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violence
Support for Luigi Mangione Reflects Working Class Weariness of Top-Down Violence
To honor Brian Thompson, and to ensure his death is not in vain, we can engage in the needed conversation about the extreme depravity of our healthcare system which his death revitalized.
Dec 28, 2024
Early this month Luigi Mangione, 26, University of Pennsylvania graduate, allegedly gunned down CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, 50. The public response has been varied, with many supporting Mangione. Some fear the positive regard of Mangione is indicative of a shift into a new era where violence is glorified and humanity is lost. As a sociology professor who teaches Poverty, Wealth, and Privilege, I disagree. This failure of subsets of the public to broadly denounce the actions of Mangione does not herald a cultural shift in appreciation of violence.
Instead this unusual display of class consciousness reflects two things. First, the reaction is due to the shift in who bore the cost of violence. Class under-resourced; Black, Indigenous, Latinx and people of color; women; and queer and trans people are the normal recipients of societal violence. Wealthy, cishet, white men in positions of power are not. Wealthy, white communities are conditioned to expect protection, and the revocation of that sheltering is rare.
Second, the working classes are weary from surviving an unnecessarily violent and unjust society. We live amid staggering class, race, and gender-based stratification and life and death stakes everyday. The ruling class profits from our blood, sweat, and tears. And yet, when one of the elite passes, they want us to give them more. They ask us to give them our love. Yet, they remain calloused to our pain and ignore our pleas for fairness.
We, as a community, might ask, how are the elite and their apologists not appalled by a harm-rich system that normalizes the idea that humans are only as valuable as their economic worth?
We all deserve the same sanctity of life given to wealthy insiders. However, when it comes to many of our social systems, such as healthcare, respect and care are not institutionalized; instead, harm is normalized. We see “out-sized returns” to private equity investors.
Recently, a magician performed at a kid’s birthday party. Magic tricks work through deception. A magician distracts the audience to hide what else they are doing. Similar dynamics play out in our public life. The wealth gap continues to grow, yet we voted in a billionaire to be president. The public is shamed for failing to appropriately sympathize with Brian Thompson and his family, yet everyday targeted attacks and systemic neglect accumulate to harm and render disposable historically and strategically marginalized communities, such as class under-resourced, BIPOC, women, and trans and queer people.
Let us stop this charade. Our healthcare system is not pro-health. The World Health Organization (WHO) names universal healthcare as a worldwide goal. The United States has not complied. Most Americans are insured through private companies. Many Americans struggle to pay for healthcare, they postpone receiving care, and are in medical debt. The healthcare system has practices, such as using AI to deny a high number of healthcare claims, which put profits over people. There is something deeply inhumane and harmful about this disregard for health in a healthcare system. It may not be illegal, but it is savage.
The elite and their apologists ask, “How could they not be appalled by Thompson’s murder?” Instead we, as a community, might ask, how are the elite and their apologists not appalled by a harm-rich system that normalizes the idea that humans are only as valuable as their economic worth? Decades ago, Larry Summers, currently on the board of directors of OpenAI, famously wrote that people who produce less are more expendable. This classist ideology pervades our healthcare system.
To honor Brian Thompson, and to ensure his death is not in vain, we can engage in the needed conversation about the extreme depravity of our healthcare system which his death revitalized. A path forward that reforms a calloused healthcare system can provide benefits to all of us. Those among us who deeply mourn Brian’s death can take solace that it can impart a legacy of positive, sustainable, and overdue social change. Those among us who view Mangione’s action as predictable, if not understandable, can appreciate the same reform.
To be sure, there are people who claim that human fallibility is a predestined curse that we cannot overcome, that we are born sinners and that we cannot do better than prioritize greed over care of each other, even within our healthcare system. There will be those of us who feel that disproportionate wealth is a triumph and that our healthcare should reflect the position we hold in our socioeconomic system. However, 73 countries have universal healthcare, including China, Russia, Mexico and Canada. Us Americans are also worthy.
Wealthy and powerful people are the most protected against societal harms, and they also have disproportionate control over them. We need the CEOs, billionaires, and other power elites to do better. The system does not have a great way to hold those in charge accountable for bad behavior. Can they figure out a way to hold themselves accountable? Can they reorganize to prioritize care, a virtue, over greed, a vice, in our healthcare system? If they are immune to this self-correcting recovery, we need to organize around collective action, such as voting, for example for single-payer healthcare, because our lives depend on it. We don’t want anyone dying in the street. We also don’t want anyone dying or in pain due to a broken so-called healthcare system.
