THE REAL LESSONS OF YESTERDAY'S SHOOTING IN WASHINGTON DC

President Trump, true to form, misses the real lesson from the tragic shooting of two national guardsmen in Washington. Trump announced that in light of what happened he will call on the Department of Defense (that’s still its official name) to call up 500 more National Guardsmen to Washington. The refugee program is also being revamped in order to avoid incidents like this from happening in the future. Just hours after the incident, the Trump administration announced it had stopped processing immigration applications from Afghanistan. The shooter, Rahmanulla Lakanwal, is an Afghan who was trained by the CIA to fight the Taliban in one of their strongholds. Apparently, Lakanwal acted in reaction to the gutting of much of the refugee program.

Trump’s moves miss the real lesson. Throughout the twenty-first century the United States has been in permanent wars throughout the world. The U.S. public doesn’t even know about many of them. We bomb countries in Africa on a regular basis. We’re in a permanent war situation in the Middle East. We’re bombing boats -- in the process blasting fishermen to pieces on both sides of Latin America and the victims are people not only from Venezuela, but also Trinidad, Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador. In doing so we are creating Frankenstein’s both at home and abroad. Lakanwal is one of them. All studies indicate that most acts of terrorism in the U.S. are committed by people and groups on the Right and a very large number of the perpetrators served in the military and are war veterans. George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, is just one example of a phenomenon in which the chickens come home to roost. Another is Timothy McVeigh, the author of the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 167 people in 1995 who was a veteran of the Persian Gulf War.

This is the discussion we should be having, not one about retribution which is the one being raised by Trump and his MAGA followers. Unfortunately, we cannot count on the mainstream media, which is increasingly being taken over by the political Right and is becoming increasingly concentrated, to raise these issues.