[News] Slaughter Central - The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine
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Tue Apr 13 15:36:38 EDT 2021
https://tomdispatch.com/slaughter-central/tomdispatch.com
<https://tomdispatch.com/slaughter-central/>
Slaughter Central
By Tom Engelhardt - April 13, 2021
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine
By the time you read this piece, it will already be out of date. The
reason’s simple enough. No matter what mayhem I describe, with so much
all-American weaponry in this world of ours, there’s no way to keep
up. Often, despite the headlines that go with mass killings here,
there’s almost no way even to know.
On this planet of ours, America is the emperor of weaponry, even if in
ways we normally tend not to put together. There’s really no question
about it. The all-American powers-that-be and the arms makers that go
with them dream up, produce, and sell weaponry, domestically and
internationally, in an unmatched fashion. You’ll undoubtedly be
shocked, shocked to learn that the top five arms makers
<https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2020/global-arms-industry-sales-top-25-companies-85-cent-big-players-active-global-south>
on the planet — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon,
and General Dynamics — are all located
<https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/why-world%E2%80%99s-top-5-arms-sellers-are-all-american-177427>
in the United States.
Put another way, we’re a killer nation, a mass-murder machine,
slaughter central. And as we’ve known since the U.S. dropped atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, there could be far worse
to come. After all, in the overheated dreams of both those weapons
makers and Pentagon planners, slaughter-to-be has long been imagined on
a planetary scale, right down to the latest intercontinental ballistic
missile (ICBM) being created by Northrop Grumman at the cost of at least
$100 billion. Each of those future arms of ultimate destruction is
slated to be “the length of a bowling lane
<https://thebulletin.org/2021/02/why-is-america-getting-a-new-100-billion-nuclear-weapon/>”
and the nuclear charge that it carries will be at least 20 times more
powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That missile will
someday be capable of traveling 6,000 miles and killing hundreds of
thousands of people each. (And the Air Force is planning to order 600 of
them.)
By the end of this decade, that new ICBM is slated to join an unequaled
American nuclear arsenal of — at this moment — 3,800 warheads
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1701286>.
And with that in mind, let’s back up a moment.
*Have Gun — Will Travel*
Before we head abroad or think more about weaponry fit to destroy the
planet (or at least human life on it), let’s just start right here at
home. After all, we live in a country whose citizens are armed to their
all-too-labile fingertips with more guns of every advanced sort than
might once have been imaginable. The figures are stunning. Even before
the pandemic hit and gun purchases soared to record levels
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/29/coronavirus-pandemic-americans-gun-sales>
— about 23 million
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/record-gun-sales-us-2020/2021/01/18/d25e8616-55a9-11eb-a931-5b162d0d033d_story.html>
of them (a 64% increase over 2019 sales) — American civilians were
reported to possess almost 400 million
<http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/Weapons_and_Markets/Tools/Firearms_holdings/SAS-Press-release-global-firearms-holdings.pdf>
firearms. That adds up to about 40% of all such weaponry in the hands of
civilians globally, or more than the next 25 countries
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gun-ownership-country-us-legal-firearm-citizens-statistics-a8406941.html>
combined.
And if that doesn’t stagger you, note that the versions of those
weapons in public hands are becoming ever more militarized and powerful,
ever more AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, not .22s. And keep in mind as
well that, over the years, the death toll from those weapons in this
country has grown staggeringly large. As /New York Times/ columnist
Nicholas Kristof wrote recently
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/opinion/sunday/gun-deaths-united-states.html>,
“More Americans have died from guns just since 1975, including
suicides, murders and accidents (more than 1.5 million), than in all the
wars in United States history, dating back to the Revolutionary War
(about 1.4 million).”
In my childhood, one of my favorite TV programs was called /Have Gun —
Will Travel/. Its central character was a highly romanticized armed
mercenary in the Old West and its theme song
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evcMtOZDp4Y> — still lodged in my
head (where so much else is unlodging these days) — began:
“Have gun will travel is the card of a man.
A knight without armor in a savage land.
His fast gun for hire heeds the calling wind.
A soldier of fortune is the man called Paladin.”