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Resistance Under Pressure: the Colombian Peace Community of San José de Apartadó
The South American country is being terrorized by brutal paramilitaries. A small community has consistently practised nonviolence—now they have received death threats again.
Dec 22, 2024
Nature is loud. Unknown animal sounds resound from the darkness as I work on the veranda in the evening. Everything seems so peaceful while the Comunidad de Paz reports the presence of armed people near their private properties La Roncona and La Holandecita. This is exactly where our small women's delegation from Europe is staying—Sabine Lichtenfels, Andrea Phoebe Regelmann, Katharina Müller and I—in the first house after the entrance gate.
Outside our terrace, the lavish abundance of nature. Lush greenery, with the occasional free-roaming horse or chicken on the lawn. There is a latent threat in the air, but not to our lives. The threatened people of the community have learned to live with the daily danger. They occasionally come to visit us, still have a sense of humor, and radiate from within. They have been friends with my fellow travelers from the partner community Tamera in southern Portugal for 19 years. Our presence and reporting on them gives them protection, because the murderers cover up their crimes and attack when no international witness is looking.
Colombia is in utter chaos. The more I hear and read about what is happening here, the more I immerse myself in books about the country, the more perplexed, confused, and disillusioned I remain. According toThe System of the Bird: Colombia, a Laboratory of Barbarity by Guido Piccoli, "Violence has not left Colombia since the war of independence against the Spanish." In Colombia, "there is always room for everyone, but equally the possibility of killing each other to no end."
Piccoli writes:
Don Gonzalo was not only a good person, he was also a hard worker. He got up at dawn and went to the mountains of Norcasia to cut down trees. One morning, his sister did not bring him his lunch, as she did every day. When Gonzalo came home, he found her dead, tied to a post. They had raped her. In the courtyard lay the decapitated bodies of his two brothers, while the bodies of their parents were lying in the hallway of the house. The only one still alive was the youngest brother. Before he died in his arms, he was able to tell him that the bandits were responsible for the massacre. From that day on, Don Gonzales decided to cut off the heads of bandits.
I can't say who the bandits are here. Paramilitaries, military, guerrillas. The state, the police, the public prosecutor's office. According to the law and the Constitution, the country is a democracy. In practice, hardly anyone understands how it works, and criminals enjoy complete impunity. During a riot in 1948 in the capital Bogotá, after the socialist politician and lawyer Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was murdered, "in one neighborhood in the center of the city, police distributed weapons to the demonstrators. In other neighbourhoods, they shot at them with rifles"
Initially, both the Colombians and American diplomats believed that Gaitán was assassinated by the Conservative Party, but after a few years, the opinion emerged that this was the first plot organized by the CIA, which had only been founded seven months earlier, to curb the spread of communism in the U.S. sphere of influence. Even the world-famous author Gabriel García Márquez supported this theory, because he was in the area on the day of the assassination and saw a conspicuous, unusual man, but no authority investigated this murder further and the FBI refused to open its archives "for security reasons."
Violence in Colombia only got worse from there. People were being sawed in half, had their eyes gouged out, had body parts cut off—all while they were still alive. Then the bodies were dumped in some villages. The terror was intended to force entire communities to leave their land.
The beneficiaries were the country's oligarchs, large landowners, and North American corporations:
The paramilitaries in Colombia are the armed wing of the elites, supported by or interwoven with all state authorities, at all levels of government and in all social classes. They were formed with the help of the Colombian army, several Colombian and U.S. intelligence services, and mercenaries. Paramilitarism is a strategic project and an integral part of the state. The paramilitaries play a central role in enforcing a capitalist neoliberal economic and social model with enormous profit margins.
All of this happened a long time ago. A peace agreement was signed in 2016, and a truth commission was set up as a result. The current left-wing government of Gustavo Petro is working to implement these milestones in Colombian history and is committed to the vision of "total peace." And here I am, surrounded by tropical abundance, struggling against a feeling of hopelessness as I realize how deeply violence and murder have shaped the lives of every person I talk to, and especially how murder and torture are still widespread. Most of the guerrillas have been demobilised, while the paramilitaries are stronger than before.
