In the most recent issue of The Black Commentator, which is one of the best reads on the internet, Ira M. Leonard, a professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University, analyzes the place of violence in American history.
The reality, not taught in American schools and textbooks, is that war — whether on a large or small scale — and domestic violence have been ever-present features of American life and culture from this country’s earliest days almost 400 years ago. Violence, in varying forms, according to the leading historian of the subject, Richard Maxwell Brown, “has accompanied virtually every stage and aspect of our national experience,” and is “part of our unacknowledged (underground) value structure.” Indeed, “repeated episodes of violence going far back into our colonial past, have imprinted upon our citizens a propensity to violence.”
Thus, America demonstrated a national predilection for war and domestic violence long before the 9/11 attacks, but its leaders and intellectuals through most of the last century cultivated the national self-image, a myth, of America as a moral, “peace-loving” nation which the American population seems unquestioningly to have embraced.
Follow
