Bombs Away! From White House to School House

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The president declared with a straight face: "We do know that we must do
more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger
and to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons." Mainstream
American journalists were far too circumspect to point out that such
pieties were being uttered by a leader who has championed the deadly use
of many weapons by the United States and other NATO countries.
The high-school shootings occurred while NATO warplanes were in the midst
of the most intense bombardment of Yugoslavia yet -- with 603 "missions"
reported in a 24-hour period. Civilians under those bombs were mere blips
on our media screens.

Before the above comment, Gunder Frank  had seen no media or even e-mailed
comment [other than my own e-mailed on April 21] making any possible
connection between a bomber in the in the Littlefield school house and 
the bigfield White house, notwistanding that the former were
'sophisticated' enough intentionally to throw their bomb on Hitler's 
birthday [would that the other one were sophisticated  enough  to limit
his bombing to  that one day only]. 

The following items only make a temporal correlation, but for enough times  
to suggest that the correlation is not spurious and that this time
a causative inference may be justified:

 The criminologist Dane Archer (_Violence and
> Crime in Cross-National Perspective_, New Haven: Yale U Press, 1984)
notes  upsurges of violent crimes in the aftermath of wars and armed conflits
> among nations.  That tendencey is especially pronounced in victorious
> nations.  He explains that government use of violence legitimizes it, in
> eyes of citizens, as a means of conflict resolutions.

The empirical facts are exactly correct. I have seen them elsewhere. But
they do not explain themselves. It is an inference, and not a self-evident
one, that there is a direct causal relationship between war and personal
violence. They occur at the same time (the violence if I remember goes
up after rather than during the war?), but the causal relation to each
other or to some third (4th/5th?) cause(s) is less clear.

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                   ANDRE GUNDER FRANK
250 Kensington Ave - Apt 608     Tel: 1-514-933 2539    
Westmount/Montreal PQ/QC         Fax: 1-514-933 6445 
Canada H3Z 2G8              e-mail:agfrank@chass.utoronto.ca 

My Personal/Professional Home Page> http://www.whc.neu.edu/gunder.html
My NATO/Kosovo Page> http://csf.colorado.edu/archive/agfrank/nato_kosovo/       
My professional/personal conclusion is the same as Pogo's - 
            We have met the enemy, and it is US 
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