By Glen Martin

The tragic killing or wounding of 19 people on January 8 by suspect Jared Loughner has led to a national soul-searching concerning the pervasive violence that has infected our country.  Many analysts attribute Loughner’s bizarre ideology to the violent rhetoric and hate speech of the Tea-party movement and the rabid ravings of far right talk show hosts.

However, they are ignoring the larger picture of this country’s historic choice, at least since the Second World War, to repudiate democracy in favor of domestic plutocracy for the rich and brutal empire abroad.

January 17 was the 50^th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s historic farewell address declaring that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the industrial-military complex.”

Our country never demilitarized after World War Two.  Top secret government planners such as George Kennan saw the potential for a global empire: “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population….Our real task in the coming period is to maintain this position of disparity….The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”

Since that time the US developed a monolithic military-industrial complex that spends more annually on weapons and violence than all the other nations of the world combined. We established a worldwide network of more than 730 foreign military bases that routinely project both overt and covert military violence in every corner of the globe.

Michael Moore’s movie “Bowling for Columbine” (investigating the horrific 1999 shooting of 13 students in Denver’s Columbine High School) interviews a manager in one of the giant corporate facilities in the Denver area designing intercontinental ballistic missiles to carry nuclear warheads to any target on Earth. While a gigantic missile for weapons of mass destruction looms in the background, the manager expresses genuine perplexity at the terrible violence in Columbine. We are hypocrites down to the very bottoms of our violent and “patriotic” souls.

Do our wars and our support for violent totalitarian right wing regimes inevitably destroy democracy and freedom at home?  The function of this empire is to promote the interests of US multinational corporations greedy to exploit the cheap labor and resources of countries around the world.  This greed for profits in turn leads these corporations to colonize the US government so that it will continue to use its military-industrial complex in their interests.

Especially since the Regan presidency, we have forfeited more and more of freedoms to the rich and their multinational corporations, the core of which remains this gigantic industrial-military complex.  Huge profit making corporations now control the mass media, naturally slanting the news in their own interests.  They now dominate our elections, making most representatives in both houses of Congress beholden to them.  Their lawyers write the laws supposed to regulate the drug companies, insurance companies, and banking corporations that Congress then rubber stamps.

These same corporations use their billions to support right wing think tanks and political movements that attack “big government” as the enemy and insist on privatizing everything.  Their reckless greed brought on the great economic collapse of 2007 only to have these criminals bailed out at the public’s expense.  Jarred Loughner is accused of killing or wounding 19 people, while the banks and corporations have ruined the lives of millions of Americans, stealing their life savings in the form of pensions and illegally foreclosing on millions of homes.  Congress bailed out the rich and did nothing to protect the average American.  Is this not violence – pervasive structural violence — and the death of democracy?

Genuine democracy is intrinsically a method of nonviolently governing and promoting a common good centered on peace, justice, and freedom.  It can only be protected and promoted by good government, which means strong government, with effective checks and balances run by all the people, for all the people, and of all the people.  It cannot be “protected” by militarism, nor private corporations, both of which inherently subvert of democracy and freedom.

The so-called right wing is only a symptom of a much larger problem.  They are understandingly suspicious of a federal government stealing our liberties. The answer is not weakening government but taking back the government. Only a mass movement of American citizens, standing together and demanding an end to militarism and the reclaiming of our internal democracy for the people themselves, will address the problem of pervasive violence.

Glen T. Martin is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies and Chairperson of the Program in Peace Studies at Radford University.