July 5 2024 Sacrifices to America’s Culture of Death: the 2022 Fourth of July Massacre
On this day of celebration of our Liberty as a free society of equals and our Declaration of Independence from the British Empire, a deniable asset of the Fourth Reich and its agents of infiltration within the carceral state which include all those guilty of treason in the January 6 Insurrection from Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his co-conspirators down to the dishonorable and lunatic barbarians who attacked our capitol on that most terrible of days, perpetrated mass murder and terror on a town parade.
This was a hate crime of gun violence motivated by fascist ideology and a sign of the enormous power of white privilege as immunity before the fact which enables such crimes and many others as the precondition of free access to guns, and a measure of how far we have yet to go to achieve the true goals of the American Revolution as seizures of power to win the social and legal equality of all human beings, and to overthrow the tyranny of systemic inequality founded on the idea that some of us are better than others by reason of birth as class and caste; for on this day a madman has killed people just because he can.
Here is the fascist apologetics of power; an amoral nihilism which claims that there is no good or evil, that only fear is the basis of human exchange and that only power as force has meaning.
The psychopathy of fascism is brilliantly interrogated in the character of Martin Chatwin in the series The Magicians, a victim of monstrous abuse who by seizure of power became himself a king and a monster. Both a film noir tyrant of Freudian horror beyond the limits of the human called The Beast for his abominable crimes and the wounded child he once was locked in titanic struggle within the same flesh, a tragic avenger who helps a victim on her mad quest to kill a Trickster god of cannibalism and sexual terror in order to forge her as his successor, he is a figure of the duality of force and violence.
He has a line which like a Zen riddle enfolds and typifies what for myself is the primary question of how to become human under imposed conditions of struggle which require the use of force in resistance, where the use of social force is always ambiguous, dehumanizing, and obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion as bidirectional forces of reaction which create their own antithesis. “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You're powerful or you're weak."
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. As Wagner teaches us in his great opera, only those who renounce love can wield the Ring of Power; this truth has as its corollary the redemptive power of love to set us free.
Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
While the use of social force may be necessary to free oneself from subjugation and enslavement by others in seizures of power, as an imposed condition of revolutionary struggle, nothing can justify the use of force and violence as dominion and control of others or in their subjugation and enslavement. This is the inherent duality of the use of social force, for liberation struggle has tyranny and terror as its dark mirror image.
Once we have freed ourselves and others, we must abandon the use of social force or entrap ourselves in the Ring of Power once again, as many heroes of revolution have become tyrants, Washington, Napoleon, Stalin, and Mao, and many of those like the fictional Martin Chatwin who became The Beast in The Magicians and the all too real perpetrator of the Fourth of July Massacre two years ago yesterday have become figures of the terror and tyranny in the struggle to free themselves of it.
Systems of unequal power, patriarchy and white privilege as mutually reinforcing, parallel, and interdependent forces, shape some of us into monsters with which to terrify and claim dominion over the rest to us. This is why America has an open market for guns and valorizes violence as false masculinity; tragedies like yesterday’s manufacture consent for the centralization of power to the carceral state, pervasive surveillance and propaganda, and the militarization of the police as an army of occupation. If they scare us enough, we will vote for more tyranny and state terror; this is the Calculus of Fear on which all states are founded.
We have but to compare the reactions of the Republicans in the NRA press release to that of the Democrats in the Bidens’ address to the nation to see who is on our side, and who weaponizes white supremacist terror as gun violence in the repression of dissent and the enforcement of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
“What is to be done?” as Lenin asked in his essay of 1902. While we have many interdependent ongoing existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, part of the answer is simply this; the American Revolution is something in which we all participate throughout our lives.
Each of us must reinvent how to be human. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
The Fourth Reich and its deniable assets of patriarchal and white supremacist terror operating in conspiracy with a captured police state of force and control have attacked Fourth of July family and community celebrations throughout America in a terror campaign designed to steal our Liberty by making it unsafe for citizens to gather, even for a neighborhood barbeque.
