worn so thin and threadbare that only the most blind and ignorant now buy it. That said, a majority of Americans still believe their military is the most powerful and best in the world.

Their capacity to judge is disarmed and rendered null by the fairy tales of biased history and the endless barrage of hogwash they get from every official source available to them. The reality that in the decades since The Empire’s abject failure in Vietnam it has only fought with some of the poorest, weakest, most vulnerable nations on earth does not seem to register.

That its army, equipped with every killing device, and assisted by sophisticated electronics, could not defeat poorly armed guerrilla fighters with no air force, showed it for what it was. The murder of thousands of innocent women and children as a hideous by- product made the nauseating myth of “heroes” a bald absurdity.

The good killer myth is dead, and its use in Minnesota has failed. Killing by the State is not done by heroes: it’s done by murderers.

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