The massacres of domestic terrorism in America, I’m coming to think, are not directly caused by mental illness and the availability of weapons designed to kill as many people in as short a time as possible. The massacres in El Paso, in Dayton, in Gilroy — and the tremendous spike in murderous sprees since mid-2016 — are caused by a derangement of our culture brought to us by the propaganda of hate and fear.
Our culture has become so saturated with a permissiveness toward bigotry and a glorification of violence, that hateful rhetoric obliterates compassion and civility and regularly now incites sociopaths to vent their remorseless cruelty with no cultural restraint. Domestic terrorism here seems more and more to me about the malign nurture of propaganda stimulating the deranged nature of homicidal maniacs.
Certainly the ubiquitous availability of hair-trigger weapons has a destabilizing role. And I still believe a trigger that sprays 400 rounds a minute is more inherently lethal than a stone or a knife or cross bow, and is just down from a car bomb. You’d have to be a gun manufacturer not to get that basic fact right. Of course gun control is crucial. We can’t have war zone weapons floating free like a plague virus through our daily lives. Even the NRA hypocritically lobbied for gun control in the late 1960s when the Black Panthers were arming themselves. Now the menace of guns has gotten so bad that the rank and file membership of the NRA is predisposed to some form of restraint, in direct opposition to the group’s leadership.
And yes, mass murderers are not your regular Joes, we hope. But just as advertising can stimulate us to buy, irrationally, things we don’t need, or to make critical choices between products that are essentially the same, so propaganda stimulates incipient sociopaths to violent action. While advertising can make people inhale smoke into their lungs that is full of carcinogenic and addictive chemicals, and do it all day long, despite dire warnings, the propaganda of hate and fear can turn a whole nation or ethnic group into a murderous mob, or create a lynch mob mentality in a single person.
An environment made crazy by endless salesmanship and hate speech stimulates crazy behavior in crazy people. Cut out the propaganda, and you reduce the insane violence to a tragic anomaly, not a cultural regularity. From 1980 to 2016, annual deaths from mass shootings reached over 50 only three times, with many years never reaching five or ten. Since the electoral season of 2016, dominated by hyper-divisive Trumpian hate speech, every year has had a 100 or 150 or more deaths from mass shootings. There’s only one unique variable, and that’s the conservative embracing of bald public hate speech.
Where does this come from? One is tempted to say from people like Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi’s mastermind of molding public opinion. And I’m going to succumb to that temptation, but with a strong caveat. I don’t think American conservatives are Nazis. They may appear to be criminal morons, like they accuse their opposition of being, but they’re as American as apple pie, though someone in their midst has been reading Goebbels.
Here’s what Goebbels was saying more than 80 years ago:
“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”
“Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets of hatred.”
“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which government can play.”
And lastly, “the essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape it.”
Ring any bells? When a culture becomes a flaming river of hate-filled sewage, everyone is vulnerable to being washed away out of the blue by manifesto-writing crackpot Rambos whose “aggression” has been displaced by those who gather power to themselves “by specifying targets of hate.”
But how do you control political propaganda without offending the First Amendment? Do you create a body of law that regulates political speech in the same way that current laws work to prevent false advertising? The essence of prejudicial stereotyping is falsehood. Do you impeach politicians who “displace aggression by specifying targets of hate?” Might this be a technique to shame the shameless? I am close to being a First Amendment absolutist. But the First Amendment itself isn’t absolute. You can’t use your free speech to incite immediate harm, like falsely causing panic in crowds. And I would say now that it should be a violation of the First Amendment to “specify targets of hate,” and soil the civility and decency of your own culture merely to achieve debased political ends.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Images by alainalele and WeekendPlayer)
So important to make these connections. And to remind us of the similarity between today and another terrible time in history. Thank you, V.B.!