The Menace That Is (Lt. Col.) David Grossman

I've mentioned this man on these pages a number of times since I was clued to his ravings about "sheep, wolves and sheepdogs" last year.

Once I dug into some of his arguably puerile if not completely whacked out writings and statements -- after resisting for months because I considered him a crazy-maker -- I began to see him as the primary source of the quasi-religious "philosophy" of policing which is at the root of so much police violence and killing in this country, and forms the principle belief-system which justifies the various overseas military operations the country has engaged in since 9/11.

Apparently in the wildly popular (?) movie "American Sniper" released at Christmas last year, one of the characters expounds about the "sheepdog" theory without attributing it to Grossman, telling the character of Chris Kyle, American sniper, of his calling as a "sheepdog."

Chris Hedges puts it this way in his polemic against the film at TruthDig:

The camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white Christians—blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen movie—are listening to a sermon about God’s plan for American Christians. The film’s title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be called upon by God to use his “gift” to kill evildoers.

The scene shifts to the Kyle family dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang: “There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe evil doesn’t exist in the world. And if it ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then you got predators.”

The camera cuts to a schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy.

“They use violence to prey on people,” the father goes on. “They’re the wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any sheep in this family.”

The father lashes his belt against the dining room table.

“I will whup your ass if you turn into a wolf,” he says to his two sons. “We protect our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little brother, you have my permission to finish it.”

I haven't seen the film and I won't -- at least not for quite a long time. As a rule, I don't get off on violence, and because so many American movies are saturated with blood and violence, I don't often go to the movies or even watch them on the teevee. But when I read that these words and attitudes are attributed to characters in "American Sniper," I recognized immediately the influence of Dave Grossman and his peculiar notions of "Killology."

Killing being the highest achievement of the... "sheepdog."

I don't know if Grossman is ever mentioned in the film, but he's been selling his claptrap quasi-religious nonsense to military and police forces around the country for decades, conducting hundreds of seminars a year with recruits and seasoned veterans of military and police forces, and he is regarded as something of a guru -- if not a god -- in the police and military fields.

Until recently, Groosman's existence seems to have been overlooked by the mainstream, though he is well-known in the circles in which he runs. I seriously doubt that Hedges has ever heard of him or has any knowledge of his beliefs.

Most Americans seem to be oblivious to him and the menace he represents.

Years ago it was routine to attribute some of the worst aspects of American behavior and government to specific individuals, whether it was Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney or whomever.  Individuals actually were the ones behind the appalling policies that were causing so much destruction and bloodshed around the world, especially after 9/11. But somehow, Grossman escaped notice.

A few days ago, though, Slate ran an article that exposed the connection between Grossman's claptrap and the lines in American Sniper that are taken from that claptrap -- claptrap which is, by the way, believed by many Americans in the police and military forces. It's still sort of their secret religion.

The Slate article puts it this way:

Grossman crafted this analogy in response to 9/11 and the war in Iraq. And it’s not enough to classify the human race into these three simple categories; Grossman—and those who parrot his metaphor—are issuing a call to action to defend yourself against your enemies. In a country where innocent, unarmed, mostly black Americans keep getting killed, it’s a pernicious worldview to hold.

In Grossman’s original essay, now available on his website, he credits an “old war veteran” with first telling him about wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. He writes:

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath—a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path.    

In Grossman’s telling, the wolves will do anything they can to hurt sheep. Grossman variously identifies wolves as school shooters, terrorists, criminals, and anyone looking to hurt the innocent. Internationally, think ISIS, al-Qaida, and Boko Haram.

Domestically, think gangsters, criminals, and thugs. Grossman makes it clear that, no matter how much society fears its sheepdog protectors, the sheep need their sheepdogs. That means that a sheepdog cannot “take out its teeth.” In gun rights terms, this means that gun owners should never go anywhere without a concealed firearm: “If you are a warrior who is legally authorized to carry a weapon and you step outside without that weapon, then you become a sheep, pretending that the bad man will not come today.”

And the wolf will come, says Grossman. “If you want to be a sheepdog and walk the warrior’s path,” he writes, “then you must make a conscious and moral decision every day to dedicate, equip and prepare yourself to thrive in that toxic, corrosive moment when the wolf comes knocking at the door.” He emphasizes practicing “when/then” thinking as opposed to “if/when” thinking. He encourages sheepdogs to view their surroundings with fear and paranoia. 

