Over two decades ago, I traveled to a city in the Russian provinces called Rostov-On-Don to interview a psychiatrist named Alexander Bukhanovsky.

Bukhanovsky, now deceased, was famous. If you've seen the movie Citizen X, about the capture of serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, Bukhanovsky was the guy played by Max Von Sydow. He was the Soviet Union's first criminal profiler.

One of the first things he said was that both Russia and America produced disproportionate shares of mass killers.

"Giant militarized countries," he said, "breed violent populations."

Bukhanovsky at the time was treating a pre-teen who had begun killing animals. He told me this young boy would almost certainly move on to killing people eventually. He was seeing more and more of these cases, he said.

Nikolas Cruz, the 19 year-old just arrested for shooting and killing 17 people in Parkland, Florida, supposedly bragged about killing animals. He reportedly even posted photos of his work on Instagram.

There will be lots of hand-wringing in the coming days about gun control, and rightfully so - it's probably easier to get a semi-automatic rifle in this country than it is to get some flavors of Pop Tarts - but with each of these shootings, we seem to talk less and less about where the rage-sickness causing these massacres comes from.

On the rare occasions when we do talk about it, the popular explanation now is that guns themselves cause gun violence. As the New York Times put it after the Vegas massacre, "The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns."

This makes sense. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we tried real gun control as a solution (we won't, of course).

But even then, what are we talking about as a root cause of the violence? Commerce? Advertising? We have companies that make a lot of guns, sell a lot of guns, and then - what? Is it just statistics from there?

It's here, when Americans talk about what actually drives people to kill in huge numbers, that we show off our amazing incapacity for introspection.

Deep-seated racism is the most believable of the many motivations Americans typically trot out to explain their gun-violence problem. But from there it just gets dumber and dumber. Everyone from Donald Trump to Ralph Nader has tried blaming violent video games ("Electronic child molesters," Nader called them).

Music lyrics are usually next in line - it was Marilyn Manson's fault after Columbine, but the latest bugbear is gangsta rap (you'll hear this one even in England).

After that, it's movies, where we've been told by academics that the amount of gun violence even in PG-13 movies has doubled since 1985 and started surpassing the levels in R-rated film.

OK, sure. But what about the fact that we're an institutionally violent society whose entire economy has historically been dependent upon the production of weapons?

And how about the fact that we wantonly (and probably illegally) murder civilians in numerous countries as a matter of routine? Could that maybe be more of a problem than 50 Cent's lyrics? No? Really?

Apart from a few scenes in Bowling for Columbine, this is an explanation you won't hear very much. Military spending is the lifeline of virtually every federally-elected politician in the country. You've been to trained seal shows where the animals get a fish every time they perform? The same principle works with members of Congress and defense contracts.

The U.S. is more dependent than ever on a quasi-socialistic system that redistributes tax dollars to defense projects in even fashion across both Republican and Democratic congressional districts. A few times a year, you'll spot a news story about someone in the Pentagon trying to refuse a spending initiative, only to be told to keep building by Congress.

In an era of incredible division and political polarization, military killing is the most thoroughly bipartisan of all policy initiatives. Drone murders spiked tenfold under Obama, and Trump has supposedly already upped the Obama rate by a factor of eight. The new president apparently killed more civilians in his first seven months in office than Obama did overall, making use of our growing capacity for mechanized murder.

"We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now," a CIA official reportedly told a subordinate with glee some years back. Another CIA vet told the Washington Post the agency had become one hell of a killing machine.

Maybe this is just hippie-ish whining about the military, but if we're talking about where the rationalization of violence comes from in our society, Jesus, how can you not look in this direction?

I vividly remember the spectacle of Dennis Kucinich being laughed at by reporters on the campaign trail during his quixotic presidential runs. He got the most abuse whenever he talked about one of his favorite ideas, the establishment of a "Department of Peace."

Kucinich never said we couldn't have a defense department. He just happened to believe we should should make nonviolent conflict resolution an "organizing principle in our society."

