18 is the number, the age, in Britain anyway, which denotes
leaving childhood. This is also the number of school ‘shootings’ in the U.S. in 2018, already by
the middle of February, according to the group ‘Everytown for Gun Safety’. Although a Washington Post article, posted on
MSN, disputes the validity of this number:
The article explains that the group class a ‘school
shooting’ as any incident involving firearms being discharged in a school
grounds. The number 18 includes incidents such as a suicide of an adult in a
car parked outside a school. The school had actually been closed for several
months. Other incidents include those where guns were fired at night after classes
were finished and cases where accidental shots caused no injury. The group make
the point that ‘every time a gun is discharged on school grounds it shatters
the sense of safety” for students, parents and the community. This is true, I’m
sure, but the Washington Post article counters this by saying that the criteria
isn’t widely publicised and the figures can be misleading. Some would say that
is deliberate, and that there is an agenda to take ordinary Americans guns from
them. Apart from the National Rifle Association’s vociferous defence of the
constitutional right to ‘bear arms’ (incidentally, it’s interesting the way the
word ‘arms’, through ‘firearms’, makes guns synonymous with limbs, as if they
were an essential part of us), there are those ‘conspiracy theorists’ who argue
that hidden powers do not want ordinary Americans to have weapons as without
them they are easier to control.
Personally, I think that the deep state is quite happy for
people to keep shooting each other, as that helps reduce the population and
keep us in fear, together with the alleged acts of terrorism.
And, the actual figures regarding school shootings are
horrific enough without manipulation. The Washington Post’s own analysis has
found that more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or
secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine
High School massacre in 1999. A number which does not include dozens of
suicides, accidents and after-school assaults that have also exposed young people
to gunfire. The article also quotes a recent study of World Health Organization
data published in the American Journal of Medicine that found that, among
high-income nations, 91 percent of children younger than 15 who were killed by
bullets lived in the United States. On average, two dozen children are shot
every day in the United States, and in 2016 more youths were killed by gunfire
— 1,637 — than during any previous year this millennium.
In isolation, this loss of life is sickening enough. But
when it is put together with the many other assaults on children that I have
referred to in previous posts, such as trafficking, paedophilia, abduction, and
the every day pressures on children such as bullying (online as well as
physical), which lead to self-harm, anxiety, depression and suicide, it is like
a war on childhood. The FBI’s National Crime Information Center states that, in
2014 there were 466,949 under 18s reported missing (compared to 168, 206 18 and
older). These statistics include anyone reported missing for 1 or 2 days and
children taken by family members. More information about the massive,
multi-faceted problem is on the National Centre for Missing and Exploited
Children website:
In Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to talk about Kevin, about a teenager who kills several of
his classmates (although this time with a crossbow, not a gun), Kevin’s father,
Franklin, normally fiercely patriotic, tells his wife that ‘This whole
country’s anti-child’ (Shriver 108). I argue, in my book, that childhood has
been reviled and feared at least in equal measure to, and often concurrent
with, feelings of reverence and love. People are perhaps secretly repulsed that
children stand outside the structures that enclose them and resent it, or else
resent themselves for bringing children into this terrible, corrupting world.
Jen Webb discusses Shriver’s admission that We Need to talk about Kevin is partly a
critique of America. Webb extends this to argue that it is also a critique of a
global society dominated by American doctrines: ‘Eva, Franklin and Kevin
exemplify not just the absence at the heart of discourses of ‘the family’, but
the emptiness of the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, and silence about the
violence of global capital’ (Webb 134). Webb argues that Kevin is ‘the gap that
lies below – indeed, that forms the foundation of – the notions of family,
nation, and meaning’ (Webb 136). Kevin ‘stands for nothing but absence’ (Webb
137), he is the lost child who disrupts the signifiers which we base our
realities on, the power struggles within relationships, families, and
countries. He is lost not as a victim himself but as a representative of all
that is missing from the world, ‘silences and absences: the gap between how
things are and how they seem to be, between the United States and the rest of
the world, between representation and reality’ (Webb 136). The character of
Kevin highlights the absence, the nothingness, which underlies the world we
live in the people we are, and the words we use.
Eva describes how Kevin not only pretended he couldn’t speak
up to the age of three, he also withheld his knowledge of written language.
