TUCSON - "In the days immediately after the massacre on Saturday - announcing the FBI - the arms sales throughout Arizona have increased by 60%. And people do buy up shippers' killer of 33 bullets as used by Jared Loughner: for that type of ammunition the increase in sales came to 300%. " Business is good for Greg Wolff, owner of two gun shops in Tucson Glockmeister (the brand of gun used by the killer on Saturday), yet he himself admits that he is exaggerating, "People act as if the government were about to invade their houses and seized weapons, this is paranoia." Welcome to America, "Land of the Paranoid," as Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post baptized. In a nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Barack Obama gave a lesson in civility. In his speech in tribute to the victims, on Wednesday evening in Tucson, "by Democratic leaders of the executive, it has become in every sense the head of state" shall recognize even the arch-enemy Fox News.
Obama has condemned all political manipulation, has called on all (including her) to tone down the controversy. He spoke from the heart and has relied on the most noble values that unite America. Praise came from all over him, and someone already see in this speech a turning point in his presidency.
But conspiracy theories die hard. Emerging from a closed-door meeting with congressional leaders to discuss the FBI's new security issues of parliament after the assassination of Gabrielle Giffords, Member of the Texas Republican Louie Gohmer said: "It is clear that the FBI hides of information about political views Loughner, because they might embarrass Obama.
" The paranoia has always played a role in politics, and America is no exception. The historian Richard Hofstadter has dedicated years of research, culminating in the work "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." But the baby-boom generation of post-war to that of peers of the twenty Loughner, there is an immense distance.
In between there was a reversal of the parties. The paranoia has changed its color dominant had long been cultivated by the radical left, is now almost a monopoly of the right. The two "family album" could not be more different. The left one is dated sixties. There is an explosion of student protest, the struggle of Martin Luther King, pacifism against the Vietnam War, feminism, the hippie culture.
In parallel, rootless left a culture of suspicion towards the state, the establishment, the powers that be. The assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 is a wedding invitation to conspiracy theories, the findings of the official investigation did not convince the liberal wing robbed of his dream: to link the suspects on the reactionary forces of the South who want to stop rights laws civil rights of blacks, in league (depending on version) with the Mafia or the FBI's anti-Edgar Hoover.
In the years following the anti-imperialist left sees the Trilateral (a club of VIP American, European and Japanese precursor to Davos) a "dome" to serve multinational companies. Paranoid conspiracy by the legitimacy of the armed rebellion is a short step. The blacks disillusioned from the nonviolence of Martin Luther King chose the Black Panthers.
For radical white the chips are called terrorist Weathermen and Symbionese Army, the latter made famous by the story of the young billionaire Patricia Hearst, the first abducted and then transformed into a guerrilla. Today is forgotten, but the spread of armed struggle between the American extreme left of the sixties and seventies is so important to fill the literary work that best captures the historical memory of that time, the "American Pastoral" by Philip Roth.
Twenty years after the paranoia passes on the field. The worst terrorist massacre in American history before September 11, is the explosion of the government building in Oklahoma City April 19, 1995. Die under the rubble in 168, including 19 children under six years. The authors are Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.
Refer to the movements of the "militia" right-wing formations that are exercised to resist the state, the Leviathan that wants to destroy individual rights. A decisive antecedent, which triggers the revenge of McVeigh and Nichols, is the assault of the federal forces in Waco (Texas) in 1993, and seized the ranch where he holed one of these militias.
Another challenge that mobilizes the militias is the threat of tougher laws on gun ownership, like the "Brady Bill" passed after the assassination of Ronald Reagan. The massacre in Oklahoma City, despite the many innocent victims such as children's crèche, does not reduce the attraction of militia: on the contrary, the FBI recorded a rebound in their numbers after the attack.
Just like after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the event that raised the roof of the paranoia of the right. From the moment you took office the first African-American president in history, the number of militias, self-proclaimed right-wing has tripled, from 42 to 127. This is only the militias "official", with headquarters and website, and of course those are not included clandestine.
Nor does the wild isolates, which increasingly have identical cultural imprint. As Joseph Stack, who just a year ago he went with his private plane to crash against the IRS building (the federal agency of the Treasury) in Austin, Texas, to protest taxes. At the other end of the culture of the plot are all initialed after which the mass has exploded in the last two years.
Inside the Tea Party is the wing of birthers, still convinced that Obama was not born in America, its registry certificate is a fake, then he is a citizen of Kenya who usurps the Head of State. There's that 40% of Republicans believe that the president is a Muslim and wants to introduce Sharia law.
These are small families waving white blow-ups of the president touched up with a mustache of Hitler invaded repeatedly Washington for protests against the "national socialism" of Obama, "euthanasia of the state" required by his health care reform. The response to reality is irrelevant factual denials have not changed much.
The indomitable strength of mass paranoia, the charismatic command of one of the instigators of the right people, the Fox News anchor Glenn Beck. Beck has announced the start of winter on TV: "The government wants to come to my house to take my children to have them vaccinated against the flu? They must first deal with my Smith & Wesson" (a famous brand of guns).
Same incendiary words into the mouth of Erick Erickson, columnist right on CNN: "If government officials are trying to violate my home to undergo interrogation of the population census, shooting out of the closet the shotgun my wife" . Vaccination, census, even the anti-obesity campaigns of Michelle Obama to educate children to eat more fruits and vegetables all become part of the same conspiracy to stifle personal freedoms.
The allusions to arms recur with obsessive frequency in speeches by Sarah Palin, to the "shooting" in the virtual site of the Republican leaders designated as targets precisely the deputy Gabrielle Giffords. The right rejects the moral or political processes for this bellicose language.
"We are at war - said Larry Pratt, who heads the powerful pro-gun lobby, Gun Owners of America - and the other part knows exactly why they have started this war. They want our freedom, they want our property, to indoctrinate our children. "
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