He introduced a "Department of Peace" bill in 2001 and it languished in legislative purgatory until his retirement in 2012. The bill called for the establishment of a "Peace Academy," modeled after the military service academies, whose graduates would have to perform five years of public service after graduation.

The corresponding Peace Department's goals were to be aimed at transforming the way we look at the world, and would: "...promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights; strengthen nonmilitary means of peacemaking; promote the development of human potential; work to create peace, prevent violence, divert from armed conflict and develop new structures in nonviolent dispute resolution..."

This is a completely sane and rational idea. It's even beautiful prose, for a congressional bill. Yet it was continually held up as exhibit one in the case against Kucinich as a crazy person.

When he retired, the Washington Post wrote a patronizing little obit for his peace dream, calling it the "Hope Diamond of liberal ideas: pure, breathtaking, and highly impractical in the real world."

Why is it impractical?

Why are peace and nonviolence impossible to embrace as national values? Why is this the last taboo?

The people who point at pop culture as the reason disturbed kids and lone-wolf madmen go on killing sprees are half right. But images of violence are less the problem than the messages behind them, which are profoundly intertwined with deep-seated cultural ideas about the virtue of military supremacy and the political efficacy of violence.

Hollywood churns out one film after another in which the hero is a reluctant but highly skilled killer, an "unstoppable killing machine" (there's that phrase again) like Wolverine. Reluctantly deadly: This is how we like to see ourselves.

One of the weirdest genres involves the super-powerful Randian wealth creator who as a secret hobby masters hand-to-hand killing techniques, and saves the world by bypassing laws and ass-whipping bad guys using awesome military technology.

Christ, both Iron Man and Batman are literally military contractors during their day jobs. Even journalistic movies like Zero Dark Thirty turn into upper-class parables about how the only way to save American lives is through violence, even torture.

The other incredibly popular genre is the revenge tale, in which the otherwise peaceful family man (who just happens to have also been a government-trained super-killer - beware, "I do this for a living!") is forced to go around the world ripping heads off to save his daughter/son/wife whomever. Hell, even the president turns into an unstoppable ass-kicker from time to time (who can forget Harrison Ford's "Get off my plane!" scene).

These aren't just scenes from bad movies. They're foundational concepts in our society. We're conditioned to disbelieve in the practicality of nonviolence and peace, and to disregard centuries of proof of the ineffectiveness of torture and violence as a means of persuasion. On the other hand, we're trained to accept that early use of violence is frequently heroic and necessary (the endless lionization of Winston Churchill as the West's great realist is an example here) and political courage is generally equated with the willingness to use force. JFK's game of nuclear poker with Nikita Khruschev is another foundational legend, while Khruschev is generally seen as a loser for having backed down.

We just don't believe in peace. We don't believe in nonviolence. The organizing principle we're going with instead involves using technological mastery to achieve order by killing exactly the right people.

This is despite the fact that "precision" killing turns out to be less than precise in reality, whenever anyone bothers to check. And we don't dwell on the misses, like those millions of Indochinese men, women and children we once massacred with bombs and chemicals and evil little pellet-mines. It's always the enemy who doesn't value human life, who thinks "life is not important," as General William Westmoreland - one of the early users of the term "body count" - once said about "the Oriental."

Gun control? I'm all for it. But this madness won't stop until we stop believing that killing makes us strong, or that we can kill without guilt or consequence just by being "precise." What beliefs like that actually make us is insane and damaged, and it's no surprise that our kids, too, are beginning to become collateral damage.
(c) 2018 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

PITY THE almond tree, especially when it is in full bloom.

The bloom of the almond is, in German, Mandelblut. That is also the name the Israel's chief legal official, called "the Legal Advisor of the Government".

The Legal Advisor is appointed by the government, but is supposed to be completely independent. He is in practice the Attorney General, the person who has the final say about indicting people, especially the prime minister. That is now his unhappy lot.

