Will This Make Trump More Popular?
Assassination attempts targeting populist leaders have had a track record of boosting their popularity.
While speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Donald Trump was hurried off stage after what sounded like gunshots. Before he was ushered away by his security detail, Trump, bleeding from an apparent wound on the ear, raised his fist defiantly toward the crowd.
The extent of any injuries sustained by Trump remain unclear; a campaign spokesperson issued a statement saying the former president “is fine and is being checked out at a local medical facility.” It is unclear how the incident might affect his campaign, but given historical precedent, his popularity is likely to benefit.
Assassination attempts targeting populist leaders have had a track record in the past of boosting their public appeal.
In the months after he was shot in the leg at a political rally, former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan saw support for his party grow as the public came to view him as a solitary figure battling a corrupt establishment.
Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed at an event in 2018, before going on to win elections boosted by the support of voters who saw him as surviving an attempted murder by their ideological enemies.
President Ronald Reagan likewise benefited from public sympathy and support after an attempted assassination — support which helped him push through a raft of controversial economic policies that would define the country for decades to come.
Scholars have warned of an apparent increase in political assassinations in recent years, after a number of foiled and successful attempts targeting officials in the U.S. and abroad. Following the killing of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022, the national security publication War on the Rocks blamed the possible increase in attacks on “accelerationists” seeking to drive social conflict through destabilizing political institutions.
In the aftermath of the apparent shooting at his campaign rally, an image of a blood-streaked Trump raising his fist to the crowd began spreading virally on social media, including among supporters who lauded his defiance. The world awaits more details on Trump’s condition and what exactly took place in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. It will also be watching what this moment means for Trump’s popularity and the 2024 election.
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Murtaza Hussain, a seasoned reporter at The Intercept, specializes in in-depth coverage of national security and foreign policy matters. His expertise has led him to be a sought-after commentator, featured on prominent news networks including CNN, BBC, and MSNBC, among others.
Tyrannicide: An American Value?
By Kary Love
Image by Richard Cole
The US has a long, chequered relationship with assassination. On one hand, the myths of 1776 recount of a nation born through resistance to the tyranny that it holds at the core of its identity. Values legitimizing tyrannicide can be imputed from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.
On the other hand, the US has followed the international prohibition against assassination beginning with the Lieber Code (1863), and General Order No. 100 that declared assassination “a relapse into barbarism.”
Despite this, the use of assassination in American covert operations has been frequent and many have argued that the US should be exempt from such prohibitions in times of war, and, as against foreign forms of tyranny. The Church Committee (1975) affirmed this position, asserting that while assassination was contrary to American values “we should not today rule out support for dissident groups seeking to overthrow tyrants…” (emphasis added 1975, 258).
The use of assassination was banned by President Ford at this time in the first of a series of Executive Orders that were adopted and modified by all successive presidents. Yet with the War on Terror, the War Powers Resolution, Hughes-Ryan Amendment and the Intelligence Oversight Act, reveal the US maintains a substantial capacity for covert acts of assassination.
The US strikes on Hussein in 2003 were the first open strikes made by one state to target and kill another sovereign. Similar open strikes were made by NATO on Qaddafi during the Libya Intervention in 2011.
The alleged conspiracy between terrorist groups and Hussein were used to justify these first assassination attempts. For Qaddafi, it was the assumption of imminent genocide.
Alongside the strategic benefits of targeting both leaders, it was the moral arguments observed in the rhetoric of both Presidents Bush and Obama that highlight powerful reasons behind the US willfully breaching an international prohibition of such importance as assassination. The language President Bush used to justify the strikes were carefully crafted to appeal to American morality: combining a just war against tyranny, promoting human rights, extending democracy, and the assumption of American values as universal goods.
Importantly, it was only when the WMD failed to materialize that the moral rhetoric of fighting tyranny and promoting freedom begins to be ramped up by the Bush Administration over the security threats or purported links to al Qaeda.
