Some politically left people are hard line against killing anyone for any reason, especially in Europe these days. Some of those make allowances for self-defense or waging defensive war or whatever. These attitudes are very much lacking in the USA. We are all about the murder. The states that do manage to abolish the death penalty often find that reversed by the vagaries of democracy within a few years. I can’t speak for Canada, but it seems like they also might be more into murder than, say, Germany is these days. Don’t know about other countries either.
But even with our comparatively bloodthirsty attitudes, with the tall talk we make about willingness to pull the trigger on those we regard as evil, where are the bodies? US lefties have an incredibly meager body count to our name, compared to right wingers. I sit here and say, yes, I will proudly and easily kill nazi sumbitches, put a knife in their soulless faces. I can think that, I can say that, I can dream about it. But at the end of the day, the vast majority of politically motivated violence comes from right wingers.
I have no problem attributing that to inherent goodness. When you were a little rough with an animal or a sibling, and mommy rebuked you for it, did you feel bad? Did you feel like you’d been justly reprimanded, that you would do what you could in life, from that day forward, to not be a bad person? I have no problem saying that is a good thing. Good people should not want to hurt people, let alone kill them. The extent to which the evils of white supremacists make me want to shred their bodies with nail bombs or just break their faces? Is the extent to which they have made me a worse person than I’d otherwise be.
And could I do those things? If the scumbags get the war they’ve been gagging for since 1860, let’s hope that we all can do what needs to be done – and with gusto, why not? But in these times of peace, whatever turmoil is happening, the people generating corpses right now are right wingers. Might be that changes at some point, but I think those particular numbers will always be on their side.
They valorize cruelty. They despise compassion. This informs much of what they do and say in life. Indeed, a common reason for people born into red states to become politically opposed to their own culture is from suffering the cruelty they inflict on their own. If I saw a man in pain, mortal terror in his eyes, I might take my knee off his neck. But white supremacists don’t do that. Right wingers don’t do that. They want to hurt and to kill.
I can say I’d kill every last Rittenhouse with a smile on my face and piss on their corpses, but at the end of the day, would I? The numbers suggest that we just aren’t like that, and whatever violence is ultimately necessary to do in the defense of goodness and humanity, the fact it isn’t our first recourse is surely directly connected to our own goodness and humanity – whatever we have left of that – and it might be a good thing.
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There’s a separate topic that came out of the discussion that spawned this post. Is guns bad? I don’t like them. I have liked them in cinema an awful lot, but the reality is unpleasant. Have you ever had a suicidal or homicidal thought, however fleeting, in your life? How should you then feel about having a “make person instantly die” button in your fucking hand? Like standing at the edge of a cliff with somebody. I don’t like how it feels. If you can’t dig my position, eat shit. Step on up for a ban. I’m generous with those.
Or you can listen to my follow up statement.
If you’re somebody who has never felt like I feel, or who managed to suppress that long enough to become comfortable with firearms, and you use them responsibly? I have no problem with that, or even with saying that it is possible for you to be a good person. I’m not saying that comfort with guns inherently makes you a bad person. I personally believe no private citizen should ever be legally allowed to have an assault weapon, will side-eye the fuck out of you if you say otherwise, but that’s a difference of opinion I’m willing to hold without thinking of you automatically as a bad person.
But you have to admit, it’s easier for bad people to get cozy with killing machines, which again, might have something to do with the great disparity between murders by fascists and murders by their opposition. I hope you won’t take offense to the statement of some plain facts here, and will spot me a roscoe when the soup goes down, comrade. Thank you.
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Prior enlisted, USMC infantry (no combat, thankfully), so I’ve handled an M16 and a few other weapons a fair amount. I don’t generally care for firearms, but I’m now finding myself seriously considering trying to purchase one, for the second, maybe third time in my life… But, for the most part, aside from the rise of nazis and this Rittenhouse trial, I don’t have much use for a firearm, and I don’t want the responsibility.
I think another thing that distinguishes (US) leftist vs rightwing violence, is that the right is perfectly okay with indiscriminate attacks – bombing a mosque, burning a synagogue, driving a car into a crowd. Sure, there are probably some indiscriminately violent people who identify as some variety of leftist, but for the most part, I think a lot of the left that is willing to engage in violence, are more likely to be certain about their targets before acting. I’m probably just coming at the same conclusion you are from a slightly different angle, or slightly paraphrased.
my brother and father were army and my mom was air force, as befits impoverished black sheep. i remember as a small child seeing mom’s m16 certification among our random shit.
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Ok, so in the event of civil war, we’re seriously outgunned, right? So here’s what we need to do.
What’s the problem with biological weapons? They’re just as likely to make your own side sick as the enemy, right? So…
Step one: (This is the hard part) Bioengineer a disease that is extremely easy to prevent. Like, say, aspirin has a 100% chance of stopping it.
Step two: Have Dr. Fauci go before the cameras and tell everyone that they’ll be safe as long as they take aspirin.
Boom, we have now guaranteed that all our enemies will never touch an aspirin again, while the sane people survive. That is how we win.
(Should go without saying, but /satire)
This is complicated. I wasn’t the one throwing the first punch, I was just the one who got caught. I was also punished for yelling at a sibling after he had deliberately tried to hurt me, because I’m older, I should know better, that’s just how he is, I’m overreacting, and so on. Way to teach the one kid he can get away with anything, and the other that their safety isn’t a priority.
It’s true, I contrived a simplistic scenario for that. I also used the word inherent good to describe the antifa political position and really all morals include some amount of nurture or environmental influence.
Point stands tho, I think. Did you, at some point in early youth, develop an idea that hurting people is bad? Say you sensed the injustice of the scenario you presented, was the fact you were on the receiving end of violence something that gave you the idea violence is wrong?
I know it was for me. My first memory is getting a bloody nose from an older kid. I was immediately thinking, why would anybody do that to another person? Some people could have the same early experiences of you and I and come away with very different morals – maybe a sense that the ideal in life is to be the one doing the punching.
Complicated, yes.
Over the past 60 years, there has been a strong correlation between who is assassinated and who the assassins are:
1) A progressively minded person is run over, murdered or shot, the assailant was motivated by politics and/or religion.
2) A rightwingnut is run over, murdered or shot, the assailant had mental health issues (e.g. Hinckley).
It’s not universally true (i.e. some with mental health issues shot progressives, like Jared Laughner; I wouldn’t cal Wojtyla a progressive, but also Mehmet Ali Ağca). But extreme rightwingnuts are the least likely to be asassinated for political reasons, if at all.
It’s something of a given that we’ve never had a particularly bright political assassin. The evidence is that they keep gunning for presidents and other politicians, whereas the real target if someone wanted to make lasting political change would be a justice.
I think the biggest difference is that the Left™ understands that a well-thrown punch or milkshake can on occasion be just as or even more effective than cold blooded murder.
In the world of right-wing dominance games, losing face is one of the worst fears many of them have.
intra – True facts.
bruce – See I keep thinking petrol executives, like it would be great to make them feel as much fear for profiting off that shit as we feel despair at living in a species doomed by that shit. But justices, that ain’t bad. Lower court justices, unfortunately, have been murdered – again by right wingers. This just being spitball about shit that we’re not doing because we aren’t, at the end of the day, murderers.
dauphni – On that front, I hope that big hacker dump of nazi personal info continues to yield embarrassments. I wonder how the digging is going…
I think the key difference is the goal; the Nazis want me dead, i want them to go away. some of us won’t shed a tear about Nazis dying, but that would just be a side effect rather than the actual goal.
and this feeds into what Dauphni said at no. 8; we can accomplish our goals with less than lethal violence