Now Mandelblit (as we pronounce his name in Hebrew) is in an impossible position. The prime minister has been officially accused by the police on two counts of bribery. Now Mandelblit must decide whether to put him on trial.

But Binyamin Netanyahu has been his benefactor for a long time, pushing his career to the top. Do you bite the hand that has fed you? Or do you shirk your duty?

An awful choice.

AVICHAI MANDELBLIT was born in Tel Aviv into a right-wing family. His father was a member of the Irgun and a rightist party stalwart. Avichai ("My Father Lives", meaning God) adopted religion at the age of 25 and put a kippah on his head.

After studying law, he served in the army as a military judge in the occupied Gaza Strip and other military jobs, until he became the chief legal officer of the army. From there it was but a short jump to the job of "government secretary", the right-hand man of the Prime Minister, who happened to be Binyamin Netanyahu.

When the office of "Legal Adviser of the Government", an official with immense power, became free, Netanyahu looked around for a candidate. And who did he see? Yea, quite right - the good, loyal Mandelblit.

On the horizon there were looming already all kinds of criminal suspicions. The crucial position of Legal Advisor was becoming very important. So, choosing the religious, right-wing lawyer was a clever move.

How clever? Well, we will soon know.

NETANYAHU HAS not always made the cleverest choices.

Almost at the same time as he chose the Chief Legal Advisor, he also chose a new Chief of Police.

His choice was a total surprise. He did not pick one of the senior policemen, each of whom had years of experience behind him, but a completely anonymous person. And not anonymous by accident: he was the No. 2 of the internal security service (Shin Bet).

Roni Alsheich did not want the job. He wanted to be the chief of the Shin Bet. But Netanyahu almost compelled him. He promised to appoint him Shin Bet chief if he - Netanyahu - were still Prime Minister in four years time. That was a not-so-subtle hint: you help me keep my job, and I give you the job you desire.

The new police chief was an enigma. He is of Yemenite descent, rather unusual for Israel's elite. He does not look like a police officer. A joker once called him "a barrel with a mustache". He does not talk in public - as befits a person who has spent most of his life in the secret service.

With these two loyalists in place, Netanyahu had nothing to fear. A number of criminal suspicions popped up, but nobody believed that anything would come of them. Netanyahu was just too clever.

What were the suspicions about?

1. A billionaire with large business interests in Israel for ten years provided him with Cuban cigars of the most expensive kind, as well as "pink" champagne and some jewelry for the lady, all in all about a quarter of a million dollars. An Australian billionaire chipped in.

2. There was a deal with the boss of the second largest newspaper in Israel to enact a law clipping the circulation of the No. 1, in return for favorable coverage. The adoring coverage of newspaper No. 1 was assured anyhow. It belongs to Sheldon Adelson, an American casino billionaire, and its sole purpose is - quite openly - to glorify Netanyahu.

The third matter concerns suspicions of bribes from a German shipbuilder, which produces submarines for Israel's atomic weapons. It's a multi-billion deal. Suspicions run high but have not yet been aired publicly.

No serious person in Israel expected anything to come of any of these affairs. With the hand-picked chief legal officer and the chief of police safely in place, how could it?

And then, two weeks ago, a bomb exploded. The taciturn policeman suddenly appeared on TV, and hinted that the police were about to publish recommendations to indict Netanyahu for bribery in the first two affairs.

What? The chief of police a man of integrity? What is the world coming to?! This is a moral problem: if Netanyahu appointed him in the belief that he is a man of no conscience, and then it turns out that he is a man of conscience - does this mean that he only pretended to have no integrity, which might be an act of no integrity? Work it out.

Can a similar terrible thing happen now with the Legal Adviser? Can he suddenly turn out to be a man of integrity too? Sooner or later he must decide whether to indict Netanyahu or not.

Poor man.

WHEN THE police chief hinted on TV about the coming police decision to recommend indictment, my first impulse was to rush and clean the air-raid shelter at my home.

When you are Prime Minister and in deep domestic trouble, the first thing you think about is a military crisis. Nothing like a military emergency to divert attention from your misdeeds towards the national interest.