Similar moral justifications arose when the US targeted Qaddafi. The rhetoric of ‘freedom versus tyranny’ was a stronger theme from the start, given the UNSC mandate was in preventing imminent genocide. President Obama was clear “The goal [of the intervention] is to make sure that the Libyan people can make a determination about how they want to proceed, and that they’ll be finally free of 40 years of tyranny…”
Afterward, Obama praised the death of Qaddafi in moral terms, as something that had removed the “dark shadow of tyranny” and “opening up a democratic era for Libya.” Nevertheless, he would later lament what took place in Libya after Qaddafi’s death was the “biggest mistake” of his presidency. The swift return of slavery to Libya has lampooned any notion of a ‘humanitarian’ cause behind the intervention.
In both cases, assassination was recast by the US as a legitimate tool of liberal power, a moral obligation, something intrinsic for transitioning a state from dictatorship to democracy, from incivility to civilization. The cases show that in the absence of a counter-balancing force/s or interest/s, the US has come to consider illiberal/tyrannical rulers when linked to terrorism (whether this connection is real or perceived) as so threatening and morally egregious as to override the usual normative constraints against targeting sovereign leaders.
Moreover, as a democratic state and as leading world power, the US receives both domestic and external legitimations by undertaking this specific form of political violence that is intrinsic to the promotion of American hegemony. The openness of these targeted strikes on Hussein and Qaddafi by the US call into question the strength of the prohibition on assassination, an undermining of its normative fabric from within liberal international order in which the usual mooring bars against direct acts of violence to sovereigns no longer hold. Most of all, these strikes set dangerous precedents for increasing liberal-imperialist moralism in the application of the use of force.
With Trump v US assassination as national policy is probably immune. The irony is slaying me.
By Ted Glick
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
You don’t need to be a pacifist to regret the attempt on Trump’s life yesterday. The MAGA fascists are not going to be defeated on November 5th, as well as beyond this election, by physical attacks, with guns or otherwise.
What will defeat them? Right now I would say there are two main things:
-In the short run, over the next four months, there needs to be a coming together of a massive and broad united front to mobilize tens of millions of people to come out and vote on November 5th for Biden/Harris, particularly in the battleground states, as well as for progressive and not-so-progressive Democrats for the House and Senate in every state. The exception would be If there were any progressive independents like Bernie Sanders running for Congress who had a real chance of winning, though I don’t know of any.
-Day-after-day organizing must deepen and expand beyond November 5th by progressive groups, increasingly connected, all over the country, including in the rural, small town and outer suburban areas where Trump/MAGA is strongest. Door-to-door and other outreach must be stepped up on Issues that are important to most of those in that overwhelmingly white, MAGA-friendly base, like health care, affordable housing and decent-paying union jobs, but without hiding our progressive approach on issues like racism, sexism, heterosexism, the climate crisis, militarism, etc.
Already, unsurprisingly, prominent MAGA Republican leaders like Mike Johnson and JD Vance are blaming Biden and the Democrats for this shooting. Vance, very possibly about to be Trump’s Vice Presidential candidate, said yesterday after the shooting, “”Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Bullshit.
This is why nonviolent tactics must be the kind of tactics we use as we unite to defeat Trump/MAGA this November and keep building afterwards. This doesn’t mean rejecting self defense. It does mean, imho, that there needs to be a widespread appreciation within our people’s progressive movement that a willingness to risk physical attacks or jail time, or worse, is part of the way we can win. Doing so keeps a focus on the issues we are taking action on, and it brings more people to our side.
Jim Crow segregation in the South would never have been defeated if not for the willingness of the young people of SNCC, SCLC, other groups, and grassroots Black working-class people to do just this. Their courage and sacrifices, their singing and spirit, were contagious and politically effective despite tremendous repression by the FBI, racists and southern power structures.
In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4th, 1967, “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism,” and more.
This article also appeared on Ted Glick’s Future Hope column.
