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https://scheerpost.com/2022/06/06/hedges-americas-gun-fetish/

America’s Gun Fetish

There will be no gun control, not only because of the gun lobby and a corrupt political class, but because for many white Americans the idea of the gun is the only power they have left.  

Guns were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. My grandfather, who had been a master sergeant in the army, had a small arsenal in his house in Mechanic Falls, Maine. He gave me a 2020 bolt action Springfield rifle when I was 7. By the time I was 10, I had graduated to a Winchester lever action 30-30. I moved my way up the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Marksmanship Qualification Program, helped along by a summer camp where riflery was mandatory. Like many boys in rural America, I was fascinated by guns, although I disliked hunting. Two decades as a reporter in war zones, however, resulted in a deep aversion to weapons. I saw what they did to human bodies. I inherited my grandfather’s guns and gave them to my uncle.

Guns made my family, lower working-class people in Maine, feel powerful, even when they were not. Take away their guns and what was left? Decaying small towns, shuttered textile and paper mills, dead-end jobs, seedy bars where veterans, nearly all the men in my family were veterans, drank away their trauma. Take away the guns, and the brute force of squalor, decline, and abandonment hit you in the face like a tidal wave. 

Yes, the gun lobby and weapons manufacturers fuel the violence with easily available assault-style weapons, whose small caliber 5.56 mm cartridges make them largely useless for hunting. Yes, the lax gun laws and risible background checks are partially to blame. But America also fetishizes guns. This fetish has intensified among white working-class men, who have seen everything slip beyond their grasp: economic stability, a sense of place within the society, hope for the future and political empowerment. The fear of losing the gun is the final crushing blow to self-esteem and dignity, a surrender to the economic and political forces that have destroyed their lives. They cling to the gun as an idea, a belief that with it they are strong, unassailable, and independent. The shifting sands of demographics, with white people projected to become a minority in the U.S. by 2045, intensifies this primal desire, they would say need, to own a weapon.

There have been over 200 mass shootings this year. There are nearly 400 million guns in the U.S., some 120 guns for every 100 Americans. Half of the privately-owned guns are owned by 3 percent of the population, according to a 2016 study. Our neighbor in Maine had 23 guns. Restrictive gun laws, and gun laws that are inequitably enforced, block gun ownership for many Blacks, especially in urban neighborhoods. Federal law, for example, prohibits gun ownership for most people with felony convictions, effectively barring legal gun ownership for a third of Black men. The outlawing of guns for Blacks is part of a long continuum. Blacks were denied the right to own guns under the antebellum Slave Codes, the post-Civil War Black Codes, and the Jim Crow laws. 

White people built their supremacy in America and globally with violence. They massacred Native Americans and stole their land. They kidnapped Africans, shipped them as cargo to the Americas, and then enslaved, lynched, imprisoned, and impoverished Black people for generations. They have always gunned down Black people with impunity, a historical reality only recently discernable to most white people because of cell phone videos of killings. 

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer,” D.H. Lawrence writes. “It has never yet melted.”

White society, sometimes overtly and sometimes unconsciously, deeply fears Black retribution for its four centuries of murderous assaults.

“Again, I say that each and every Negro, during the last 300 years, possesses from that heritage a greater burden of hate for America than they themselves know,” Richard Wright notes in his journal. “Perhaps it is well that Negroes try to be as unintellectual as possible, for if they ever started really thinking about what happened to them, they’d go wild. And perhaps that is the secret of whites who want to believe that Negroes really have no memory; for if they thought that Negroes remembered they would start out to shoot them all in sheer self-defense.” 

The Second Amendment, as the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes in Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” was designed to solidify the rights, often demanded under state law, of whites to carry weapons. Southern white men were not only required to own guns but serve in slave patrols. These weapons were used to exterminate the indigenous population, hunt down enslaved people who escaped bondage and violently crush slave revolts, strikes and other uprisings by oppressed groups. Vigilante violence is wired into our DNA.

 “Most American violence – and this also illuminates its relationship to state power – has been initiated with a ‘conservative’ bias,” the historian Richard Hofstadter writes. “It has been unleashed against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals, and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities, and has been used ostensibly to protect the American, the Southern, the white Protestant, or simply the established middle-class way of life and morals. A high proportion of our violent actions has thus come from the top dogs or the middle dogs. Such has been the character of most mob and vigilante movements. This may help to explain why so little of it has been used against state authority, and why in turn it has been so easily and indulgently forgotten.”

Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old white shooter in Buffalo who killed ten Black people and wounded three others, one of them Black, at the Tops Friendly Markets in a Black neighborhood, gave expression in a 180-page manifesto to this white fear, or “great replacement theory.” Gendron repeatedly cited Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old mass shooter who in 2019 killed 51 people and injured 40 others at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Tarrant, like Gendron, live streamed his attack so, he believed, he could be cheered on by a virtual audience. Robert Bowers, 46, killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old, in 2019 drove more than 11 hours to target Hispanics, leaving 22 people dead and 26 injured in a Walmart in El Paso. John Earnest, who pleaded guilty to murdering one and injuring three others in 2019 at a synagogue in Poway, California, saw the “white race” being supplanted by other races. Dylann Roof in 2015 fired 77 shots from his .45-caliber Glock pistol at parishioners attending a Bible study at the Black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. He murdered nine of them. “You Blacks are killing white people on the streets everyday and raping white women everyday,” he shouted at his victims as he was firing, according to a journal he kept in jail.

The gun enforced white supremacy. It should not be surprising that it is embraced as the instrument that will prevent whites from being dethroned.

The specter of societal collapse, less and less a conspiracy theory as we barrel to climate breakdown, reinforces the gun fetish. Survivalist cults, infused with white supremacy, paint the scenario of gangs of marauding Black and brown people fleeing the chaos of lawless cities and ravaging the countryside. These hordes of Black and brown people, the survivalists believe, will only be kept at bay with guns, especially assault-style weapons. This is not far removed from calling for their extermination.

Historian Richard Slotkin calls our national lust for blood sacrifice the “structuring metaphor of the American experience,” a belief in “regeneration through violence.” Blood sacrifice, he writes in his trilogy Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier,  The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, is celebrated as the highest form of good. Sometimes it requires the blood of heroes, but most often it requires the blood of enemies. 

This blood sacrifice, whether at home or in foreign wars, is racialized. The U.S. has slaughtered millions of the globe’s inhabitants, including women and children, in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Libya, as well as in numerous proxy wars, the latest in Ukraine, where the Biden administration will ship another $700 million in weapons to supplement $54 billion in military and humanitarian aid.

When the national mythology inculcates into a population that it has the divine right to kill others to purge the earth of evil, how can this mythology not be ingested by naïve and alienated individuals? Kill them overseas. Kill them at home. The more the empire deteriorates, the more the impetus to kill grows. Violence, in desperation, becomes the only route to salvation.

“A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions,” Slotkin writes.

America’s gun fetish and culture of vigilante violence makes the U.S. very different from other industrialized nations. This is the reason there will never be serious gun control. It does not matter how many mass shootings take place, how many children are butchered in their classrooms, or how high the homicide rate climbs.

The longer we remain in a state of political paralysis, dominated by a corporate oligarchy that refuses to respond to the mounting misery of the bottom half of the population, the more the rage of the underclass will find expression through violence. People who are Black, Muslim, Asian, Jewish, and LGBTQ, along with the undocumented, liberals, feminists and intellectuals, already branded as contaminants, will be slated for execution. Violence will spawn more violence.

“People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become,” James Baldwin writes of the American South. “The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.” He added that he “was not struck by their wickedness, for that wickedness was but the spirit and the history of America. What struck me was the unbelievable dimension of their sorrow. I felt as though I had wandered into hell.”

Those who cling to the mythology of white supremacy cannot be reached through rational discussion. Mythology is all they have left. When this mythology appears under threat it triggers a ferocious backlash, for without the myth there is an emptiness, an emotional void, a crushing despair.

America has two choices. It can reintegrate the dispossessed back into the society through radical New Deal types of reforms, or it can leave its underclass to wallow in the toxins of poverty, hate and resentment, fueling the blood sacrifices that afflict us. This choice, I fear, has already been made. The ruling oligarchy doesn’t take the subway or fly on commercial jets. It is protected by the FBI, Homeland Security, police escorts, and bodyguards. Its children attend private schools. It lives in gated communities with elaborate surveillance systems. We don’t matter.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/dystopia-now-surveillance-through-vaccine-certificates-digital-id-biometric-data/5734793?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles

Dystopia Now! – Surveillance Through Vaccine Certificates, Digital IDs, and Biometric Data

With the pandemic, the “digital transformation” that so many analysts have been referring to for years, without being exactly sure what it meant, has found its catalyst. One major effect of confinement will be the expansion and progression of the digital world in a decisive and often permanent manner. – Klaus Schwab, COVID-19: The Great Reset (p. 153)

No matter the origin or true lethality of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus pandemic has been utilized to implement broader agendas that have been planned well in advance. One of the motivations for declaring a global pandemic was to make possible the widespread usage of new technology such as facial recognition, digital IDs and payment systems, mRNA vaccines and vaccine certificates. This is openly stated in books such as COVID-19: The Great Reset and The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The engineers of the “plandemic” recognized that new technology is often resisted by the masses, but could be adopted quickly due to a public health crisis. What better way to coerce people into using technology that has long been planned to enslave humanity than by holding them hostage to a “deadly” virus causing people to fear for their lives? From the outset of the COVID-19 crisis, humanity was told the world could not return to normal without global vaccination against the coronavirus. We were even told that some things would never return to normal.

