EDITORIAL
The Real Terrorist Is the U.S. Government

Jan 6, 2025

When a truck exploded in front of a hotel in Las Vegas, politicians and the corporate media immediately proclaimed it to be an act of terrorism. They also talked about it as some kind of political act, since the hotel was owned by Donald Trump and the Tesla truck was identified with Elon Musk.

None of those sensational headline accusations of terrorism were true. It turned out to be something much more common and tragic. The explosion was another act of suicide by a U.S. soldier.

Matthew Livelsberger, the driver of the Tesla, was an active-duty Green Beret in the U.S. army. The U.S. government sent him to war in Afghanistan and also sent him to Ukraine, Africa and Asia. Just before he killed himself, he posted to his phone that he was mourning the “brothers I lost” and that he wanted to “relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took” in Afghanistan. After his suicide, it came out that Livelsberger also got a traumatic brain injury while in the army and was likely suffering from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).

The suicide by Livelsberger was done in a sensational manner and widely reported by the media, but there are few headlines about the average of 22 U.S. soldiers and veterans who kill themselves every day. Military veterans have a suicide rate that is 57% higher than the rest of the population. That certainly was seen in U.S. veterans after the war in Vietnam. Today, U.S. active-duty soldiers are nine times more likely to commit suicide than to die in combat.

What leads these soldiers and veterans to commit suicide? Being in combat brings horrors of destruction and the deaths of combatants and civilians alike. These are traumatic experiences that dehumanize soldiers and that many suffer from afterward. This is true for the soldiers who the U.S. government ordered into recent wars, be it in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. These were wars where the U.S. military brutally bombarded civilian areas. Then, U.S. ground troops were placed in the midst of a population that had been bombed. These were wars where U.S. troops massacred civilians, like Fallujah in Iraq or My Lai in Vietnam. Even pilots operating drones from U.S. Central Command and killing people from thousands of miles away end up committing suicide at a high rate.

Even those soldiers who were never in combat have suffered from some of their training experiences, like being exposed to repeated explosions, causing brain injuries. In combat or not, many soldiers suffer wounds, trauma, PTSD or exposure to deadly chemicals, like Agent Orange or burn pits. The U.S. government cynically places wreaths for dead soldiers on Veteran’s Day, but they refuse to give surviving veterans the treatment or the care to deal with what they suffered.

What these soldiers experience not only leads some of them to direct their despair inwards and kill themselves, but, in other cases, they have been dehumanized to the point that some have been turned into ticking time bombs and direct their anger toward other people. These soldiers have been trained to kill by the U.S. military, not ISIS. Some of them explode in their anger toward their own families. The biggest common denominator for people who commit mass killings in the U.S. is that they are military veterans. As many as one third of mass killers are military veterans, far exceeding their percentage of the population.

The man who just killed 14 people with a truck in New Orleans was in the military for 15 years. The man who used a gun to kill 18 people in Maine was also a veteran.

These mass killers are called terrorists. But the real terrorists are those who run the U.S. government. They commit a policy of military terror around the world. This government spends more money on the military than the next nine countries in the world, combined. The U.S. government stations troops in 750 bases in 80 different countries. The U.S. government sends this military into one war after another, usually far from the borders of this country. This military terror by the U.S. government is committed on behalf of the U.S. capitalist class, protecting their investments and profits around the world.

The working class has nothing to gain from this system that can’t provide decent jobs, exploits our labor and then wants to send us to war against working people from other countries. But when it uses its forces, the working class also has the power to get rid of this system based on terror and exploitation and replace it with a system based on human needs.