The authors describe Grossman's perspective as toxic, and it is. It's toxic, it's pernicious, and it's lethal. It is due to beliefs like this that people like Tamir Rice and James Boyd -- and so many, many others -- have been killed by police in the recent past, and why so many are still being killed.

It's not because of any actual threat, either to police or the public -- certainly Tamir Rice, John Crawford and Darrien Hunt didn't represent a threat -- it is because of the belief that killing is the highest achievement for an officer of the law or a sniper... They kill to be fulfilled, they kill because they must, they kill because it is who they are -- or who they have been convinced to believe themselves to be.

I've said Grossman is a cult leader, a guru not unlike the various Maha and Raj -Neeshi and other religious cult leaders who have come and gone throughout recent American history. His devotees and acolytes are in the military and the police forces throughout the land. And they kill, mostly without conscience or in many cases without even consciousness, because that's what they've been told they are there to do. It is their mission in life. They are told that killing is their highest achievement. They are convinced -- like Chris Kyle apparently was -- that every kill is a "good shoot." Every one is a "good shoot" because they have done the killing -- which is their highest achievement. It's circular, it's insane, but that's the belief.

Everyone they kill needed killing or they wouldn't be dead. You can't get much closer to a religious faith than that.

I've said that it's going to take a massive level of deprogramming to undercut and eliminate this faith-based killing spree by domestic police forces, and I don't know what it will take to turn the military around.

When even the killing of little Tamir Rice does not move the police to reform themselves but only leads to ever greater levels of rationalization and justification, we should recognize how deep-rooted this faith is among police forces and how difficult it is to change those deep-rooted beliefs.

Part of it will require exposing Grossman and what his nonsense has done to police forces and the military. Grossman must be exposed and rejected before there can be serious reform of police forces.

And then a very carefully designed and implemented de-programming effort will have to get under way at nearly every police department in the land.

It's a huge task. I don't know whether there is the will or the ability to carry it out.

The killing must stop. Stopping it -- when police are inculcated with the belief that killing is their highest achievement -- will be a monumental task.

But I'm glad others are recognizing how pernicious Grossman is.

He is a menace.

Crazymaking Crazymaker

Yesterday's police kill-count got up to 1001  according to "Killed by Police". That means there's a ways to go in December to get to the kill-goal of 100 a month, so we'll see. Tensions always rise around the Holidays, and December may well have a bloody and spectacular outcome.

The sudden execution of Tamir Rice and the false stories the Cleveland police were putting out about it have caused more than a little tension in Cleveland and elsewhere. The video evidence shows that the police arrived at the park where he'd been playing (albeit with a toy gun, and Negroes and toy guns tend to give white folk the heebe-jeebes. EEEE!) Anyway, the police arrive and immediately shoot the boy. The video is compressed, only two frames a second, but it is clear that literally no time at all transpires between the moment the police cruiser arrives and the boy is lying on the ground, mortally wounded.

Split-second decision? No, Tamir Rice was marked for death when the call came in and the warrior cops were dispatched to take care of him. Negro with a gun, that's all they needed to know.

These are the rules:

White man with a gun, you talk him down, banter with him, and you let him go. Only in the most extreme circumstances is a white man subject to summary execution.

Negro with a gun, you shoot his ass, and you keep shooting his ass until he is good and dead. Even if the "gun" is his wallet, his cell phone, his air soft, or -- as so often happens -- his blackness.

Job well done. Carry on.

Why is it that a Negro -- pretty much any person of color -- with a gun or said to be armed in any way is subject to instant execution, whereas white folk are not (though we should not come to think that white folk are immune. They are by no means immune -- as a cursory look at the stories documented at "Killed by Police" will demonstrate.)

The point is that Negroes are the primary targets for summary execution in this country, and they are the ones who take the brunt of today's Killer Kop culture. It's devastating families and whole communities. If we can get a handle on why that is and what can be done about it, we might simultaneously be witness to a reduction in police killing and violence of all kinds.

