It’s Time to De-Normalize Murder
David Swanson / World BEYOND War
Remarks at December 13 Online US-Iran Town Hall 

(December 13, 2024) — I was asked to talk about Gaza and Syria, and so I shall, but I also want to talk about de-normalizing murder. There have been human societies in which murder was unthinkable, where the most typical Hollywood movie — marketed to US children — has been seen as horrific and traumatizing. Normalizing murder is an option, not required by genes or economics or physics. I want us to take responsibility for that.

This week in the United States, two things happened. First, a man who murdered a health insurance CEO was widely celebrated and turned into a figure of romantic adoration. Second, the House of so-called Representatives voted overwhelmingly for nearly another trillion US dollars for the war machine.

People in the US don’t generally condone murder, but they’ve learned very well how to justify it, as in the movies and the Pentagon press conferences:
“He murdered a guy who causes lots of deaths.”
“He murdered a guy while avoiding collateral damage.”
“He did what you secretly want to do but are afraid to do.”

People don’t want all their money going into wars, but not a single protest opposed the latest bill, and only one Congresswoman said a word against it prior to the vote, and that was the same day as the vote. Meanwhile, Joe Biden pardoned lots of people, but not those waiting in cells to be murdered by the US government, even though he’d opposed the death penalty to get elected. Also — and it’s so normal I almost didn’t mention it — more police were acquitted for murder and a white veteran was acquitted for murdering a poor black man in front of a crowd.

In the US, as in much of the world to various degrees, murder is treated as perfectly normal. But the way the US does it is the furthest thing from normal. Mass shootings and police shootings and shootings by veterans and suicides by guns are all areas in which the United States is a leader globally.

In the latest numbers on military spending, of 230 other countries, the US spends more than 227 of them combined. Russia and China spend a combined 21% of what the US and its allies spend on war. Since 1945, the US military has acted in a major or minor way in 74 other nations. At least 95% of the foreign military bases on Earth are US bases. Of 230 other countries, the US exports more weaponry than 228 of them combined. Most places with wars manufacture no weapons. Most wars have US made weapons on at least one side, and often both. Only the US military has devoted various sections to various portions of the Earth, seeking to dominate everyone everywhere.

The world is nonetheless an extremely complex place. The evils of the US military do not excuse the evils of anyone else’s military or weapons dealing or any nation’s domestic evils. As Iran copies US drones and (if reports from Sudan are to be believed) sends them off to murder people in Africa, so there are politicians in the United States seeking to copy Iranian abuses of women. None of it excuses any of the rest of it.

The world is also a very corrupt place. If the United States had a democracy it would have fewer wars. If Congress Members weren’t owned by weapons dealers or Israel, they’d make fewer wars. If Kamala Harris had been willing to say three words against genocide, she’d be president elect. And nonetheless, it matters that the US public — like much of the world — just opposes wars and military spending in opinion polls, and not by nonviolently surrounding the Capitol or the State Department until the wars end.

Why are the people of South Korea or Bolivia or so many other nations able to block coups and to do so without murder? It’s not just that the United States is too big. It’s not just that the United States is too divided by distractions. (The only real dispute over the latest military spending bill was over transgender healthcare.) It’s also that US culture leads the world in lack of outrage over murder.

When I began working seriously to end wars, Bush and Cheney and gang (young people may know them as the portrait painter friend of the Obamas and the beloved father figure whose daughter in Congress dislikes Trump) were busy in Afghanistan and Iraq normalizing occupation, kidnapping, torture, murder, and creative lawless use of secret prisons. They sent prisoners in many cases to other nations that were known for torture and secrecy.

For instance, in 2002, they arrested a Canadian engineer in New York named Maher Arar and sent him to Syria to be tortured by the government led by Bashar al-Assad. When US troops freed those left alive in Nazi death camps, reports seldom mentioned that the United States had led the world in refusing to accept the people the Nazis wanted to expel before deciding to kill. When the US lost its ever-loving mind over the crimes of September 11, few reports mentioned past arming, supporting, and glorifying of those responsible.