We must take back America, if our future generations are to live in a free society of equals, and win Independence from fear and force. And we must do so without taking the bait offered by the enemy who seeks to drive us toward a Second Civil War by demonstrating the powerlessness of our institutions of government to defend us.
We must abandon the use of social force; all of it, both ours and theirs, not merely disarming and abolishing the police and purging our society of guns and the right to bear death among us, but also of the systems of unequal power and oppression which drive the Ring of fear, power, and force which has made of us not citizens allied as guarantors of each other’s rights, but bearers of death and subjects divided against each other by overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Guns and the terror they enable create wealth and power for those who would enslave us, both as imperial conquest and dominion in war and as state tyranny and terror here at home.
To bear arms is to be a bearer of death; choose life.
Of this personal and ongoing process of Liberty we have an example written by Michael Moore; “I, Michael Moore, standing up for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, and being completely fed up with recent events that have upset my tranquility, herby declare the following on this Fourth of July, 2022:
1. I refuse to live in a country threatened by white supremacy — and I’m not leaving. So we‘ve got a problem.
2. I cannot in good conscience continue to receive the privileges of “full citizenship” in this land when all of its women and girls have now been, by Court decree, declared official second-class citizens with no rights to their own bodies and conscripted to a life of Forced Birth should they fall pregnant and not want to be.
3. I demand an end to the mass incarceration of Black Americans, an end to police shooting Black people, and I demand that reparations be made to the Black community for all they currently have to suffer and endure.
4. I insist we remove every single Republican from office in November. The Republican Party has dismantled itself and its remaining rogue elements now exist purely to overturn legitimate election results and overthrow the elected will of the vast majority of the American people. This must be halted without delay or equivocation.
Therefore, I will do the following:
~ Until women’s rights have been fully reinstated, and their equal rights are enshrined in our Constitution (now that the required 38 states have passed the Equal Rights Amendment), I will not shut up about this. If you invite me to dinner that’s all I’m gonna talk about. Have me over to your party and it’s going to be, “Dobbs, Dobbs, and more Dobbs!” And I won’t stop until Roe is reinstated and 51% of Congress is female.
~ I will help to organize a massive Get Out The Vote drive amongst the millions who follow me on social media, listen to my podcast, and read my Substack column. I will join with others to tour the country. No candidate will get our support unless they sign a pledge stating they will vote to make Roe v. Wade the law of the land; make gerrymandering and voter suppression illegal; eliminate the filibuster; upgrade Obamacare to Universal Health Care for All; pass strong gun control laws; and end the police executions and racist incarcerations of Black citizens.
~ I will help lead a national strike, in whatever form it needs to take, and if we want to see immediate change, watch what happens when we shut down even 10% of the country. POOF! goes Wall Street! Hit ‘em where it counts.
This I do declare.
Signed,
Michael Moore July 4, 2022”
As written by Shruti Rajkumar in Huffpost, in an article entitled Biden Calls For Gun Reform On Highland Park Anniversary: ‘Much More Must Be Done’
The president's statement on the Illinois mass shooting arrives in the wake of three back-to-back fatal shootings early this week; “After three back-to-back shootings this week, President Joe Biden condemned gun violence in the U.S. and once again pleaded for tighter gun laws.
On Sunday evening, two people were killed and 28 injured — including many children — in a shooting at a neighborhood block party in Baltimore. On Monday night, five people were killed and two were injured in a separate mass shooting in Philadelphia. Yet another mass shooting occurred at a festival in Fort Worth, Texas, the same night, with three people killed and eight others injured. The tragedies add to the growing list of mass shootings plaguing the country.
“Today, Jill and I grieve for those who have lost their lives and, as our nation celebrates Independence Day, we pray for the day when our communities will be free from gun violence,” Biden said in the statement on Tuesday.