And lo and behold - two days after the TV announcement about the police recommendations, the Iranians were so kind as to provoke a crisis.

An Iranian spy drone entered Israeli airspace from Syria and was promptly shot down. In response, the Israeli Air force sent its planes to bomb Iranian positions in Syria. An Israeli plane was shot down - a very rare occurrence Indeed, and fell near a kibbutz. Both crewmen bailed out and one was severely injured.

The criminal business was swept off the table. Everybody spoke about the coming war. But then Vladimir Putin intervened and put an end to that nonsense.

No war this time. The police published their findings and recommended that Netanyahu be put on trial on two counts of bribery. The entire country was glued to their TV sets. Everything else was forgotten.

Netanyahu did what he does best. He made a live statement on TV. He accused his accusers of all kinds of misconduct. These scoundrels, he more than intimated, were ready to risk the very existence of Israel, just out of spite against him. But not to worry, he has no intention of resigning, even temporarily.

Looking us straight in the eye, shining with honesty, he promised us that he will not forsake us. Since he is the only person on Earth able to ensure our safety, he will remain at his post and protect us, come what may.

This made me very afraid indeed. Far be it from me to insinuate that he might start a war just to divert attention from his indictments. In a war, people get killed. Jewish boys (and girls) of Jewish mothers. Would a patriot like Netanyahu do such a dastardly thing as starting an unnecessary war just to divert attention?

Surely not. But when he has to make a fateful decision in a crisis, between two meetings with his lawyers, will his head be completely clear?

How long can this go on? Experts assess that Mandelblit, in his desperation, can draw his decision out for a year. He must think. Thinking takes time,

THERE WAS this Polishnobleman who called his Jew and told him: "I love my dog dearly. Jews are clever people. You can teach my dog to speak. Do it. Otherwise I shall kill you!

"No problem," the Jew answered. "But teaching a dog to speak is a very difficult task, It takes time. I need two years."

"Good," the nobleman said. "But if you don't do it, I shall kill you!"

When the Jew's wife heard this, she started to wail. "You know you can't teach the dog to speak!" she cried.

Robert Mueller, the former head of the national political police (FBI), has indicted 13 Russian nationals for the crime of sowing "discord in the U.S. political system," and encouraging "U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate." The defendants' nationality makes their acts of political speech a crime, in Mueller's legal view, but "at least 20 Americans" are embedded in the document as unindicted co-conspirators because they interacted in various ways with the Russian team's activities during the 2016 presidential campaign.

These U.S. citizens "were just engaging in politics," said independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, on Democracy Now! "They were putting together campaign events. They were engaging in online speech. That's like, you know, the most sacred part of being an American citizen. And yet, they were unknowingly interacting with Russians...."

The Russians will never face trial in the U.S., and it is highly unlikely that the unindicted Americans will be criminally charged -- but that is not the purpose of Mueller's indictment. The political crime has been defined, for the broad purpose of repressing dissent in the United States. The witch hunt has found a legalistic vocabulary.

The New York Times' in-house witch-hunting Negro, Charles Blow, has worked his mojo to the bone, fulminating against the dark forces that refused to support Hillary Clinton' return to the White House. Mueller's indictment is the charm Blow has been seeking to remove the hex of resistance to the established duopoly. Blow quotes Mueller's document: "On or about October 16, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the Instagram account 'Woke Blacks' to post the following message: 'Particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we'd surely be better off without voting AT ALL.'"

These are the Russians' words, but the sentiment is not at all alien to the contemporary and historical Black political conversation. Yet, for Blow, it is heresy and devilment to urge Black people to vote for third parties, or to refrain from voting. There ought'a be a law against it! -- or some string of words that can be made to sound like a law. "What happened in this election wasn't just a political crime, it was specifically a racialized crime, and the black vote was a central target," wrote Blow.