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Ted Glick has devoted his life to the progressive social change movement. After a year of student activism as a sophomore at Grinnell College in Iowa, he left college in 1969 to work full time against the Vietnam War. As a Selective Service draft resister, he spent 11 months in prison. In 1973, he co-founded the National Committee to Impeach Nixon and worked as a national coordinator on grassroots street actions around the country, keeping the heat on Nixon until his August 1974 resignation. Since late 2003, Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a renewable energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal. In May 2006, he began working with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and was CCAN National Campaign Coordinator until his retirement in October 2015. He is a co-founder (2014) and one of the leaders of the group Beyond Extreme Energy. He is President of the group 350NJ/Rockland, on the steering committee of the DivestNJ Coalition and on the leadership group of the Climate Reality Check network.
Trump Got a Bloodied Ear: US “Political Violence” Poses a Far Bigger Danger to the Rest of Us
Biden and Trump are two rotten figureheads of a rotting empire. Ignore the tribal rhetoric: neither poses an existential threat. But the system behind them does
The outpouring of opinions on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump mostly offers little insight or honesty – apart from the all-too-obvious concern that the shooting of the former president is likely to make the United States even more of a tinderbox than it is already.
There’s a reason for this. The responses – whether from Trump supporters or Trump opponents – are all embedded in the same ideology of political tribalism that provoked the gunman. Neither side is capable of self-reflection because the US system is designed to avoid such self-reflection.
Despite what the political class wants you to believe, “political violence” is as American as apple pie. The US global empire was built on political violence, or the threat of it, most especially after the Second World War. Just ask the people of Vietnam, Serbia, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and Gaza.
The difference now is that Washington’s imperial grip is all too clearly weakening.
President Joe Biden is not alone in refusing to recognise this fact. He recently told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos: “I’m running the world.”
But US elites are rapidly finding that the world is no longer prepared to submit.
Washington’s international military arm, Nato, is being run into the ground by Russia in a proxy war in Ukraine.
Washington’s key military client state in the oil-rich Middle East, Israel, is being flooded with US weaponry to destroy Gaza. But in the midst of a genocide, Israel is exposing how weak it is. Hamas has not been defeated. In fact, it has been strengthened. And greater cooperation is being encouraged among those opposed to Israel’s regional hegemony.
Current domestic US politics can only be properly understood through the prism of the gradual decline of US influence abroad. The building of alternative international power formations, such as BRICS, is weakening Washington’s military and economic reach.
Adding to its woes, Washington’s ideological hegemony is crumbling too. Transnational capitalism – headquartered in the US – has no answers to the environmental fall-out from the endless resource extraction required to feed the appetite for wasteful, mass consumption it has to cultivate to generate greater profits for a corporate elite.
As the plundering of the planet’s finite resources gets harder, especially as corporations continue to stoke our hunger for material excess, other states are less willing to sit back and let the US take its pound of flesh.
The result is a growing political and economic instability that is hard to miss.
Muddled posturing
In the US, there have been two political impulses in response.
The first – illustrated by the Biden camp, backed by most of the US establishment media and three-letter agencies such as the CIA and NSA – is to double down on a failed strategy and continue seeking “global full-spectrum dominance”.
That means raising the stakes by showing uppity rivals, most especially Russia and China, that any defiance will be punished. It means endlessly expanding wars, with the inherent risk of increasing the chances of triggering a nuclear confrontation.
The other, more muddled response is illustrated by the Trump camp. If the US can no longer effectively impose its will abroad, rather than risk repeated humiliation, it should withdraw into a more isolationist posture, even while stepping up the imperial rhetoric.
Part of the reason for Trump’s muddled posturing, of course, is down to his narcissistic personality. He bigs himself up, even as he prefers to be master of the small domain he knows best. Caesar Trump has an instinctive aversion to global structures like Nato and the United Nations where he must share the limelight.
And part of the reason is that Trump can’t truly control the domestic terrain either. He depends on deeper power structures – such as the three-letter agencies – that would become pale shadows of themselves were they to agree to shrink US influence on the world stage. They need to push him out of his comfort zone.