On the anniversary of the 2022 massacre at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, in which seven people died and more than 30 were injured, the president also acknowledged that state’s recent efforts to combat gun violence.
Since the tragedy, Illinois has passed legislation to ban assault weapons — including the one used in the Highland Park shooting — and high-capacity magazines in the state, marking a major win for gun safety.
“Their achievement will save lives. But it will not erase their grief. It will not bring back the seven Americans killed in Highland Park or heal the injuries and trauma that scores of others will continue to carry,” Biden said in the statement. “And as we have seen over the last few days, much more must be done in Illinois and across America to address the epidemic of gun violence that is tearing our communities apart.”
Last year, Biden signed the most significant anti-gun-violence legislation in the past three decades. The landmark Bipartisan Safer Communities Act outlined ways to reduce gun violence in the U.S., including expansions to mental health services and school security, gun purchase restrictions and enhanced background checks for people under 21.
Several Democrats have been avid proponents of anti-gun-violence reforms, including assault weapon bans. But many GOP leaders have resisted gun regulations, despite the sustained surge in gun violence. There have been over 340 mass shootings across the U.S. so far in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Still, Biden and other lawmakers have insisted on more gun reform legislation.
“It is within our power to once again ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, to require safe storage of guns, to end gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability, and to enact universal background checks,” Biden said in the statement.
He continued: “I urge other states to follow Illinois’ lead, and continue to call upon Republican lawmakers in Congress to come to the table on meaningful, commonsense reforms that the American people support.”
As written by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian, in an article entitled Fourth of July overshadowed by 16 mass shootings across US: Fifteen people were killed and 94 injured across 13 states as well as Washington DC; “From the nation’s capital to Fort Worth, Texas, from Florin, California, in the west to the Bronx, New York, in the east, the Fourth of July long weekend in the US was overshadowed by 16 mass shootings in which 15 people were killed and nearly 100 injured.
The Gun Violence Archive, an authoritative database on gun violence in America, calculated the grim tally using its definition of a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people excluding the shooter are killed or injured by firearms.
The tragic bloodletting was recorded from 5pm on Friday until 5am on Wednesday across 13 states as well as Washington DC. Texas and Maryland both entered the register twice.
In one of the final catastrophes to mar the weekend honoring the nation’s founding, nine people were injured in a drive-by shooting in Washington in the early hours of Wednesday. The victims included two children aged nine and 17. All injuries were reported as non life-threatening.
Police said shots were fired from a dark-colored SUV at a house party in the north-east quadrant of the city shortly before 1am on 5 July. The SUV “fired shots in the direction of some of our residents who were outside just celebrating the fourth of July. It appears that the shooting was targeted”, said Leslie Parsons, the assistant police chief.
Hours earlier, Joe Biden issued a Fourth of July statement from the White House in which he lamented the “wave of tragic and senseless shootings in communities across America”. The president said he and the first lady, Jill Biden, “grieve for those who have lost their lives and, as our nation celebrates Independence Day, we pray for the day when our communities will be free from gun violence”.
Biden repeated his call for “meaningful, commonsense” gun control reforms including a renewed ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and an end to gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.
By the reckoning of the Gun Violence Archive, the US is on track for one of the worst years of mass shootings. The database has identified 350 such incidents so far this year and warns that should the pace remain steady through the second half of the year, the final total for 2023 could reach 679: about double that recorded in 2018.
The archive’s tally of mass shootings over the 4 July weekend involved incidents in: Washington DC, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland (twice), Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas (twice).
One of the youngest victims of the weekend was a 14-year-old boy who was killed early on Wednesday in a shooting at a fourth of July block party on Maryland’s eastern shore. Six others were injured in the incident in Salisbury.
Two people were killed and 28 wounded, including 15 children, in a mass shooting in Baltimore, Maryland, on Sunday. Videos recorded at the scene showed teenagers scrambling to get away from the gunfire. On Wednesday, police were still searching for the shooters, who were thought to have opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon.