In fact, the people and organizations behind exercises such as Crimson Contagion and Event 201 secretly planned to reshape the world in their technocratic image using the guise of the pandemic to implement their schemes.

For decades Hollywood, a major partner in advancing globalist agendas, has been conditioning people to accept all-pervasive surveillance through films such as Enemy of the State, Eagle Eye, and Minority Report. The societies depicted in those dystopian films is now a reality. Welcome to Dystopia Now!

Vaccine Certificates Will Change the Future of Work and Travel

On January 14 the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI), a broad coalition of health and technology corporations, was announced. The VCI combines the efforts of companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Mayo Clinic for the purpose of standardizing digital access to vaccination records. The VCI also garners support from the World Economic Forum (i.e., Klaus Schwab and his Great Reset) through The Commons Project Foundation and its Common Pass project.

Common Pass is a “globally-interoperable platform for people to document their COVID-19 status (health declarations/PCR tests/vaccinations) to satisfy country entry requirements, while protecting their health data privacy.” In other words, it’s a digital tracking system designed to keep people from traveling unless current with vaccines and other future health requirements. Common Pass requires a smartphone and works on Apple (through the Apple Health app) and Android (through the CommonHealth app) devices. Authorities will be able to scan a QR code embedded in the app that will verify whether an individual is cleared for travel. It is expected to launch in the first half of 2022.

In the new world being erected right before our eyes, the Global Syndicate does not want the average citizen to have the right to travel freely without being closely monitored for compliance with new societal rules. They claim reducing travel will help the environment and solve the problem of climate change, but this is just a ruse to destroy individual freedom and rights. In reality, they want humanity locked into a surveillance grid that can track every movement and eventually, every thought!

As I warned in part four of the Beware the Vaccine series, employers will eventually make it difficult to work without proof of vaccination. Additionally, stores, concert and sports venues, restaurants, museums, and parks may also soon require a tool like Common Pass to shop for necessities and access entertainment and leisure. But it doesn’t stop here.

Facial Recognition, Thermal Cameras, and Biometric Wearables

Surveillance including the use of facial recognition technology was increasingly used by governments worldwide under the guise of fighting the spread of COVID-19. As early as last April, Amazon began using thermal cameras to scan workers for fever and other symptoms of coronavirus. Companies such as Thermal Guardian and Flir have been supplying thermal cameras to airports, healthcare centers, businesses, casinos and even grocery stores throughout the plandemic.

Contact tracing plans largely failed because people were uncooperative, and the technology was not well developed. Companies such as TraceSafe and Estimote have created the next wave of contact tracing tools in the form of biometric wearable devices. Wearables from Flywallet and Digital DNA will hold your vaccine certificates. For now, these new surveillance devices are meant to be worn outside the body, but the ultimate goal is for widespread adoption of bodily implants as documented in my Internet of Bodies article.

Though there have been some rumblings about the privacy violations these technologies could create, it hasn’t stopped their development or implementation by governments and companies worldwide. This does not bode well for the future as the digital transformation of society races on.

Digital IDs Will Place All Humans on the Surveillance Grid

Globalists have a funny way of posing as saviors while secretly planning humanity’s total subjugation. A global technocracy cannot be imposed without robust surveillance systems, widespread deployment of artificial intelligence, and the digitization of everything.

The push for digital identification is increasing at a pace faster than Usain Bolt’s 100-meter dash. As I wrote in part 5 of the Beware the Vaccine series:

“…the plan is to roll out a full-fledged digital ID (ID2020) which would contain driver’s licenses, passports, work badges, building access cards, debit and credit cards, transit passes, and more.” 

Under the guise of aiding the marginalized and protecting their civil liberties, despotic technocrats will be able to use digital IDs to control access to government, finance, health, travel, and any service where an ID would be required for access or benefits. The road to the ID2020 initiative leads to the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations. You may recall that both were co-sponsors of Event 201, the pandemic planning exercise that became reality just a few months later. Is it a mere coincidence that these two foundations are the driving forces behind global pandemic planning, vaccination, and the creation and enforcement of digital IDs?

Digital Payment Systems, Global Digital Currencies, and the Cashless Society

The next domino to fall, coinciding with a planned and coordinated global economic reset, will be universal adoption of digital payments and the outlawing of cash.

The plandemic has served to rapidly change the way people think about money, especially cash. Last March, the World Health Organization vilified cash as a coronavirus spreader, and its use was restricted around the world. Coin shortages also soon followed, resulting in a dramatic shift toward digital payments. Talks and moves to implement digital currencies ramped up, all according to schedule.

Prior to the plandemic, cash usage was still prominent in the U.S., but was already on the decline in China and many Asian countries. The COVID-19 crisis provided the perfect cover to accelerate adoption of digital payments throughout Western nations.