Blacks that refuse to forgive the Clintons for mass incarcerating and dehumanizing our people are guilty of Black voter suppression and deemed dupes of both Trump and the Kremlin. To prove that anti-Clinton Blacks are in league with foreign and domestic devils, Blow quotes a Trump operative who bragged that the Republican campaign reminded Black voters about Hillary Clinton's "suggestion that some African-American males are 'super predators'" in order to discourage them from voting. Mueller's legal framework requires that we forget such trivial history.

Black Bernie Sanders activists are co-conspirators, in Blow's view: "Even after Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination, rapper Killer Mike, a prominent Bernie Sanders supporter and surrogate, was still promoting the position that 'If you're voting for Trump or Hillary Clinton, you're voting for the same thing.'"

Which is true, in that both are corporate capitalist politicians and warmongering racists that don't deserve the vote of any decent person. But, saying so can now be construed as giving "aid and comfort" to a foreign "enemy"- either directly to Putin or to his "surrogate," Trump. It must be a crime, because "the Russians" were indicted for it, right? Mueller's "law" spells it out: "...in or around the latter half of 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, through their personas, began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate."

Funny thing, though: the Democrats refused to cite the Republicans' systematic, mass suppression of Black voters through the Cross Check scheme which, as Margaret Kimberley points out in this week's Freedom Rider, caused 400,000 heavily Black votes to disappear in Michigan. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein called for a recount in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and found that Black voter suppression was a major factor, particularly in Detroit. "We are seeing again this evidence in Michigan that communities of color are systematically disenfranchised through the machinery that constitutes really another form of electoral Jim Crow," Stein told The Guardian. "It's pretty staggering. Eighty-seven optical scanners [in Detroit] broke on election day."

The Democratic Party reluctantly added its name to the recall petition, while at the same time claiming it had seen no "actionable evidence" of grounds for challenging Trump's victory. But that's par for the course. The Democrats have never confronted the GOP's blatant theft of elections through massive suppression of Black votes -- bound, apparently, by a gentleman's agreement among the two parties. John Lewis, the Black congressman from Atlanta who wears his voting rights credentials like a robe of glory, abides by that agreement. The first thing out of Lewis' mouth after Trump was declared the winner, in November, was a denunciation of "the Russians"- not Black voter suppression by Republicans.

Roughly one year later, Jill Stein -- who fought Black voter suppression harder than the Democrats -- was targeted for investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee as a possible collaborator with the Russians.

The suppression of the franchise of their Black base is not considered "treason" or any kind of "high crime" by the Democratic Party, but the siphoning of Black votes away from the corporate duopoly, through voluntary non-voting or support of third parties, is cause to bring out the pitchforks.

Under the Mueller legal formula, there are many more potential co-conspirators. The highest political crimes are "sowing discord" and "spreading distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general" - for which one can theoretically go to prison if you are a foreigner (Russian, not Israeli), or become an unindicted party to the charge, if American.

The Republicans, of course, have been sowing racial discord as a matter of policy ever since they adopted their "Southern Strategy" in 1968, and it's been key to their success ever since. The United States is the nation that invented apartheid, and has served as a model for racists around the world. Racial discord is part of its DNA, and is the principal reason for the historical lack of a social contract and the weakness of the Left in this country. Corporate political hegemony would not exist in the U.S., were it not for the endemic nature of white supremacy in this society. The Russians have nothing to do with it -- especially the Russian amateurs from St. Petersburg.

We are now in the throes of a calculated campaign to sow "discord" and "distrust towards the political system in general,"such as not seen in living memory, mounted by the Democrats and their allies in corporate media and the national security state. The initial goal was to depose or discipline the unpredictable billionaire who in 2016 crushed the establishment leaders of the Republican Party -- potentially destabilizing the duopoly system of corporate governance -- rhetorically rejected the dogma of "free trade," and spoke as if he would not maintain the momentum of his predecessor's global military offensive. With the "intelligence community" on point, the political offensive could not help but take on the characteristics of a profoundly destabilizing regime change and psychological operations campaign.