Late on Tuesday, another outdoor party in Shreveport, Louisiana, exploded in gun fire, leaving three people dead and 10 wounded.
Tabitha Taylor, a local councilwoman, told CBS News she was livid.
“Now we are the victim of a mass shooting in our community simply because individuals decided to come in and disrupt a good time that individuals were having,” she said.
“A family event that has gone on for years in our community has been disrupted by gunfire because somebody decided to pull their guns and do this. Why, why?”
One of the injured was in critical condition, Angie Willhite, a Shreveport police sergeant, told reporters on Wednesday, adding that others who were injured were expected to survive. No arrests had been made.
“We are struggling with getting information from those who were present,” Willhite said. “We’re not getting a lot of cooperation. We’re going to hope for some quick and immediate cooperation that will lead us to the people we’re trying to find.”
The greatest fatality in a single incident over the long weekend was seen in Philadelphia, where five people were killed when a shooter wearing a bulletproof vest and bearing an assault rifle went on a random rampage on Monday night.
The youngest person to die was 15. A two-year-old boy was shot four times in the legs and a 13-year-old was shot twice in the legs. On Wednesday, both were listed in stable condition.
The 40-year-old suspect was arraigned on five counts of murder as well as charges of attempted murder, aggravated assault and weapons counts of possession without a license and carrying firearms in public, prosecutors said.
Philadelphia police identified the victims killed on the streets as 20-year-old Lashyd Merritt; 29-year-old Dymir Stanton; 59-year-old Ralph Moralis; and 15-year-old Daujan Brown. All were pronounced dead shortly after the Monday night gunfire.
Joseph Wamah Jr, 31, was found in a home early on Tuesday, also with bullet wounds. Investigators believe Wamah was the first victim killed but was not found by family members until hours later.”
The Magicians: Fear, Power, Force, the Origins of Evil and the Carceral State as Embodied Violence
"The only reason you’re celebrating Independence Day is because citizens were armed," the NRA tweeted. Unless you've been killed by an armed citizen.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nra-fourth-of-july-mass-shooting_n_62c35c8de4b0f612572aaf74
My Declaration by Michael Moore
Biden Calls For Gun Reform On Highland Park Anniversary: ‘Much More Must Be Done’
Fourth of July overshadowed by 16 mass shootings across US
Dirty Hands, by Jean-Paul Sartre
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11098581-dirty-hands?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=nDNZ1BofpA&rank=1
Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice
by Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, George Novack, David Salner
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/184450.Their_Morals_and_Ours
Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context, by Lars T. Lih
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/highland-park-illinois-shooting-victims_n_62c3f81fe4b0f612572b5574
Three responses to grief in the philosophy of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Camus
“Each one of us will experience something in life that transforms who we are. A human life is one of adventure and tempering. A lot of people today tend to use the language of “formative experiences,” but the idea of an awakening or initiation of some kind, is as central to the human condition as sleeping or falling in love. Those who study the stories and myths we tell point out that they often share remarkable similarities. For instance, they involve a separation from home, a test of character, and then a return home with new wisdom or strength.
One of these transformative trials comes when we lose someone we truly and deeply love. Those who have known grief understand something more about life. When we suffer the loss of someone we love, we know what it means to be left alone and behind. On an intellectual level, we know that all things must die. We can rationally appreciate the transience of life, the breakdown of biology, and entropy in the universe. But to know death, to feel and bear loss, gives someone an understanding that no poem, movie, or book could convey.
Many philosophers have explored the idea of grief and death, and for many, it’s the most important thing about being alive.
Memento mori
For many people, like the young or the lucky, there is no need to face mortality. They can walk through their days without a moment’s thought for the big questions about eternity. It won’t cross their minds to reflect on their own death or of those around them. They likely will never ponder that the people they have in their lives will, some day, be gone forever.