On March 18, 2024, President Petro visited the nearby town of "Apartadó and spoke—for the first time for a president—words of recognition and reparation for the Comunidad de Paz. The next day, the paramilitary responded—at least that is how the Comunidad De Paz understands it: 30-year-old Nalleley, mother of three, and 14-year-old Edinson were brutally murdered." The Urabá region, where the peace community is located, is under the control of the Gulf Clan, the most powerful criminal syndicate in Colombia. It emerged from right-wing paramilitaries and now, perfidiously, has renamed itself the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia after Gaitán in order to give itself a political coloring.
On our porch, over coffee and buñuelos, various members of the Peace Village describe how it felt when they lost family members in massacres by paramilitaries. They take an empty bowl in their hands to illustrate the inner emptiness that this leaves in them. And now comes the part that makes this place so special: They do not react like Don Gonzales and want revenge, and they no longer allow themselves to be driven out, uprooted in dignity, to beg for work in the cities. Since 1997, they have declared their neutrality, practiced organic farming for their own sustenance, exemplified nonviolence, and thus practiced the only possible form of resistance, namely collective resistance against war, expulsion, and exploitation. The integrity of these people is incredible.
"Their profound and courageous stance of nonviolence, ethical integrity, reconciliation, and community building, despite suffering unending attacks and massacres, has turned them into an important reference and role model for many other resisting grassroots communities in Colombia," writes Martin Winiecki from Tamera, who has also visited them several times.
I am learning a lot here. Above all, about the great fight against the system of exploitation, which always takes place on a small scale, especially in our minds. And the people here, with all the threats and the very simple life on the brink of poverty, seem more alive and, paradoxically, more radiant than my European friends. An excess of prosperity and the lack of a purpose in life seem to me more and more like enemies of vitality. On the outside, neoliberalism is destroying the Earth and on the inside, it is destroying our souls.
Amid the huge plants, the free-roaming animals, the women, men, and children who move around on foot or by horse and mule to reach their lands up in the mountains, where there is still no civilization, I feel closer to life than ever. My soul, buried by our consumer world, suddenly breathes life here, as if a layer of dust has been blown away. And it is precisely from this "civilization" that the Comunidad de Paz protects its land, protecting it and itself from the grip of the mega-machine.
"What's happening in Colombia of course isn't an isolated phenomenon," Winiecki writes. "It's part of an intensifying global clash: empire versus communities, capitalism versus Earth, patriarchy versus Life. This clash plays out in the ever more heartbreaking genocide in Gaza, the accelerating climate breakdown, the rise of far-right authoritarianism and fascism, and more. For life to succeed, we need unbreakable solidarity, recognizing that all struggles are connected, and we also need the power of vision that enables us to create living alternatives."
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Trump’s Second Victory Marks the Climax of the US War on Terror
Trump has used his public statements to direct his anger not toward China and Russia whose militaries threaten our allies, but toward our own unarmed civilian workers who feed, educate, nourish, and pay Americans.
Dec 11, 2024
In the early 1990s, doctors in Hiroshima, Japan discovered a stress-induced syndrome they called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome”—a condition in which the heart’s left ventricle, responsible for pumping blood, loses its capacity in response to extreme stressors like war, natural disaster, and the loss of loved ones. Prevalent among older women, that acute condition involves heart attack-like symptoms, including chest pain and pressure, light-headedness, and dread.
More recently, Israeli doctors in Tel Aviv noted a spike in the condition after the October 7, 2023 attack by the militant group Hamas and Israel’s subsequent incursion into (and devastation of) Gaza in response. The mothers of Israeli soldiers in particular have been affected, as have many who didn’t directly experience or witness the ravages of October 7 against that country’s civilians. (Undoubtedly, something similar has been happening in Gaza, too, but given the disastrous situation of the medical profession there, we have no way of knowing.)
Examples like these remind me of one of the most valuable things I’ve learned from studying my country’s endless foreign wars as both an anthropologist and a military spouse: Armed conflict transforms the bodies and minds of people far beyond its battlefields, including in the country that launched such wars in often distant lands.
it’s hard to know which came first: our president-elect, or Americans who distrust each other as much as they do outsiders, the federal government, and factual reporting.