Police departments are aware that they are in some disrepute among a growing segment of the population, though they comfort themselves in the belief that a "majority" of the public still loves and appreciates them. The City Administrator who is in charge of the police in Albuquerque used that line in an interview before the release of the consent decree with the DoJ, and it was false. A "majority" of the public in ABQ indicated in a poll taken shortly before the interview that they did not have confidence in the police. Disconnect was stark. The public's confidence in the police had declined sharply from previous polls, in part because of the constant rat-tat-tat of police killings of innocent and/or mentally ill victims. They were killing too many people too often, too often over issues that could have been handled without violence or gunfire at all. And it was too obvious.

That fact had not penetrated the police culture, however. It had not yet reached the protected enclaves within the city administration. The police were still of the opinion that they were beloved by the people when they were not. The city was still convinced that if the community were annoyed with all the bloodshed, it was merely a matter of public relations and perception management.

In studying the issue, I came across a video-lecture by (Lt. Col.) Dave Grossman that seemed to me to encapsulate the philosophical, almost spiritual madness that has led to so many police killings and seemed to me to be a key to understanding -- and perhaps dealing with -- the police mindset that is primarily responsible. I posted the video last Friday, and have mentioned it in other posts.

Today, I'll try to transcribe and annotate it.

The video is titled "The Sheep, the Wolf, and the Sheepdog," and it comes from Grossman's book "On Combat." 

I talk about the sheep, the wolf and the sheep dog, and I can't tell you how many people have come up to me over the years and said, "You know I always thought there was somethin' wrong with me. All my life people told me I was a 'wolf.' I'm not a wolf. I would never harm the flock. But I yearn for a righteous battle. I yearn for an opportunity to use my skills."

The sheep are all those kind, decent, gentle creatures who can only hurt ya by accident or extreme provocation, and the wolf will feed on the sheep without mercy.

Then there's the sheep dog. The sheep dog is a predator too. The sheep dog's a meat-eater, too.  It takes a predator to hunt a predator. But that sheep dog, if if if you have no propensity for violence, then you're a nonviolent citizen. If you have a propensity for violence and an absence of empathy, violence without any emotion for others, pretty good definition of aggressive sociopath, or a wolf. But what if you had a propensity for violence and a love for the lambs? What if you spent a lifetime nurturing the capacity for violence and a desire to use it in a righteous battle?

You know the sheep heard about the 9/11 highjack and said, "Thank god I wasn't on that plane." The sheepdog heard about the 9/11 highjackings and said, "I wish I was on that plane. Maybe I coulda made a difference."

And that's that mindset. The amazing thing is that the sheep dog, they're not destroyed by combat. They thrive in it. We have got to go into combat with what I call a 'positive self-fulfilling prophecy.' People have scripts in their minds, and if you get in a gunfight and say "Oh my God, my life is gonna go to hell, I had to kill this guy, everything's gonna be shit," then that's a mental program you just gave yourself. "My life is gonna go to hell, everything's gonna go to shit."

Most people will tell you -- in private, one on one -- "that when I had to shoot that bad guy, it was the culminating achievement of a lifetime of preparation. I used my skills in a life and death event  to stop a deadly threat and to stop a bad man. It was the ultimate achievement of my lifetime. The pinnacle of a lifetime of preparation. It was a moment of great adrenaline, achievement. All my training came together and and and it was one of the greatest moments of my life!" 

If if if you think about going into combat that way -- and the sheepdog does, the sheepdog yearns for that opportunity -- then then when combat comes, you're not destroyed, you got a positive self-fulfilling prophecy. And and and it's so important that we don't sink into what I call the "pity party." That we have this positive self-fulfilling prophecy as we go into combat.

The sheepdog. They yearn for that righteous battle, and when the moment comes they thrive on it, they take pride in it, and and and they get on with their lives and are able to sustain themselves and be triumphant and stronger for their experience."

Well, there you have it.

I only saw some of the interview with Brave Officer Wilson the other day, and I don't see much reason to watch it all. It was clear enough from what I saw that Brave Officer Wilson believes himself to be a sheepdog and for him, killing Michael Brown was a high, if not the highest, achievement of his lifetime. He had to shoot that bad guy, a weaponized NegroDemonHulk, and it gave him a rush. He's still high from it.

How many police officers have adopted this cultic belief -- propagated by this man, (Lt Col) Dave Grossman -- that killing is their highest achievement, what they live for, and how many carry a positive view of killing? A positive self-fulfilling prophecy about their coming opportunities to kill?

