Having the Wrong Discussions about the Charlie Kirk Murder
Earlier this month, Israel bombed a building in Doha, Qatar, murdering five Hamas political leaders.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu was predictably defiant: “I say to Qatar and all nations who harbor terrorists, you either expel them or you bring them to justice. Because if you don’t, we will.” Donald Trump called it simply an “unfortunate incident” and then disclosed that he gave Qatar a heads-up in a phone call before the attack.
The useless tree stump that is the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, talked about the attack being “a violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Qatar.” Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney seemed to have less of a problem with what Israel did as the inconvenience of how and when it did it: “Regardless of their objectives [emphasis added], such attacks pose a grave risk of escalating conflict throughout the region…”
Notice anything? All the sympathy goes to Qatar, which yes, got its territory violated. There is no clutching of pearls or expressions of caring over the murdered officials — just vague condemnations over “violence.”
Funny how if your government carries out or helps a political assassination, it’s treated — especially by the media — as business as usual, with tacit acceptance that this is how things are.
But somehow, if political violence happens in an American or Western European city, it’s shocking.
This is where someone can’t wait to say, “But they’re completely different!”
Please tell me how. They’re both assassinations. One was carried out by a clearly unbalanced individual now in police custody, while the other was committed by a state that’s slaughtering thousands of Palestinians. They’re both acts of violence, whatever your politics.
At this point, I am probably supposed to make a blunt statement saying that political violence is wrong. But I shouldn’t have to say the obvious, and I find these reflexive denials silly because they’re clearly intended to immunize the speaker before they find the guts to say something substantive. “I abhor political violence,” said writer Nels Abbey on British television… even as he gave a bang-on description of what a repulsive racist, sexist cretin Charlie Kirk really was.
This is the ritual now. We are all suspected of violence if we simply use harsh criticism. Which is inane and only stokes the fires of paranoia.
And when we condemn political violence what we really mean is that we condemn violence in contexts that suit our politics. And we’re often having the wrong discussions about it.
As I draft this, the Trump regime and its minions in Congress are preparing to have a field day drawing lines between the left and the politics of suspect Tyler Robinson, who according to a family member already expressed critical opinions of Kirk for “spreading hate.” Which Kirk, in fact, did. Robinson’s mental state will no doubt be dissected by pundits on the talk shows, and who really gives a shit? Because this is not the discussion we should be having. So, let’s have it and start with one hard truth:
Yes, such murders might sometimes be carried out by the deranged, but there are also sane people who get desperate after they lose patience with the puppet show of Western “democracy” and when institutions fail to offer adequate means of redress. This naturally doesn’t excuse murder, but it can help explain it.
What sure as hell doesn’t help is sanitizing the victim. Francesca Ronchin, an Italian journalist whom I once had tremendous respect for, has made several complimentary posts about Charlie Kirk on her Facebook page. One of her FB friends demanded I show proof that Kirk was a racist, sexist creep. I did. Naturally, it made little impression on them. Ronchin insists that Kirk’s conduct is not the point. She also posted this, and since it’s a public post, it’s therefore fair game for my public comment:
Note the logic here: “If we think we should now start scrutinizing [Kirk’s] language, his provocations, his ideas, his thinking, it means we are opening the door to justification of physical violence and his assassination.”
In other words, Kirk was fully entitled to make the outrageous claims that Black people lived better under American slavery, that gay people should be stoned, that young women impregnated by their rapists should be forced to carry their fetuses to term… but if we knock any of that, if we criticize that, we’re somehow the ones promoting violence? So the racist gets free speech, but the rest of us don’t?
To be clear, I do stand on the side of free speech. I prefer not to stand on the side of hypocrisy.
You can defend the principle of free speech without airbrushing this despicable creature’s record. And I find it highly questionable that this is the guy you want to memorialize as supposedly just a “provocateur” — a guy who on his podcast clearly reveled in the brutal violence done to those he didn’t like.
I also find it interesting that so much of the Kirk murder fallout revolves around a sterile debate over free speech and not the actual political reality in which it happened. Barack Obama went on X and offered the empty bromide that “this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.”
Except you don’t have a democracy anymore in the United States. You have a fascist dictatorship where the despot has people grabbed off the street by masked thugs with badges and illegally deported to gulags, where TV networks are pressured to conform to its twisted world view, and where the Felon-in-Charge threatens to invade several countries.
Americans are starting to get how people in Myanmar probably feel, crushed under the weight of a military regime, the Tatmadaw. Or how Ethiopians feel, watching the despot they now casually refer to as “the Mad King” conduct ethnic cleansing against the Amhara people while with breathtaking incompetence, he destroys the nation’s economy.
Do you honestly think folks in these countries or in Iran strike haughty attitudes in private and say, “But political violence! Oh, my!”
It’s very convenient to have high morals when you’re safe and white and middle class and live in Chicago or Minneapolis, isn’t it? Or Toronto. Or Rome. Or Copenhagen.
But the reality is that even if one was to condone such a horrible tactic, it simply doesn’t work.
Meet Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew who in 1938 shot a Nazi diplomat five times in Paris “in revenge for the thousands of Jewish refugees, including members of his own family, who had been expelled from Germany and were trapped in horrible conditions at the Polish border.”
Who could blame his motivations? Unfortunately, the Nazis thought poor young Hershel’s act was a propaganda godsend. It was used as an excuse for Kristallnacht. Many of us know about Kristallnacht, as we should, but how many know what happened to Hershel and what drove him to murder? I was about to type “drove him to extremism,” and there’s the irony. His act was indeed extremist in 1938… but so was the world in which he had to live.
