By Soya Jung Harris
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the media’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings is that it has served to normalize other forms of violence. This is not meant to imply that the loss of lives on April 16th was in any way acceptable or insignificant. It is to say that America – which continues to be, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” – owes it to the 33 victims and their families to acknowledge the forces that led to Seung-hui Cho’s tragic suicidal rampage. And in doing so, it is obligated to take stock of how deeply U.S. power and violence shapes reality for people within the United States and around the world.
To the chagrin of many Asian Americans, TV networks immediately chose to focus on Cho’s identity as an Asian “resident alien” – foreign, enigmatic, and sinister. Among other things, the emphasis on Cho’s race and immigration status implied that large-scale acts of violence, like the one Cho had committed, were somehow “un-American”. This is the same reasoning that led many media outlets to assume that those responsible for the Oklahoma bombing in 1995 were Muslim foreigners, an assumption later proved wrong. Moreover, regarding Virginia Tech, viewers and readers were told over and over again that Cho had committed “the worst mass murder in U.S. history” – also untrue. What is the common thread among these distortions? It is a distinctly American brand of collective denial, the forgetfulness that allows U.S. nationalism, imperialism, and violence to thrive.
As some have pointed out, the Oklahoma bombers killed more people than Cho did. Yet the media, in its eagerness to hype up Cho’s status as an exceptional (and foreign) mass murderer, somehow lost track of Timothy McVeigh, whose actions claimed 168 lives just over a decade ago. And then there was the 1990 Happy Land arson, which claimed 87 lives, mostly Hondurans, at a nightclub in the Bronx. But these are just two recent examples that pale in comparison to the litany of mass murders throughout U.S. history, massacres that have been swallowed up by America’s collective amnesia.
The reality is that violence is an American tradition. It has been used to acquire and maintain territory, wealth, and power since the formation of the United States. As historian Howard Zinn writes:
The massacres of Indians by the armies of the United States – in Colorado in 1864, in Montana in 1870, in South Dakota in 1890, to cite just a few – were massacres in the most literal sense: that is, wholesale slaughter in each case of hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children…
In addition to Native Americans, Blacks, Asians, and Latinos have all experienced state and institutional violence – whether by government forces or by angry white mobs – in the interest of maintaining white supremacy. These forms of violence against people of color have taken more insidious forms in recent decades – through tribal terminations, police violence, mass incarceration, sweatshops, and large-scale immigration raids and deportations.
At a time when American Empire has reached a new pinnacle, we must also examine present-day forms of institutional violence, and look beyond U.S. borders. Today there are more than 737 U.S. military bases operating in over 130 countries, covering every continent in the world. The Bush Administration’s policy of preemptive war has not only increased the threat of war around the globe, it has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. To date, it is estimated that more than 655,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. That amounts to roughly 500 unexpected violent deaths in Iraq per day.
Why, then, are we shocked at the violence of the Virginia Tech tragedy? Why are we surprised at Cho’s ability to take innocent lives in the name of a self-righteous cause? One need only watch Cho’s video, where he brandishes two semi-automatic pistols, wearing a military-style vest holding ammunition clips, to understand that U.S. war and militarism had indelibly shaped his notions of power, justice, and masculinity.
It is worth noting that while Cho made no specific reference to Korea, he and his family came from a country that has been controlled by the U.S. military since the end of World War II. Under the watch of the U.S. military command, the people of South Korea suffered for decades under military dictatorships until the late ‘80s, including Presidents Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan, and Roh Tae-woo – all of whom were responsible for the deaths and imprisonment of thousands of Korean pro-democracy dissidents.
That legacy still persists in South Korea today, with a National Security Law held over from the Cold War allowing the imprisonment of any dissidents suspected of being North Korean sympathizers, and used as a tool for brutal government crackdowns on labor unions, farmers, and student activists. Rather than supporting reunification efforts, the U.S. government continues to heighten tensions on the peninsula by expanding and consolidating its military forces, preparing a new staging area for military offensives in Asia.
In the end, we must face the inevitable question. If reality for people around the world is increasingly defined by U.S. war and domination, then how do we, as people of color living in the United States, effect change? In his famous 1967 speech on the Vietnam War, Dr. King urged a “radical revolution of values” – one that would declare in the face of war and exploitation, “This is not just.” Indeed, what if we were able to turn the ship around? What if we could reinvest the hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. military spending into culturally competent healthcare, education, and infrastructure (i.e., levees that don’t break)? What if we took the money spent on prisons and reinvested it into job training and community development?
The truth is, as the Virginia Tech tragedy reminded us, we simply have no choice but to heed Dr. King’s words, because 40 years later, they still ring painfully true: “There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.”
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Soya Jung Harris is a member of Sahngnoksoo, a Seattle-based group of Koreans and Korean Americans working against the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement and against the U.S. military base expansion in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. She is also on the steering committee of the national coalition KAWAN, Korean Americans against War and Neoliberalism.
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