I've pointed out that many police departments maintain and deploy kill-squads, snipers. Many deaths caused by police are due to the deployment of these kill-squads, but not all. Quite a few are the result of trigger-happy patrolmen confronted with what they think is a Bad Guy who needs killing, and here is their opportunity to fulfill that "positive prophecy." They then reach their highest achievement. They've killed the Bad Guy/Gal for the good of the flock...

Imagine how this madness infects rookie policemen especially, and then imagine how the killer of Tamir Rice must have seen himself as the cruiser pulled up to the boy and he got out and shot little Tamir (he was a small boy) bam, bam, and he knew it was a Good Kill, for Tamir was a Negro With A Gun, and that is absolutely all he needed to know to designate him as a Wolf from whom the rest of the flock of Sheep had to be protected. Bam-bam.

A little boy.

And so it goes. In Albuquerque and many other places, the primary victims of police killings are mentally ill individuals having some kind of episode or breakdown. Police are always dispatched first on these calls, and they almost always approach them with weapons at the ready. Far too often, the result is a dead mentally ill individual. In the police mind, "the Bulletproof Mind" (another of the training videos and seminars Grossman offers), the mentally ill are nearly as dangerous to the flock of sheep as the Negro With A Gun, and they are treated with almost as much deadly contempt and force.

Supposedly, police aren't trained to deal with the mentally ill, but they ARE trained. They're trained to kill them if they feel there is a sufficient threat from the individual. They are trained to kill suicidal individuals who threaten no one but themselves. They are trained to kill Negro males in their multitudes ("thugs" don'tcha know). They are trained to kill Hispanic males ("thugs" and drugs, don'tcha know), and they are trained to kill poor whites ("meth monsters" don'tcha know) of whatever gender.

And they do. They kill them day in and day out, and they see every one of these killings as a high achievement, perhaps the highest achievement of their lives.

You can see it in Brave Officer Wilson's apparently passionless description of what he did to Michael Brown. He's still jazzed. Thrilled. He killed. He killed a Negro Demon Hulk, a weaponized black man, a jibbering savage, an animal to be put down. He killed! There is no higher purpose or calling than that. He did his job.

Insane freaks like (Lt. Col.) Dave Grossman are the reason why.

They are the ones who inculcate the theories, theology, "killology," and philosophy that leads police to kill so many and so inappropriately.

I'm convinced that 90% or more of lethal force incidents do not require lethal force at all. The blanket use of lethal force in so many of the incidents that do take place leads to contempt for police and worse. The abject failure of the injustice system to hold police accountable, indeed its celebration and rewarding of police killing, leads to contempt for law.

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, however. The police do not have to kill, certainly not as often as they do, but they do it because of insane beliefs that are inculcated by people like (Lt. Col.) Grossman, by use of lethal force policies which propose that "force protection" -- that is protection of the officer -- is the highest value, and by laws which protect police when they kill.

But they are on the wrong side of history. Their cult of killing is self-fulfilling the demise of the killer cop. It won't come quickly, not quickly enough to save the lives of the thousand or more killed this year and probably next, but it will come.

Too many police forces have faced too much public outrage at their cult of killing to sustain the practice much longer. They've gone too far for too long.

A reckoning is on the way.

Genocide, Massacres, Police Violence, and The Cult

We've made it to Thanksgiving Day, 2014.

Thanksgiving celebrates genocide. I don't know when I first came to the realization that that's what this holiday represents, but it was most likely during the Civil Rights era when so much of the American mythos was put to the test.

We had been lied to all our lives in other words, lies and damned lies about the past that made it out to have been a struggle won by the righteous. Well, no. Not so. The righteous continued to struggle, nothing had been won but a sham, it was all false -- and how many millions had been slaughtered and enslaved in the process?

How many millions? The mythos didn't know. The mythos didn't care.

We were to believe that's done is done, and we can't go back and we can't fix it. White folks are good and true and righteous, everyone else is a savage or suspect or unworthy.

That's the story we were told, but I didn't believe it from a very early age because I spent a good portion of my early childhood among people of color. They weren't called this at the time, however. They were called Greasers, Beaners and Niggers, but when you're a kid, those words don't necessarily carry the sting they do when you get older. They're just words, and they don't really have anything to do with people. It takes a while to learn that words like that can hurt badly.

I lived the first ten years of my life among people of color and I didn't become socialized to the fear of the Other that seems to influence so much of world view of white folks to this day.