Staggering numbers of Americans are now ever grimmer versions of
Paladin. Thanks to a largely unregulated gun industry
<https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/guns-crime/reports/2020/08/06/488686/gun-industry-america/>,
they’re armed like no other citizenry on the planet, not even — in a
distant second place
<https://www.vox.com/2018/6/21/17488024/gun-ownership-violence-shootings-us>
— the civilians of Yemen, a country torn by endless war. That TV
show’s title could now be slapped on our whole culture, whether
we’re talking about our modern-day Paladins traveling to a set of
Atlanta spas
<https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/17/us/shooting-atlanta-acworth>; a
chain grocery store
<https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/23/us/boulder-colorado-shooting>
in Boulder, Colorado; a real-estate office
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/us/shooting-orange-california.html>
in Orange, California; a convenience store
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/us/baltimore-essex-county-shooting.html>
near Baltimore; or a home
<https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/08/us/york-county-south-carolina-mass-shooting/index.html>
in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Remember how the National Rifle Association
<https://explore.nra.org/interests/hunting/> has always defended the
right of Americans to own weapons at least in part by citing this
country’s hunting tradition? Well, these days, startling numbers of
Americans, armed to the teeth, have joined that hunting crew. Their game
of choice isn’t deer or even wolves and grizzly bears
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/28/us/montana-wolves-grizzlies-hunting.html>,
but that ultimate prey, other human beings — and all too often
themselves. (In 2020, not only did
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/2020-shootings/> a
record nearly 20,000 Americans die from gun violence, but another 24,000
used guns to commit suicide.)
As the rate of Covid-19 vaccination began to rise to remarkable levels
in this country and ever more public places reopened, the first mass
public killings (defined as four or more deaths in a public place) of
the pandemic period — in Atlanta and Boulder — hit the news
big-time. The thought, however, that the American urge to use weapons in
a murderous fashion had in any way lessened or been laid to rest, even
briefly, thanks to Covid-19, proved a fantasy of the first order.
At a time when so many public places like schools were closed or their
use limited indeed, if you took as your measuring point not mass public
killings but mass shootings (defined as four or more people wounded or
killed), the pandemic year of 2020 proved to be a record 12 months of
armed chaos. In fact, such mass shootings actually surged by 47%. As
/USA Today/ recounted
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/26/mass-shootings-soared-covid-black-lives-matter-fears-2020/6784339002/>,
“In 2020, the United States reported 611 mass shooting events that
resulted in 513 deaths and 2,543 injuries. In 2019, there were 417 mass
shootings with 465 deaths and 1,707 injured.” In addition, in that
same year, according to projections
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/24/us-murders-extra-4000-everyday-gun-violence>
based on FBI data, there were 4,000 to 5,000 more gun murders than
usual, mainly in inner-city communities of color.
In the first 73 days
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/biden-gun-control.html>
of Joe Biden’s presidency, there were five mass shootings and more
than 10,000 gun-violence deaths. In the Covid-19 era, this has been the
model the world’s “most exceptional” nation (as American
politicians of both parties used to love to call this country) has set
for the rest of the planet. Put another way, so far in 2020 and 2021,
there have been two pandemics in America, Covid-19 and guns.
And though the weaponization of our citizenry and the carnage that’s
gone with it certainly gets attention — President Biden only recently
called it
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/us/politics/biden-gun-control.html>
“an international embarrassment” — here’s the strange thing:
when reporting on such a binge of killings and the weapons industry that
stokes it, few here think to include the deaths and other injuries for
which the American military has been responsible via its “forever
wars” of this century outside our own borders. Nor do they consider
the massive U.S. weapons deliveries and sales to other countries that
often enough lead to the same. In other words, a full picture of
all-American carnage has — to use an apt phrase — remained missing
in action.
