LETTER: Government has taught it’s OK to murder
If one wants to know why so many Americans seem to celebrate the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, they need to look no further than the actions of the U.S. government over the last two decades.
During the “war on terror,” “targeted killings,” a euphemism for the assassination of “suspected militants” outside of both the legal system and the battlefield, became the tool of choice for the American foreign policy establishment. Typically, these “targeted killings” involved launching missiles from a drone at the “suspected militant,” killing them and anyone in the vicinity.
The latter might include other “suspected militants,” but could just as easily include neighbors and bystanders. In more egregious cases, like the obliteration of a family of 10 during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, all of those killed would turn out to be non-militants.
When not actively killing those they didn’t like, U.S. officials would openly praise extrajudicial killings committed by others. For example, when Muammar Gaddafi was lynched by a mob in Libya, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s reaction was not to decry political violence, but to crow, “we came, we saw, he died.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis spoke of the danger of this attitude nearly 100 years ago: “The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”
The U.S. government has taught, by its example, that it is OK to murder someone, so long as they are “really bad” – or, more accurately, so long as the government says they’re “really bad.”
It should be no wonder, then, why so many Americans celebrate the murder of someone they believe was “really bad.”
James Scoblick
Pittsburgh