It didn't occur to me that there anything at all to fear from brown folk and black folk, but I knew from a very early age that there was plenty to fear from white folk. The ones in charge, you know? Some of them were purely evil in so many ways that you had to be on the alert all the time -- or you might not survive.

We, the children, black, brown, and white, all seemed to be aware of who we had to watch out for and be afraid of, and it was always white kids and white adults in positions of power. Always. They could hurt you, and they did.

But the mythos says no, white folks were kindly and generous and righteous, and I knew that some of them were, but when they were kindly and generous and righteous, so often they wound up almost as persecuted and disparaged as black and brown folk were.

This was, after all, the era of Red Baiting and worse. Oh, much worse.

Thanksgiving celebrates the genocide of the Indians by these righteous, kind and generous white folks. They did their duty. They cleansed first the eastern seaboard, then the rest of the country of the taint of the Savages. They brought their slaves over from Africa to serve their needs and demands. They fought one another and they killed whatever they designated as the Other with impunity.

The Other scares the holy shit out of them. Murderous rampages are the result. It has ever been thus, but if you're not socialized to fear the Other, as I wasn't, you run the risk of being designated the Other and being rampaged against yourself.

How well I know. How well so many Americans know.

Police violence is a direct descendant of the genocidal, massacring, murderous rampages that made this land what it is, that we celebrate at Thanksgiving.

I've been studying police violence for decades and have written extensively about it. It has become the central social issue of the American people this year thanks to an appalling spate of police killings, so many of them driven by nothing but stark terror of the Other, that has led to the deaths of hundreds, nay more than a thousand, many of them innocent of wrongdoing, this year and every year. People are killed by police because the police in so many cases are terrified of their own shadows, specters they've created in their own minds.

It's insane -- just as the genocidal, massacring, murderous rampages that created this country were.

Recently I came across a video at the Police One site that actually explains how policing has become such a perverted killer culture, and why so many get killed by police year in and year out, and nothing is done about it.

I posted the video here as an example of how police are trained and brainwashed to regard certain designated Others as existential threats fit for nothing but killing. And how the police are trained and brainwashed to believe that killing the Other is their highest accomplishment.

This is psychological abuse of the highest order and this is what leads to scenes like the killing of Tamir Rice in a park, the killing of Michael Brown in the street, the killing of James Boyd on a hillside, and the killing of so many others, at least 1001 since January 1, 2014, according to the tracking site, "Killed by Police."

An analysis of this insane training video is, I believe, long overdue, for this trainer, (Lt Col) Dave Grossman, had been spreading his theories and philosophy of "Killology" among police and military recruits unchallenged for a very long time.

From his perspective, a perspective shared by police and military alike, the highest accomplishment of a police officer is to kill -- to kill the designated Other, with neither remorse nor regret. According to Grossman, police are sheepdogs, the Other is the Wolf -- a veritable demon -- whose death at the hands of police is the purpose of the sheepdog's life.

When Brave Officer Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown on Canfield Drive that hot August noon, he was fulfilling the purpose of his life, just as Brave Officer Lowman Loehmann fulfilled the purpose of his life when he shot and killed 12 year old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park a few days ago.

That is what they are trained to believe their purpose in life is: to kill, without conscience or remorse, whatever is deemed a threat to the lives of the Good People, the Sheep as it were, that sheepdogs -- the Police and the military -- are assigned to "protect."

But what happens to these theories when the sheepdogs become the threat?

Who do the sheepdogs work for, anyway? It's not the sheep, that's for sure. Who or what are they protecting?

I resisted the cult and the theories that this insane freak (Lt Col) Dave Grossman propounds, but when I realized that his theories are largely responsible for the huge number of killings and other abuse by police in this country, and they probably form the psychological basis of so much of the killing by Our Valiant Forces abroad, and that it all amounts to a secular cult of killing, I realized I'd better take a closer look.

But the fact is, I don't want to look closer. It's vile. What Grossman propounds is clearly an effective means to warp and perverting the minds of police and military, too.

How to corral and overcome it becomes a fundamental question for the survival of the people who face this deadly police culture every day.

That's what the protests against police violence and murder all over the country and spreading around the  world are all about.

Overcoming the madness.

I give thanks that so many people are waking up to the necessity to overcome this madness, to end the slaughter, to curb the police.

But the struggle isn't done, but more and more police seem to be waking up, too.

Let's hope so.