Many are excited about digital money and the blockchain technology behind it, believing it will be the key to decentralization and less oversight by central banks. However, history has proven that elites tend to establish greater control of economies as societies move away from physical currency.

This push for digitalization is placing the world at a crossroads. I believe the transition to a global digital economy will happen similar to the way Napster revolutionized digital file sharing (mainly music) in the late 90s. As millions of songs were uploaded, downloaded, and shared across Napster’s networks, consumers relished the ability to obtain “free” music. However, the music industry and many of its artists were not happy and launched an all-out assault against Napster and the many services it spawned, such as Limewire and BitTorrent. After years of legal proceedings, the music industry was able to smash Napster and other file-sharing platforms to pieces. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) even sued individual citizens for illegal downloading and file-sharing. Through the creation of platforms like iTunes, Spotify and Apple Music, the music industry regained iron-clad control of its copyrighted material. Sadly, artist revenue never rebounded to pre digital piracy heights.

I see a similar situation with blockchain and digital currency. Though blockchain technology and cryptocurrency may initially provide financial freedom and anonymity through products like BitCoin, eventually the banking elites and their technocratic partners will find a way to regain control. The Federal Reserve has already proposed a new FedCoin that threatens to centralize digital currency with the ability to track and/or prohibit transactions. Attacks on cryptocurrency are on the rise as governments, credit card companies, and mega-corporations have banned their use. Big tech giants like Facebook and Google joined together to ban cryptocurrency ads. However, Facebook (which owns data from billions of people) has announced it will launch its new rebranded cryptocurrency called Diem later this year.

To top it off, several countries and banks have issued Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) which threaten to destroy the independent and anonymous financial system brokered through blockchain technology. Once these efforts by governments, central banks, and mega-corporations gain steam, it won’t be long before BitCoin and other cryptocurrencies will be targeted for extinction. Those who possess them may be sued, criminalized, and excluded from financial systems much like those who pirated music in the earlier part of the century.

The War on Terror Set the Stage for Global Surveillance

A significant outcome of the war on terror was the emergence of the surveillance state. Initially sold as a way to track terrorists, governments soon turned these tactics on their citizens, as revealed by whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and through legislation like the Patriot Act (which President-Elect Joe Biden bragged about writing) and National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It even spawned the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an entirely new government agency conceived to monitor known and “potential” terrorists and prevent future terror attacks. With time and the advancement of technology, the fledgling surveillance state of the early 2000s has grown exponentially into the monstrous biosecurity police state now emerging.

What began as eagle eye tools for militaries to track and monitor “terrorists” abroad have now been adapted for use in everyday consumer products like nanny cams, smartphones, smart watches, and vehicles. Use of traffic and surveillance cameras have exploded in the years since 9/11 to the point where the U.S. and China combined possess one surveillance camera for every four people. It is expected that 2021 will see the global deployment of over one billion cameras.

DHS expects to have biometric data including DNA and face, fingerprint, and iris scans of at least 259 million people by 2022. DHS is using cloud-based software called Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART), hosted by Amazon Web Services to “make it possible to confirm the identity of travelers at any point in their travel,” according to former secretary Kevin McAleenan. The possibilities of using this software to curb individual rights and freedom are staggering. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

“The records DHS plans to include in HART will chill and deter people from exercising their First Amendment protected rights to speak, assemble, and associate. Data like face recognition makes it possible to identify and track people in real time, including at lawful political protests and other gatherings. Other data DHS is planning to collect—including information about people’s “relationship patterns” and from officer “encounters” with the public—can be used to identify political affiliations, religious activities, and familial and friendly relationships. These data points are also frequently colored by conjecture and bias.”

Northrop Grumman, a preeminent U.S. defense contractor, received a $95 million contract to develop the first two phases of the HART system under DHS’s Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM). But this is just one of many ongoing government surveillance projects designed to spy on and incorporate all of humanity in biometric databases.

Technology Isn’t the Problem, It’s the People Behind It

For the record, I am not advocating against the use of new technology. Technology is simply a tool used to achieve a task or goal. It’s mostly neither good nor bad. How it’s used, who’s using it, and for what purpose typically determines benefit or harm. However, it has been proven time and again that digital systems are fragile, ripe for hacking, and contain back doors that can be used to spy on users. Though the technologies discussed in this article promise privacy and individual control, trusting those overseeing their development or deployment is foolish. Most involved in the creation, implementation, distribution, and use of these technologies have ties to governments, global entities, spy agencies, and billion-dollar tech companies.

All these new inventions are being used to create a global panopticon, making it easy for technocrats to control humanity through technological innovation. So pardon me if I don’t get all excited about artificial intelligence, augmented reality, body implants, and other rapidly developing technologies. In fact, these unprecedented modern times make me nostalgic for corded telephones and fax machines.