*Cornering the Arms Market*
In fact, internationally, things are hardly less mind-boggling when it
comes to this country and weaponry. As with its armed citizenry, when it
comes to arming other countries, Washington is without peer. It’s the
weapons dealer of choice across much of the world. Yes, the U.S. gun
industry that makes all those rifles for this country also sells plenty
of them abroad and, in the Trump years, such sales were only made easier
to complete (as was the selling
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-arms-trump-idUSKCN24P2IC> of
U.S. unmanned aerial drones to “less stable governments”). When it
comes to semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 or even grenades and
flamethrowers, this country’s arms makers no longer even need
<https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/new-trump-rules-make-it-easier-u-s-gun-makers-n968601>
State Department licenses, just far easier-to-get Commerce Department
ones, to complete such sales, even to particularly abusive nations. As a
result
<https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/new-trump-rules-make-it-easier-u-s-gun-makers-n968601>,
to take one example, semi-automatic pistol exports abroad rose 148%
<https://stopusarmstomexico.org/us-gun-exports-2020/> in 2020.
But what I’m particularly thinking about here are the big-ticket items
that those five leading weapons makers of the military-industrial
complex eternally produce. On the subject of the sale of jet fighters
like the F-16
<https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/17/asia/taiwan-us-f-16-fighter-purchase-intl-hnk-scli/index.html>
and F-35
<https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2021/01/20/just-hours-before-bidens-inauguration-the-uae-and-us-come-to-a-deal-on-f-35-sales/>,
tanks and other armored vehicles, submarines (as well as anti-submarine
weaponry), and devastating bombs and missiles
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/16/us/arms-deals-raytheon-yemen.html>,
among other things, we leave our “near-peer” competitors as well as
our weapons-making allies in the dust. Washington is the largest
supplier
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/03/26/us-arms-sales-these-countries-buy-most-weapons-government/39208809/>
to 20 of the 40 major arms importers on the planet.
When it comes to delivering the weapons of war, the U.S. leads all its
competitors in a historic fashion, especially in the war-torn and
devastated Middle East. There, between 2015 and 2019, it gobbled up
nearly half
<https://3ba8a190-62da-4c98-86d2-893079d87083.usrfiles.com/ugd/3ba8a1_c035cc647bb84e3aad535bfdc342abd7.pdf>
of the arms market. Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia was its largest
customer, which, of course, only further stoked the brutal civil war in
Yemen, where U.S. weapons are responsible for the deaths
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-security-idUSKBN1KU12U> of
thousands of civilians
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/middleeast/saudi-yemen-airstrikes-civilians.html>.
As Pentagon expert William Hartung wrote
<https://tomdispatch.com/william-hartung-how-to-stuff-the-middle-east-with-weaponry/>
of those years, U.S. arms deliveries to the region added up to “nearly
three times the arms Russia supplied to MENA [the Middle East and North
Africa], five times what France contributed, 10 times what the United
Kingdom exported, and 16 times China’s contribution.” (And often
enough, as in Iraq
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/08/isis-jihadis-using-arms-troop-carriers-supplied-by-us-saudi-arabia>
and Yemen
<https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/02/middleeast/yemen-lost-us-arms/>,
some of those weapons end up falling into the hands of those the U.S.
opposes.)
In fact, in 2020, this country’s arms sales abroad rose
<https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2020/12/04/american-sold-175-billion-in-weapons-abroad-in-fy20/>
a further 2.8% to $178 billion. The U.S. now supplies no fewer than 96
countries <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56397601> with weaponry and
controls 37%
<https://www.dw.com/en/sipri-saudi-arabia-largest-importer-of-arms-us-biggest-exporter/a-56872307>
of the global arms market (with, for example, Lockheed Martin alone
taking in
<https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/why-world%E2%80%99s-top-5-arms-sellers-are-all-american-177427>
$47.2 billion in such sales in 2018, followed by the four other giant
U.S. weapons makers and, in sixth place, the British defense firm BAE).
This remains the definition of mayhem-to-come, the international version
of that spike in domestic arms sales and the killings that went with it.
After all, in these years, deaths due to American arms in countries like
Afghanistan and Yemen have grown strikingly. And to take just one more
example, arms, ammunition, and equipment sold to or given to
<https://fpif.org/its-time-to-end-u-s-military-aid-to-the-philippines/>
the brutal regime of Rodrigo Duterte for the Philippine military and
constabulary have typically led to deaths (especially in its “war on
drugs”) that no one’s counting up.
