Thread by @caitoz

The US Empire Is A Self-Reinforcing Trauma Factory

"The status quo of the US empire guarantees that there will always be new offenders to imprison, new extremists to bomb, new justifications for blockades, sanctions and apartheid oppression."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-us-empir…

American corporate media are having a field day with a rise in violent crime across the country, seizing on the opportunity to declare that it proves last year's calls to defund police have been thoroughly invalidated.

Right guys. Violent crime can only be the result of this imaginary alternate reality in which there are fewer worthless (consortiumnews.com/2020/06/01/lee…) police officers patrolling American streets.

Couldn't have anything to do with the fact that this is a nation with the worst income inequality in the developed world, where people are being squeezed harder than ever in a pandemic which the government did virtually nothing to help them through.
huffpost.com/entry/income-i…

Violent crime has a direct causal relationship with childhood trauma; not everyone with childhood trauma is a violent criminal, but violent criminals are overwhelmingly victims of childhood trauma. Growing up in crushing poverty is inherently traumatizing.
keranews.org/2015-10-06/for…

The US status quo is inherently traumatizing, because a status quo which maintains a permanent underclass working for slave wages 100 percent guarantees generation after generation of highly traumatized people.

This in turn guarantees more violent crime, which in turn has led to the largest prison population on the planet. Prison is itself inherently traumatizing. They traumatize each new generation, guaranteeing more and more cops and more and more prisons year after year.

Hurt people hurt people, and the US status quo is like a factory conveyor belt churning out generation after generation of hurt people. Those who support the status quo politics of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party are choosing to support this abusive dynamic.

And that's just domestic policy. If growing up poor in America is traumatizing, think how it is for children who are deliberately starved by US sanctions in Venezuela or US-backed blockades in Yemen. Think how it is for the children in Gaza as US-sponsored explosives rain down.

Think how it must be for survivors of America's "war on terror" in the Middle East and Africa.

As Jonathan Marshall wrote for @Consortiumnews in 2017:
consortiumnews.com/2017/11/14/the…

The status quo of the US empire guarantees that there will always be new offenders to imprison, new extremists to bomb, new justifications for blockades, sanctions and apartheid oppression.

Every aspect of it creates traumatized people, whose resultant behavior is then cited to justify the existence of the power structure which caused their trauma in the first place.

And then Hollywood goes and makes movies about cops arresting the violent criminals, about soldiers killing the evil terrorists, while in real life the criminals and terrorists only exist because of the trauma inflicted upon them by the same force that pays the cops and soldiers,

And of course in real life Hollywood is a US propaganda operation.
renegadeinc.com/how-hollywood-…

And those who support all this, those who support Democrats and Republicans and believe what the mainstream news media tell them, are called "moderates".

The US empire is evil. The status quo is evil. We must end these evil things before they end us.

The US Empire Is A Self - Reinforcing Trauma Factory (Audio)

soundcloud.com/going_rogue/th…