Unilateral, Asymmetric, and Preemptive American Murder/Suicide Foreign Policy

Reed Perry

As a peace advocate, I wish I could say it was public conscience, or a deliberate act of political policy that ended the war. If not, I wish it were the Afghan people who repelled NATO from their own oft-invaded land. But its not. At this point, it seems American militarism will suicide itself before it does the logical thing, which is escape the immense disaster-zone they created. The entire war in Afghanistan is a murder/suicide.

This is why American military strategy, full spectrum dominance, is best explained through the acts of the most recent accused mass murderer, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, who is charged with murdering 17 people, and those whose footsteps he follows in the long American tradition of mass homicide.

Over the last 10 years, more American soldiers have committed suicide than have been killed by the Afghan Jihad. These all have traits of classic murder/suicides. The slayer is haunted by his own brutality, by the fear of his own traumas, overwhelmed with guilt and grief; he takes his own life, or as in Bales’ case, resigns to permanent state custody, to a mental hospital or maximum security prison, as a surrender in his conflict with a reality he can neither fight or accept. This is political.

The constant reports of mass murder (and suicide) by children, teenagers, college students, dads, soldiers, are all considered “lone madmen” even though there have been hundreds and they now occur on a regular basis.

For various reasons, the murder/suicide cultural norm reminds me of an ancient Roman practice, decimation, in which one out of every ten soldiers were gang murdered by their own comrades. This was actually part of the plan, a national policy. The thinking behind it was that the remaining army would have better odds because they would no longer be burdened with the bad luck of those men who were culled in the immense (and mandatory) game of Russian roulette. Fortuna, the god of luck, was of supreme importance to the militarist, gambling Roman culture. Much of the Roman civilization was victim to these superstitions.

Our culture assigns mass killings to a similar mythic status, our own pseudo-scientific “god,” that of “madness,” of whatever antisocial clinical formula society labels it. Similar to the Roman cult of Fortuna, — we declare the next high-school genocided by its own inhabitants as just simply…unlucky — a psycho-statistical probability. There is often no “culprit” left alive to judge, so the general darkness in the black math of modern life is held to blame.

Whether the mass sacrifice occurs in a college, a mall, or a military base, the event is explained as either another person who “couldn’t cope,” or the failure of the system itself to recognize its own offspring.

Like the perverse evils of the Roman pantheon, the national up-tick of murder/suicide cases are now accepted as a consequence of our paradigm, and we let them pass month after month — as a byproduct of policy. Murder/suicide is business as usual. Counselors and psychologists are sent in to “help people cope.” Clearly, the attitude is to “deal with it,” and move on.

I have always seen something deeply political or even insurgent in America’s escalating outbursts of serial killing. There have been more shootings in Army facilities. There was a recent mass-killing in Washington by a veteran who was then shot and killed by another veteran — who was a cop.

Ever since Columbine, the phenomenon of youth murder/suicide has appeared less idiomatic and more automatic. Michael Moore famously explored school killings as political in his Columbine film, where he suggests that race paranoia, and the national drift towards violent militarism is the cause. I’d agree more with the latter.

Sergeant Bales brought the entire philosophy of unilateral, asymmetric, and preemptive American interventionism to its conclusion. Unilateralism is equivalent to “lone-killer” logic. Asymmetric war, the obsession with overwhelming force, is homicidal. And the concept of “preemptive” violence is an obvious perversion of reason. The realization of this single-minded policy now lies with Bales, the standard-bearer in a long tradition of American military genocide.

As another policy extension of this — the special operations “night raids,” AKA death squads, that Obama has been so fond of, along with wanton drone bombings, have a macabre record of mass-murdering people we didn’t even want to mass-murder.

JSOC, which claims authority over what is said to be our most “elite” mass-murderers, has admitted over 50% of their attacks victimize the wrong victims. Couple up these serial killers with the videogame/executioner drones or whatever other “weapon system” that crawls out of psycho-town USA, and we got ourselves a full-blown murder/suicide foreign policy!

In conclusion, if you support the war you support Staff Sergeant Robert Bales and the biggest mass-murder/suicide since the botched Nazi invasion of Russia, the 11-year, million dead, $4 trillion American serial shooting in Afghanistan.

Reed Perry has renounced his citizenship and is a stateless person.