And yet, even combined with the dead here at home, all of this
weapons-based slaughter hardly adds up to a full record when it comes to
the U.S. as a global mass-killing machine.
*Far, Far from Home*
After all, this country has a historic 800
<https://tomdispatch.com/david-vine-our-base-nation/> or so military
bases around the world and nearly 200,000
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhartung/2021/04/05/sen-inhofe-misses-the-mark-on-pentagon-spending/?sh=581f3f952caa>
military personnel stationed abroad (about 60,000
<https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/11/06/how-to-demilitarize-americas-presence-in-the-middle-east/>
in the Middle East alone). It has a drone-assassination program that
extends from Afghanistan across the Greater Middle East to Africa, a
series of “forever wars” and associated conflicts fought over that
same expanse, and a Navy with major aircraft carrier task forces
patrolling the high seas. In other words, in this century, it’s been
responsible for largely uncounted but remarkable numbers of dead and
wounded human beings. Or put another way, it’s been a mass-shooting
machine abroad.
Unlike in the United States, however, there’s little way to offer
figures on those dead. To take one example, Brown University’s
invaluable Costs of War Project has estimated that, from the beginning
of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to late 2019, 801,000 people
<https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2019/direct-war-death-toll-2001-801000>,
perhaps 40% of them civilians, were killed in Washington’s war on
terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Of course,
not all of those by any means were killed by the U.S. military. In fact,
some were even American soldiers and contractors. Still, the figures are
obviously sizeable. (To take but one very focused example, from December
2001 to December 2013 at /TomDispatch/, I was counting up
<https://tomdispatch.com/engelhardt-washington-s-wedding-album-from-hell/>
civilian wedding parties taken down by U.S. air power in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Yemen. I came up with eight well-documented ones with a death
toll of nearly 300, including brides, grooms, musicians, and revelers.)
Similarly, last December, Neta Crawford of the Costs of War Project
released a report
<https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2020/Rising%20Civilian%20Death%20Toll%20in%20Afghanistan_Costs%20of%20War_Dec%207%202020.pdf>
on the rising number of Afghan civilians who had died from U.S. air
strikes in the Trump years. She found that in 2019, for instance,
“airstrikes killed 700 civilians — more civilians than in any other
year since the beginning of the war.” Overall, the documented civilian
dead from American air strikes in the war years is in the many
thousands, the wounded higher yet. (And, of course, those figures
don’t include the dead from Afghan air strikes with U.S.-supplied
aircraft.) And mind you, that’s just civilians mistaken for Taliban or
other enemy forces.
Similarly, thousands more
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/opinion/drones-civilian-casulaties-trump-obama.html>
civilians were killed by American air strikes across the rest of the
Greater Middle East and northern Africa. The Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, which followed U.S. drone strikes for years, estimated that,
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, by 2019 such attacks had
killed
<https://www.afsc.org/blogs/news-and-commentary/us-has-killed-thousands-people-lethal-drones>
“between 8,500 and 12,000 people, including as many as 1,700 civilians
— 400 of whom were children.”
And that, of course, is just to begin to count the dead in America’s
conflicts of this era. Or thought of another way, in this century, the
U.S. military has been a kind of global Paladin. Its motto could
obviously be “have gun, will travel” and its forces and those allied
to it (and often supplied with American arms) have certainly killed
staggering numbers of people in conflicts that have devastated
communities across a significant part of the planet, while displacing an
estimated 37 million people
<https://watson.brown.edu/research/2020/Post-9/11DisplacementStudy>.
Now, return to those Americans gunned down in this country and think of
all of this as a single weaponized, well-woven fabric, a single American
gun culture that spans the globe, as well as a three-part killing
machine of the first order. Much as mass shootings and public killings
can sometimes dominate the news here, a full sense of the damage done by
the weaponization of our culture seldom comes into focus. When it does,
the United States looks like slaughter central.
Or as that song from /Have Gun — Will Travel/ ended:
Paladin, Paladin,
Where do you roam?
Paladin, Paladin,
Far, far from home.
Far, far from home — and close, close to home — indeed.
Copyright 2021 Tom Engelhardt
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