As Americans await the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, I find myself thinking that it couldn’t be more important to understand the culturally transformative impact of war. My vantage point is a strange but (I think) salient one. I’m the wife of a U.S. military veteran and the mother of children who have been encouraged by those in our family and community to become fighters “like Daddy.” Yet I’m also someone who, through my involvement in Brown University’s Costs of War Project, has long critiqued this country’s warfighting efforts and the culture that sustains them.
In short, I find myself in an awkward position in this fragile democracy of ours. After all, I’m someone who has devoted unpaid labor to our military-industrial complex, yet can’t resist the impulse to critique it for its impact. How’s that for a conflict of interest?
Having risked plenty in this position, I might as well keep at it. One thing I can say is that all too many Americans, whatever their political leanings, agree on the benefits of funding our military with ever more hundreds of billions of our tax dollars that disproportionately benefit weapons contractors rather than us or our social safety network.
In fact, decades of federal budgets have favored war fighting with all too lax human-rights standards in dozens of foreign countries, hostility and violence against vulnerable people within the ranks of our own troops, antiterrorism policies that have encroached on domestic civil liberties, and the flow via police departments of military assault rifles and armored vehicles onto America’s city streets. And don’t forget the Veterans Day celebrations that propagandize military service to young children or the military recruiters in public schools. All of that is yet more evidence of what Americans value most. Yes, many of us have balked at school shootings and spiking child death rates, or at the servicemen and veterans who helped lead the rampage to overturn the 2020 election certification, but it’s clear that ever more of us, in or out of uniform, agree, in some fashion, on the sanctity of armed violence.
In a sense, the fact that we just voted back into the presidency someone who embodies a lack of restraint might be considered the climax of America’s decades-long War on Terror that began in response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Twenty-odd years later, we have a president-(re)elect who doesn’t believe in the peaceful transfer of power. He’s already used the bully pulpit of his presidency and then his candidacies to demonize federal workers and journalists. He’s called his political opponents “vermin” and “the enemy within,” while conjuring up specific images of violence against them. And he’s accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of our country—language that, in other settings like Hitler’s Germany or early 1990s Rwanda, led to upsurges in extralegal violence even before the first official orders to kill were given.
Trump has used his public statements to direct his anger—and so that of his most ardent supporters—not toward China and Russia whose militaries threaten the sovereignty of our allies, but toward our own unarmed civilian workers who feed, educate, nourish, and pay Americans. Under such conditions, it’s hard to know which came first: our President-elect, or Americans who distrust each other as much as they do outsiders, the federal government, and factual reporting. And talking about wars of terror, if ever conditions were ripe for civilian bloodshed at home, it’s now—a time when there exists no shared sense of what it means to be an American or even any way to talk about it together.
Start ‘Em Early.
Perhaps the truest reflection of our faith in war fighting as problem-solving is the emphasis still given to telling kids that it’s a good idea to join the military. Within military communities, it remains an unspoken rule that kids ought to be raised to be like their parents in uniform. As an example, consider the Pentagon’s take-your-child-to-work-day, attended by over 8,000 children this year and replete with athletic events, refreshments, and paraphernalia for those kids to take home. My own children experience a version of that: toy battleships and fighter jets, as well as coffee-table books displaying every class of armored vehicle ever made and old uniforms and memorabilia from various military bases.
Teachers at local elementary schools ask younger grades to draw pictures of those they know who serve in the military and write essays about why they’re proud of them. A local gathering in honor of loved ones in the military, during which community leaders extol the bravery and resolve of those who serve, is among the best-attended events in my small rural town. If only that many people attended PTA meetings to discuss the curriculum and school safety, among other things!
In our kids’ local Cub Scouts troop during Veterans Day week, parents who served in the military were invited to talk to the scouts about what they did while in uniform. Adults and children peppered them with questions about the weaponry they used and who they fought. And mind you, in such settings, when was the last time you heard of doctors, election workers, teachers, or federal employees being asked to describe their work, no less what they use to do it?
A Mandate to Kill
The way we spend money, go to war, vote, and raise our children suggests that, on some level, we’ve already given our military and law enforcement our implicit trust. How else to interpret the results of the 2024 election? By a significant margin, voters decided that leadership means not standing up to autocratic leaders abroad, but promising to hurt those who would speak out against you at home.
In June 2020, as protests and riots against the police murder of George Floyd swelled in Washington, President Trump told military leaders that he wanted to augment police units already in the capitol with armed military personnel. Hundreds of soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division traveled from North Carolina to Fort Belvoir just south of Washington, theoretically to help units already posted around the capitol. Those troops were issued bayonets, though they didn’t display them.
