Hollywood’s talent for glorification has enveloped the American nation in a mythical veil that distracts the eye from every dissonant detail. Yet some of these up close reveal a disconcerting reality.
The wording of the second amendment of the American Constitution establishes the right of every citizen to be armed: the obvious question is: “To do what?”.
At the time of the Founding Fathers, the Nation having not conquered most of the territory still inhabited by the natives, who would obviously have opposed colonization, the use of weapons by the colonizers was understandable.
The Secession War of 1861, which was not made to free slaves as legend has it, but was rather a war of annihilation by an industrialized society against the agrarian one, cost 750,000 deaths. More than all the European wars of independence of the 19th century put together. In his speech in Gettysburg Lincoln celebrated the salvation of the Union but it did not happen as he intended it because it was not through the people, with the people and for the people. The civil war left wounds that have never healed. Any willingness of the people to surrender their arms vanished definitively.
Four centuries ago Hobbes – having ascertained that the human community was that belluina of all against all – indicated the transition from the state of nature to that of law, when individuals, each renouncing the use of their own strength, put it back in their hands. of a single “Body” with the authority to use it: the “Leviathan”. A century ago Max Weber characterized the modern state with “the monopoly of legitimate force”. The American people, who never breathed the air of the Enlightenment, perpetuated a colonialist spirit in which violence was part of an indispensable culture that we still live today in Hollywood filmography.
A freedom smelling of anarchy and market fundamentalism are present, with various shades, throughout the American rainbow that goes from the extreme right to the left. “The Government is not the solution, but it is the problem,” Reagan said, reflecting a widespread intolerance of state authority accepted by the Americans “obtorto collo”. It is not for nothing that the “State”, pillar of symbolic power, does not exist in America.
Columbine, Aurora and now Boulder: the massacres in Colorado revive the debate on weapons in the United States
by our correspondent Federico Rampini
If the Constitution consecrated “an armed people”, it did not do the same with the popular vote never digested by the Founding Fathers. Thus it was that in the presidential elections of 2000 in the final count of the votes in Florida between Bush and Gore, the Supreme Court was able to intervene and stop the count. The paradox of a people who are not sovereign, but which remain “armed”.
The deindustrialization process undertaken by America in the 1970s ended up compromising the country’s connective tissue. From a classless society America has become a caste society, where wealth and education are the defining fault. A permanent Pharisee preaches equality but doesn’t flinch if the Google boss makes $ 280 million a year and ignores the 50 million Americans living in poverty.
USA, massacre in a Colorado supermarket: gunman kills 10 people. Arrested
by our correspondent Anna Lombardi
The Disunited States of America (copyright Time) have ended up in the balance between the paradise of the future and the barbarism of an unsolved past. In the absence of a pact never signed with the people, who are not sovereign according to the Constitution, but which by virtue of a nefarious pact obtained in exchange the free use of weapons which cost the nation 32,000 victims a year, a kind of war permanent civil.
Use: shooting in Atlanta, 8 dead. They are all women of Asian descent
by our correspondent Federico Rampini
The dark evil of peaceful America is that it continues to celebrate its wealth, but has not yet succeeded after 250 years in celebrating peace with its citizens who are themselves increasingly divided.
There is a paradox that unites Europe and America. If the former becomes a single sovereign nation only when all 27 member states go to the world football championships with a single team, the latter will finally pacify its people only when they are willing to give up their arms.
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