In other words, the ruling circles of the imperial superpower set out to destabilize and call into disrepute the government of the home country. They have inflicted great trauma and anxiety among the public in the process, but thanks to the corporate media component of the cabal, most of the blame has accrued to the targets of the campaign: Trump, "the Russians" and those defamed as "dupes" and "co-conspirators" with the fictitious Putin-Trump axis.

It is quite evident that this campaign of self-inflicted chaos is a project of the global corporate class, manifesting in remarkably similar fashion, but with local characteristics, elsewhere in the "West." Russia is, thus, charged with attempting to subvert governments around the world through minions like the St. Petersburg outfit. Through their servant in the Democratic Party, the corporate media, and the intelligence agencies, multinational capital has used Trump's election to inflict a kind of shock treatment on their domestic polities - a very dangerous gambit, especially in the United States, with its weak social contract and immense capacity for civil violence.

More dangerous, is the whipping up of war fever based on Russia's non-existent aggressions (Ukraine, Syria) and fabricated ambitions (the demise of the "West").

We can be confident in blaming this politically engineered horror on the dominate elements of the U.S. capitalist ruling class, since they could surely call the project to a halt if it were merely a "rogue" enterprise mounted by a small section of their class-mates. Capital is using Russiagate to inflict extreme shocks to the very political system they claim to be defending. The trauma is necessary, they believe, because capital has nothing to offer to the masses of people, and must therefore dramatically weaken or destroy the political mechanisms through which the people make demands on the rulers. They are preparing the landscape for a regime of permanent austerity and war, and plan to suppress all opposition on the Left. That's why Black Agenda Report and a dozen other Left web sites were named and defamed as Russian fellow travelers and purveyors of "fake news" by the Washington Post, the plaything of the CIA-partnered oligarch, Jeff Bezos.

A lot has happened in the space of a little over a year. Based on Russiagate-era interpretations of "law" and civil propriety, free speech is in the political eye of the corporate owners of media. The shrinking of the digital world that is accessible to the Left is well underway, with no workable alternatives in sight.

A crucial factor about the Florida killer: his family had to move out of the school district because they couldn't afford the rent. Resentment yields anger. Not every poor kid becomes a killer - think Bill Clinton - but there will be one. Inequality kills.

A student of statistics - my son - was surprised by his regression analysis of gun ownership per capita in each nation versus homicides.

He wrote, "The result of my scatter plot came as quite the surprise to me: there was just about no correlation between number of guns and number of gun homicides."

In fact, "the correlation coefficient was -0.105871699." That is, by a small amount, more guns meant fewer homicides.

So what DID prove a strong correlation? Homicides versus the "GINI" coefficient. GINI is the measure of income inequality in a nation.

I've just returned from the nation with the widest gun ownership in the world, Switzerland, which has vanishingly few homicides - although almost all men 18-35, due to ancient military tradition, must keep weapons in their home (many fully automatic).

The nation with the same population as Switzerland, Honduras, has the world's highest homicide rate - yet Honduras outlaws personal gun ownership.

David Hemenway, of the Harvard School of Public Health notes, "Switzerland and Honduras are not even close to being the same in many aspects of their society that will influence the levels of violence and homicide."

Exactly. Want to end gun violence? End violent inequality.

Here's the roster of the world's most violent nations measured by non-military homicides:

Honduras
El Salvador
Jamaica
Venezuela
Guatemala
Trinidad
Colombia
Belize
Brazil
South Africa

It's also a listing of the world's most economically unequal nations.

After the US, here is the list of highest per capita gun ownership: Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Germany Austria, Iceland - all nations with tiny small homicide rates - and very low GINI scores. Iceland, where a huge one-third of households have guns, is the most economically equal society on the planet - with a homicide rate of ZERO.

(And before your all scream at me because I'm simply telling you the facts, I will add that these nations with lots of guns and few or zero homicides all maintain strict gun SAFETY rules. In Switzerland, deadly weapons in your home must be safely LOCKED AWAY.)