Apparently betting on the prospect that Trump would not want to own the decision to deploy troops against unarmed civilians, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper attempted to appease him and buy time without acting on his suggestion. However we judge the minimalist guardrails those officials put in place, it’s no longer clear that anyone in Trump’s second term will be there to restrain him from moving forward with his worst intentions against civilians, including undocumented immigrants (against whom the president-to-be is already threatening to call in the military). “The next time, I’m not waiting,” Trump said of such a future possibility at a 2023 rally.
Trolling by Nomination
Next to the man himself, nothing telegraphs Trump’s willingness to use force against unarmed American civilians more vividly than his nomination of former Army National Guard officer Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. A Fox News host with no administrative experience in the Pentagon, he sports tattoos indicating his allegiance to Christian nationalist and white supremacist causes. It’s hard to imagine a more partisan pick for a military that is supposed to be none of the above. Hegseth also (you won’t be surprised to learn) settled a sexual assault allegation in 2017 by a woman who attended one of his speaking engagements. In three separate instances as a Fox News host, he advocated on behalf of three service members being investigated by military tribunals for killing unarmed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Subsequently, President Trump pardoned two of those convicted men and reversed the demotion of the third, who had posed with the dead body of a teenage prisoner after allegedly murdering him with a knife.
Not just Hegseth’s actions but his stated goals speak to his disdain for restraint. He’s already made explicit his intention to fire any of the military’s top brass who have participated in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which, among other things, involve badly needed education to prevent sexual assault and hate speech demonizing religious and racial minorities or LGBTQ+ service members.
Hegseth’s appointment dovetails with the incoming administration’s revulsion against law and order within its own ranks, effectively ensuring, in the years to come, that the military will rot from the inside. Trump’s governance blueprint, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is direct in stating that weeding out “manufactured extremism” will be nonnegotiable this time around. The authors of that plan have urged the incoming administration to place national law enforcement agencies like Homeland Security and the federal police directly under the leadership of the secretary of defense and the president.
Disdain for Restraint
Americans have a certain reverence for those who act on impulse without considering the consequences. I doubt Donald Trump would have such a reputation for being a “strong leader” without having egged on his most ardent followers with intimations of violence. Think about his claim that white supremacist protestors in Charlottesville who, in 2017, ranted about Jews replacing them included “very fine people”; or his boast that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”; or his urging the crew who were to become the January 6 rioters to “fight like hell”; or his suggestion that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley ought to have been executed for attempting to directly reassure a Chinese general about this country’s stability while the president was trying to remain in office after his election loss in 2020. That last example should be a reminder that instability and violence within our government present an existential safety risk not just to ordinary Americans but to the entire world, as foreign governments worry about what an unhinged Trump administration might mean for them.
For me, the greatest elephant in the room is our government’s possession of a vast supply of nuclear weaponry capable of causing exponentially more destruction than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Just the non-nuclear explosives that the Biden administration has provided to Israel to drop on Gaza have, cumulatively, had a power far greater than the Hiroshima bomb—a preview of the human destruction our elected leaders are willing to allow even without giving direct orders to do so. Since the only enemies Donald Trump now refers to live in this country, it falls within the realm of possibility that, in his hands, our arsenal of weaponry could place American cities in danger.
A New Kind of War
I like to remind myself that things have been bad in the past: police wielding fire hoses, clubs, and dogs on unarmed Black children protesting for their civil rights; troops blocking Black teenagers from attending school; and of course, border patrol agents separating children from their parents and locking them in cages. To a large extent, we rebounded from such horrors, even though hundreds of those immigrant children have yet to find their parents. Still, we can only imagine what will happen in the Trumpian immigration crackdown that awaits us.
As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg emphasized to a group of activists and supporters the day after the election, we need to “make a lot of noise” about whatever the incoming Trump administration does, and what it means for our democracy. And independent journalism and truth-telling will make this possible, not cynical mistrust of the news or of Americans who try to call out what is likely to be Trump’s violent abuse of power. Keeping our republic will be harder than ever this time around, but Americans who care about their fellow citizens need to prepare themselves to bear witness to the human costs of what could be a new kind of war right here on our own soil. Otherwise, we’ll find all too many hearts broken, including mine.
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