National Paranoia over Security

The last week has been eventful for the United States: on Monday, a shooting with victims at a school in Nevada; Tuesday, a policeman in California shot a 13-year-old who had a toy Kalashnikov gun; Wednesday, a schoolboy shot a teacher before turning the gun on himself in Nevada; Thursday, the Vancouver police force arrested an 11-year-old pupil under suspicion of planning a shooting at his school; his arsenal was rather impressive for a boy — a pistol, knives, 400 cartridges. This year also marks the 160th “anniversary” of the first U.S. school shooting: a student’s brother, who stabbed one teacher and shot another.

Paradoxically, foreign observers of shootings in American schools see only regular events, which stir no emotions in them. At times, they are even perceived as twists in a particularly dramatic television series. This is not about some kind of cynicism toward the murder of children but, more likely, has to do with the specifics of gun culture in the United States, not so widely known in Russia. We can add to this the paranoia about safety, which is so widespread across the ocean. Otherwise, it would be impossible to find words to explain how a grown policeman not only suspected a teenager with a toy gun, but also tried to force him to follow police orders — familiar from many films. In fact, a child was killed purely because he refused to get down on the ground.

This atmosphere of paranoia in American society is just heating up. According to U.S. General Attorney Eric Holder, in the first decade of the new millennium, an average of five mass shootings a year took place, and so far in 2013, that number is already at 12. The school shooting cases are seen as a separate phenomenon, being researched by a number of American academics. It is strange that the surge in the number of such incidents in schools came in the 1990s, and any attempt to understand the psychology of a schoolchild as a potential murderer or sociology of “school shootings” was more than enough. By the way, we should add that the 1990s also saw the rise of teenage suicides in all developed countries; the U.S. did not lag behind others in these statistics and, just as in the case of school shootings, took no notice of the general recommendations. Thus, a general form of aggression and auto-aggression came to be realized in the country, without any clear understanding of the mechanisms of how such a psyche developed.

The Second Amendment to the 1791 U.S. Constitution grants citizens the right to bear arms. The main danger comes from assault weapons, which can be equated to fully fledged combat weapons. In 1994, Bill Clinton passed a federal ban on various types of rifles and machine guns, but the ban expired after 10 years, and it is difficult to say how this expiration contributed to the growth of mass shootings in America. It is not known whether the signatures of 400,000 U.S. citizens on a petition about limiting the arms trade, to be handed to the authorities, was enough. Anyway, limiting the arms trade would in no way solve the problem of the appearance of school shooting “heroes.” If someone has already decided to carry out a shooting, he or she is capable of finding a weapon. It is unlikely that another ban will lower the level of paranoia that has penetrated American society.

We do not intend to bring up the old “hate” for America or reinforce, as in the olden Soviet days, the rotten character of bourgeois society; that is not our intention. This is exactly the same paranoid atmosphere developing in modern Russian-American relations. The steps the country across the ocean is taking — protecting the rights of sexual minorities, boycotting of the upcoming Olympic games, defending “political prisoners” Pussy Riot, which goes beyond any common sense, and the mass psychosis regarding Snowden — in no way show common sense or constructive cooperation. If Stalinism really is an absolute evil that American “intellectuals” and politicians will never tire of fighting, then, on their own land, they have created and supported a mentally unhealthy atmosphere of pervading suspicion and insecurity, characteristic of the Soviet Union under Stalin. In an instant, even teenagers can become “enemies of the American people” — hanging around with toy guns — and will be treated as an “enemy of the Soviet people.”

On my first visit to the United States, I became acquainted with the lives of many small towns or academic centers that clearly reminded me of the atmosphere in the USSR. I was particularly struck by the similarities with the Soviet ideological machine, from top to bottom. It is for this reason that the attempts of American politicians to educate or transform modern Russian society are so ironic, even almost sarcastic.

Paranoia became Joseph Stalin’s constant companion, to the very last days of his life. This is not about the similarities or differences in ideology, but about the imperial paranoia that binds society, just as effectively as the Gulag Archipelago.