Caputo, who hails form a military family, wrote:
I understand the psychology that causes the aggressors to blame their victims. I understand the justifications and mechanisms. I understand the emotional urge to want to hate the people who killed someone dear to you. But to describe the psychology that preserves such false beliefs is not to ignore the objective moral truth that no attacker can ever justly blame their victims for defending themselves.
The same distorted morality has been used to justify attacks against the native Americans, the Vietnamese , El Salvadorans , and the Afghans . It is the same story over and over again. These people have been dehumanized, their God-given right to self-defense has been delegitimized, their resistance has been reframed as terrorism, and US soldiers have been sent to kill them.
History has preserved these lies, normalized them, and socialized them into our culture: so much so that legitimate resistance against US aggression is incomprehensible to most, and to even raise this question is seen as un-American.
History has defined the US veteran as a hero, and in doing so it has automatically defined anyone who fights against him as the bad guy. It has reversed the roles of aggressor and defender, moralized the immoral, and shaped our societies' present understanding of war.
As a society, it is time for Americans to stop condoning all this violence, particularly against children. No amount of rationalizing by police and by their bloody-minded supporters can justify the killing of Jaime Gonzalez and other children like him, and no amount of rationalizing by the purveyors of fear in government and media or by the rabid neo-cons and neo-liberals who back them and urge them on can justify America's endless brutal imperial wars and the the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, many of them children, that are such an integral part of them.
DAVE LINDORFF is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, LORI SPENCER, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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