When the Nazis occupied Paris, in 1941 Resistance fighters went out and routinely assassinated German soldiers, officers and grunts alike. They were sending a message. The Nazis sent one back; they summarily executed hundreds of French prisoners held in Germany in reprisal. The situation became so bad that Charles de Gaulle ordered the Resistance to stop doing this over a BBC broadcast. He was sympathetic but knew the assassinations simply didn’t work. Whether the different underground cells listened to him is, of course, another matter.
I can think of only two examples where assassination actually worked for the good. One was when Resistance soldiers blew up Nazi monster Reinhard Heydrich. You can say it’s war, sure, but it’s still political assassination. The other example is the hasty trial and rushed “execution” of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Ask any Romanian if they lose sleep over the lack of due process. Is it right? You can debate it, but please don’t give me platitudes that “all political violence is wrong” when we reflexively adjust our morality according to contexts.
None of these historical examples are being invoked to make what happened to Charlies Kirk acceptable, but context matters. Conditions can help explain what happened.
Old Smears, Brought Out to Use Again
Just as Luigi Mangione gunning down the CEO of an insurance company should have provoked a proper, full-scale discussion of the appalling state of health care in the United States… Funny how it started but soon lost momentum in the news cycle. And yet against the mainstream media’s and rightwing leaders’ expectations, Mangione turned into a folk hero, which was ghoulish, but again, what should we expect, given the context?
Especially when the higher discussions frequently get redirected instead to “violence,” but only in vague, superficial ways (hey, let’s make it about mental health and not gun ownership). Or to leftwing ideologies somehow supposedly fueling said violence, which is a crock. And it’s a very old one at that.
In 1963, The Atlantic Monthly excerpted a chapter from the latest bestselling history by Barbara Tuchman. Tuchman was the daughter of a rich investment banker, and she started her journalism career by, conveniently enough, working for the magazine her daddy owned, The Nation. For The Atlantic, the chapter was about anarchism around the turn of the 20th century. Now for those who don’t know, anarchists were vilified as the “terrorists” of their day, even if they didn’t condone or commit violence most of the time. Many were socialists who would have been at home with Bernie Sanders’ politics.
But in her book, The Proud Tower, she begins her chapter this way:
“So enchanting was the vision of a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him, that six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914.”
She then goes on to list them, starting with France’s president Sadi Carnot in 1894. It seems a remarkable coincidence that as Black civil rights protests were heating up and university campuses were on the eve of the Free Speech Movement that The Atlantic published — out of all the chapters it could have excerpted from the book — a shortened version of her chapter on the anarchists.
Tuchman’s language is relentlessly disingenuous. It is not so much that she distorts through omission as she rearranges her facts to lead a reader only to her conclusion. Anarchism, she tells us, “had its theorists and thinkers, men of intellect, sincere and earnest, who loved humanity. It also had its tools, the little men whom misfortune or despair or the anger, degradation and hopelessness of poverty made susceptible to the Idea until they became possessed by it and were driven to act.” Such men supposedly “heard echoes of the tirades and the trumpets and caught a glimpse of the shining millennium that promised a life without hunger and without a boss. Suddenly one of them, with a sense of injury or a sense of mission, would rise up, go out and kill — and sacrifice his own life on the altar of the Idea.”
This is a nifty trick. Imply that this political ideology led to violence then begin examining what its supposed thinkers actually believed. Only it’s not that simple. There was no “one” idea of anarchism. Among the thinkers she examines are Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, both of them wooly-headed utopians who advocated for ideas in socialism as much as they sometimes did for anarchism. Nor were anarchists out on the political and cultural fringes. Some hung out with the likes of George Sand and John Stuart Mill and Victor Hugo.
Oh, and Proudhon and Bakunin, by the way, were long dead by the time those heads of state were getting bumped off.
We have all seen Tuchman’s logic before. A few fanatics are used to smear your religion of choice, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism — or in this case, an ideology. But when Proudhon and others made their calls for revolution, their rhetoric didn’t horrify people with implicit calls for “violence.” They were talking to folks for whom the French and American Revolutions were within living memory.
But in 1963 just as now, books are bought by middle class consumers, and Tuchman knew her audience. Anarchism had to be depicted as not only inherently violent, but it had to be shown as well that it was a failure.
Anarchists have been slandered for about a hundred years, with the description of “bomb-throwing” parked in front of anarchist so reflexively that it seemed almost redundant in popular imagination. In trying to write objectively about anarchism for his book, Roads to Freedom, Bertrand Russell felt compelled to point out that “for every bomb manufactured by an anarchist, many millions are manufactured by governments, and for every man killed by anarchist violence, many millions are killed by the violence of states.”
Notice, please, that Russell didn’t have to offer a mealy-mouthed policy statement of “condemning violence.” It was understood, just as we should naturally assume in public discourse that people aren’t sociopaths until they show us. (I happen to believe Kirk did show us that he was, in example after example.)
Today, however, we are in an era in which people in the UK who simply hold up a sign that reads “Palestine Action” are charged with terrorism and face years in prison.
What should we expect if you close all the doors, shut the blinds and wall off the institutions that are supposed to give citizens an avenue of redress and justice? Is it any surprise that some turn to methods that are too horrible to think about?
When the state decides people’s politics make them a criminal and its top figures declare war on a wide segment of the population, it’s not surprising — indeed, it’s tragic — that some decide they must be criminals.
