America, depraved: a history of violence in the US

Never forget the police killings that provoked Black Lives Matter, writes Phillip Adams. Picture: AFP

Too many nations have histories soaked in blood. Hitler’s Germany with Stalingrad, Leningrad and the Holocaust. Stalin’s Soviet Union with the Gulags, Belgium with Leopold II’s butchery of millions in the Congo. The colonial cruelties perpetrated by Spain, France, Britain. China’s misnamed Cultural Revolution and its tyranny in Tibet. Even Australia is guilty, with its Frontier Wars and our massacres and enslavements of First Nations peoples. But the nation with the deepest and most pervasive culture of violence? The Gunited States of America. Let us count the ways.

Since its birth in the War of Independence, the US has had hardly a year – a day – of peace. Behold Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex”. It has fought scores of wars across the planet and always seems to yearn for more – all too often, as with Vietnam, on the wrong side of history. This is before you count in all its covert wars, including its backing of coups in South America and the CIA’s ludicrous attempts to kill Castro with poisoned cigars.

Almost a million died in the Civil War. More still in wars against Mexico and the so-called Indian Wars, those genocidal attacks on Native Americas. And continuing to drive US history was the monstrous violence of the slave trade and the homegrown slave economy. For decades, lynch mobs would hang African-Americans to the applause of happy crowds of white men, women and children. Lynchings were as popular as State Fairs. As Billie Holiday sang: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit / blood on the leaves and blood at the root.”

Long before Trump’s Proud Boys’ insurrection at the Capitol, the KKK (10 million members at its peak) murdered countless blacks – and their white supporters – during the civil rights movement. And never forget the police killings that provoked Black Lives Matter. The US incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other nation and remains an enthusiastic employer of the death penalty, affecting a disproportionate percentage of blacks.

Armed militias of white supremacists engage in domestic terror, adding to the efforts of the Unabomber and the Oklahoma City bombers. Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Bobby Kennedy assassinated – along with US presidents. And for every successful killing of a president, there are a score of attempts.

Serial killers abound and have fan clubs. Massacres in schools have become a grisly tradition, and having learned nothing from the gangsterism of Prohibition, the long-lost Drug War rages on.

Killing is celebrated in cinema and television. The echoes of dystopian fantasies are deafening. Remember how George W Bush’s shock-and-awe attack on Iraq reminded us of video games? And the US remains the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, in one of history’s greatest war crimes.

With as many handguns as hands, Americans shoot their fellow citizens daily while that military-industrial complex makes the country the world’s largest exporter of weaponry. And it is home to a venal former president who orchestrated an armed coup against his own country – yet who may well gain a second term. Be afraid, be very afraid.