They never appreciate that there will come a time when we each will have our last meal, laugh, and breath. That there will be one final cuddle with someone you love, and no more.
Sure, they know it in some remote part of their understanding, but they do not feel it. It’s intellectually “objective” but lacks the emotionally subjective. They lack the deepening that happens for those who have held the hand of a dying parent, cried at a brother’s funeral, or sat staring at photos of a now-gone friend. For those who don’t know grief, it is as if it comes from outside. In reality, the despair of true grief is something that originates from within. It aches and pulses inside your very being.
The source of despair
For such a universal, sensitive, and poignant issue as grief, there is no one philosophical position. For much of history, philosophers were also usually religious, and so the issue was one for priests, scripture, or meditation.
The pre-Christian scholars of ancient Greece and Rome are perhaps an exception. But, even there, philosophers came stewed in a cauldron of religious assumptions. It has become fashionable today to read ancient references to “the soul,” for instance, as being poetic or psychological metaphors. Yet, with the possible exception of the Epicureans, the ancient world had far more religion than our modern, secular sensibilities might prefer.
For Søren Kierkegaard, that visceral sense of mortality we get after experiencing grief he labelled “despair.” And in the long nighttime of despair, we can begin the journey to realize our truest selves. When we meaningfully encounter first-hand that things in life are not eternal and nothing is forever, we appreciate how we passionately long for things to be eternal. The source of our despair is that we want that “forever.” For Kierkegaard, the only way to overcome despair, to relieve this condition, is to surrender. There is an eternal by which to lose ourselves in. There is faith, and grief is the dark, marble door to belief.
The philosophy of grief
After the Enlightenment and the rise of a godless philosophy, thinkers began to see death in a new way. Seeing death only as a gateway to religion no longer worked.
The ancient Greek Epicureans and a lot of Eastern philosophers (although, not necessarily all), believed this powerful sense of grief can be overcome by removing our mistaken longing for immortality. Stoics, too, signed up to the idea that we ache precisely because we wrongly think things are ours for all time. With a mental shift, or after great meditation, we can come to accept this for the false hubris it is.
The German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger argued that the presence of death in our lives gives fresh meaning to our being free to choose. When we appreciate that our decisions are all we have, and that our entire life is punctuated by a final coup de grace, it invigorates our action and gives us a “daring.” As he wrote, “Being present is grounded in the turning-towards [death].” It is a theme echoed in the medieval idea of memento mori — that is, keeping death close to make the current moment sweeter. When we lose a loved one, we recognize that we are, indeed, left behind, and so this in turn gives new gravity to our choices.
For Albert Camus, though, things are somewhat more bleak. Even though Camus’ works were a deliberate and strenuous effort to resolve the listless abyss of nihilism, his solution of “absurdity” is not easy medicine. For Camus, grief is a state of being overcome by the pointlessness of it all. Why love, if love ends in such pain? Why build great projects, when all will be dust? With grief comes an awareness of the bitter finality of everything, and it comes with an angry, screaming frustration: Why are we here at all? Camus’ suggestion is a kind of macabre revelry — gallows’ humor perhaps — that says we should enjoy the ride for the meaningless rollercoaster it is. We must imagine ourselves happy.
Three responses to grief
We have, here, three different responses to grief. We have the religious turn of Kierkegaard, the existential carpe diem of Heidegger, and the laugh-until-you-die of Camus.
For many, grief involves a separation from life. It can feel like the wintering of the soul, where we need to heal and make sense of existence again. It’s a kind of chrysalis. In many cases, we return to life with earned wisdom and can appreciate the everyday world in an entirely transformed way. For some, this hibernation goes on for a very long time, and many start to see their cold retreat as all there is.
These are the people who will need help. Whether we agree with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, or Camus, one thing is true for all and everyone: talking helps. Voicing our thoughts, sharing our despair, and turning to someone else is the gentle, warm breeze that starts the thaw.”