When the US went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was not deemed appropriate to discuss past US support for its newfound enemies. And when Syrian prisons were opened this past week, no US corporate media referred in any way to past US alliance with Assad, few mentioned US efforts to overthrow Assad, and most tried to generally avoid the fact that the new Syrian allies are on a US list of terrorists.

According to US General Wesley Clark, Bush and Cheney attacked Iraq, working off a list that included Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. Not on the list was Afghanistan, but UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had told Bush he’d be better able to join in on Iraq if they attacked Afghanistan first. There was more opposition back then to those wars than there is now to the war on Gaza, never mind the wars in Ukraine or Sudan, even as opponents of the war on Gaza call it the worst war ever, most refusing to call it a war at all, claiming that a genocide is something different. Clearly the rhetoric is worse.

Clearly the popular support in Israel is worse. Clearly the destruction of infrastructure and in fact of every built object is worse. The elimination of homes and food, the targeting of aid workers and journalists, the abandonment of pretense of compliance with laws — all are worse. But even believing as I do that the official death count is less than half the reality, we’re still talking about a relatively small number.

It is a relatively high percentage of the population in Gaza — I think certainly over 5 percent and threatening to go much higher. But — and this is something almost everyone I know has tried very hard to avoid knowing — the genocide in Gaza is less one-sided than your typical US war. The US deaths in the war on Iraq were 0.3 percent of the dead. That compares to Israeli deaths, currently at 1.3 percent of the deaths in the past year in Gaza/Israel.

The peace movement did succeed in making the war on Iraq a badge of shame for its supporters — at least for many years. As with the Vietnam Syndrome, the US media created the Iraq Syndrome, naming as a disease public resistance to any more wars after such a horrific one that cost US lives and was based on particularly clumsy lies. Will we be able to impose a Ukraine Syndrome or a Gaza Syndrome or a Syria Syndrome, and if not, what does that say about us?

I think we’ve also tended to avoid knowing or have actively forgotten from those days what Operation Merlin was, namely a US project to give Iran nuclear bomb plans in order to accuse Iran of making nuclear bombs, in order to have an excuse to attack Iran — which is of course the very last thing you’d want to do if Iran really had nuclear bombs. Iran is, by the way, the only nation on Wesley Clark’s list not yet attacked in a major way, only through lies, sanctions, assassinations, threats, etc.

Several times, the US government has come very close to attacking Iran and been stopped in large part by public pressure. President Obama almost attacked Syria with a major campaign of widespread carpet bombing, and was stopped by public pressure. That was how badly the US wanted to overthrow Assad, come what may — and knowing that nothing good, even on their own terms, had come from any of the US overthrows dating back to Syria 1949, Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954 and so on.

We have to reckon with the fact that Obama told everyone to let Bush and Cheney off the hook, that he turned their crimes into public policies, and that he merged war with small-scale murder through widespread drone killings, and we let it happen.

And we let Syria divide us. One had to be either on the side that Assad can do no wrong or the side that the CIA can do no wrong. No contact was permitted between the peace movement and the real world in which both the CIA and Assad did evil things. And now you are required to believe that either NATO or Russia is God’s gift to the world. So we have something of a lasting lesson to take from Gaza and expand. At least where I live, ordinary people are able to oppose warmaking by both Israel and Hamas.

Of course, if they don’t oppose warmaking by Hamas, they are labeled as bigots. In one way, this is insane. Criticism of the Israeli government has been defined as supposed anti-Semitism. But in another way it’s exactly right: failure to oppose both sides of a war is bigotry. This rare and remarkable opposition to both sides of a war is to be treasured and learned from, and not dismissed with accusation of equating two uneven sides and that sort of nonsense. Because the very most basic problem is not the governments that wage the most war. The very most basic problem is the idea that it is ever an acceptable policy to kill people.