When he finally sits down and writes out perfectly words from his ‘grade-school
primer’ he exposes its ‘insidious nihilism’. His handwriting has ‘no
character’, no personality, it is merely a copy, repetition which reveals the
nothingness that lies beneath language:
From the point he admitted he
knew how, his printing unerringly replicated the examples in his textbook, with
no extra tails or squiggles; his T’s were crossed and I’s dotted, and never
before had the bloated interior of B’s and O’s and D’s seemed to contain so
much empty space. (Shriver 227)
The ‘empty space’ within the letters is a metaphor for this
nothingness, an emptiness which could also sum up Kevin’s attitude to human
life. Kevin is himself the absence between representation and reality,
signifier and signified. Webb argues that Kevin’s refusal to play the ‘the game
of representation’, stripping away ‘the veneer of discourse to show there is
nothing behind it’ reveals what ‘linguists and philosophers already know, of
course: signs are empty, and take on meaning only when people agree to pretend
together that they have content’ (Webb 139-140).
It may seem inappropriate to refer to linguistic or
theoretical hypothesising in relation to people – particularly children’s –
lives being lost. And yet, it is very relevant to debates surrounding the
Florida, and other, shootings. There has been a backlash in the mainstream
media, and amongst many in the general public, against claims from some
‘truthers’ who believe that the shooting itself was faked and/or the young
people organising protests in favour of gun control are being manipulated. Understandably,
perceived attacks on young people who have suffered trauma triggers an
emotional response.
I don’t believe that the event was faked. I certainly do
believe that many young people were killed in the Florida shooting. It has been
pointed out that the term “false flag”, used by some to describe this and many
other incidents, from 9/11 to seemingly random shootings, does not historically
refer to faked or imaginary events. It stems from old nautical terms when a
ship would make an attack while displaying the flag of a different nation, or
perhaps a pirate banner, in order to escape detection and enable it to sneak up and attack an unwitting enemy. In the modern context, it is used by
“conspiracy theorists” when they believe that an attack within a country,
whether blamed on terrorist factions, other countries, or lone gunmen, is
actually committed deceptively by that country’s own government, or factions of
a “deep state” within it.
“False flag” is, by definition, a signifier, a symbol which
is hollow, which pretends to be something it isn’t, behind which a violent
force hides. From this “meaningless” representation, comes death. And beyond
death, there is the emptiness of not knowing what is real.
And that, maybe, is the ultimate aim of this most recent,
tragic inflicting of death on the young. As with politics, the people deep in
control will manipulate and maintain their power whether “left” or “right” win
an election. In the furore over the Florida shooting and the ensuing campaign, old
animosities have been ramped up. As someone who has previous described myself
as liberal, left-leaning, I still naturally side with those wanting guns,
particularly automatic weapons, out of circulation. Because it is insane isn’t
it, that people, teenagers, the mentally ill, anyone can have that capacity to
kill so easily available? Almost as insane as selling weapons to states that will use them to bomb innocent children in their schools...
But, one way or another, the two sides will continue ripping
each other apart. And, seemingly as a side product of this dispute, there is
suddenly widespread mainstream media reference to “conspiracy theory” websites
and social media posters who are questioning whether the young student
campaigners are supported, or even orchestrated, by “left-wing groups”. Amid
the conflicting factions, in the increasing promotion of identity politics, the
void will consume those voices that seek to challenge the prescribed narrative,
that try to expose lies, falsehood, false flags. I was struck by the speech
given by chief executive of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre,
where he vociferously defended the NRA and gun-ownership in general, citing it,
and the American way of life, was under attack from “European style Socialism”
and referring to a number of perceived enemies, which the article below
identifies as Jewish.
This article argues that the speech is an example of
anti-Semitism, a form of attack that has been aimed at some well-known
conspiracy theorists such as David Icke. LaPierre’s speech does seem scattergun
(to choose an unfortunately appropriate phrase) – drawing in Bernie Sanders
with people such as George Soros and Democrat politicians. The main point, for
me, is that he does touch on elements of the elite conspiracy that are true.
There is an agenda, there is manipulation and control, there is deception, and
LaPierre names some of those complicit in this. But, crucially, any ongoing
reference by the many serious, analytical researchers into deep state abuses
and what lies behind the veneer of our society will now be categorised as in
league with the NRA, with Trump, the extreme Right-wing, with anti-Semitism,
and lining
up with these against children who have been shot at, killed or traumatised.
I was very interested to read a quote, shared by An0maly on his Facebook page, from Hitler's Mein Kampf:
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”
I was very interested to read a quote, shared by An0maly on his Facebook page, from Hitler's Mein Kampf:
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”
Those who seek a
deeper meaning will be censored; in fact, they are already being censored,
shadow banned and their content removed, lost into the void of the monopolies
of Facebook, Google and Youtube. They will all be sucked up together, no matter
if they are unresearched click bait or intellectual, painstaking analysis. They
will all be classed as child killers, destroyers of the future, and purveyors
of falsehood. While those false flags keep sailing across the void.
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