Outrage machine
The US political system – whether Democrat or Republican – all too obviously has no answers to the deepening crises faced at home or abroad. Which is why the choice for US voters is between Biden and Trump, two rotten figureheads of a rotting imperial system of power.
And because the US system has no solutions, it has to redirect ordinary people’s attention to internal wars. Voters – or those who still trust the system enough to vote – must be persuaded to invest their energies in tribal feuding. The rhetoric of division grows, one in which the other candidate poses an existential threat and has to be stopped at all costs.
The truth is that each candidate – and the camps that stand behind them – is feeding this outrage machine. Biden is responsible for the assassination attempt on Trump, says one camp. Trump is guilty of inflaming the January 6 riots at the Congress, says the other.
At least it would be consistent to conclude either that both are responsible, or that neither is, rather than apply one standard to your tribe’s preferred presidential candidate and a different standard to the opposition tribe’s candidate. That is hypocrisy.
But the most useful conclusion we can draw is to understand that Biden and Trump are symptoms, not causes, of a diseased body politic. Neither Biden nor Trump pose an existential threat by themselves. But a declining US economic power, backed up by the largest military machine the world has ever known, determined to stop its decline at all costs, does pose just such a threat.
Biden and Trump are symbols. One, a lifelong creature of the billionaire donor class, is now deep in the grip of Parkinson’s. The other, a rapacious businessman committed only to his own aggrandisement, can’t distinguish between reality and reality TV.
No one should take seriously the claim that either is capable of running the world.
What they are is symbols – of a US in crisis. Which, given the US addiction to its imperial pretensions, is a crisis for all of humanity. Trump got a bloodied ear. The rest of us have far more at stake
Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.The Convulsed Republic: The Shooting of Donald Trump
As a nation, the United States, as if we did not already know, is convulsed. Paranoid and divided, giddy with conspiracy and deranged by a fear of totalitarian seizure, hyper partisan and hostile to debate and any loose definition of facts (this condition afflicts the entire political spectrum), the only thing missing so far was this: an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate.
Till now, we were seeing the cruel spectacle of an aged president visibly and publicly being mauled, a wounded beast let out on safari in order to be hunted by all manner of trophy hunting punditry. Joe Biden has mumbled and fumbled his way through a haze, even as his stage managers desperately try to operate the strings. With each day, another Democratic lawmaker is expressing concern that he voluntarily yields to a fitter model.
In this whole business, the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has remained unusually reticent. Let the Democrats keep finding the rope, and the rest will follow. Then came the shots at a rally held in Pennsylvania on July 13.
Cue to the event. Videos aplenty to choose from. Faint gunshots register in the background. Trump seems to grab his head and proceeds to fall to the ground. Secret Service agents form a scrum. Trump is then lifted, blood streaking his head, seemingly from a grazing wound. A moment of near martyred glory follows: Trump, pausing the agents, salutes to the crowd.
“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” he stated in a post on Truth Social. “Much bleeding took place, so I realized what was taking place.”
The shooter in question is said to have been shot by the Secret Service, making this the first attempt to assassinate either a president or presidential candidate since an effort was made on Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981. One spectator was also killed, with two others “critically injured”. “It is incredible that such an act can take place in our Country. Nothing is known at this time about the shooter, who is now dead,” stated Trump.
President Biden, in condemning the attack, told reporters that “the idea – the idea – that there’s political violence, or violence in America like this, is just unheard of, it’s just not appropriate.”
Far from this being incredible, such acts of violence speckle and blood US politics. Candidates have been previously gunned down in cold blood. Presidents, whether going to the theatre or appearing in public motorcades, have been very publicly assassinated.
Within minutes, the metre on the political gauge was ticking, making Trump sound like an oppressed jihadi warrior. These are the effusive words of Texan Gov. Greg Abbott: “They try to jail him. They try to kill him. It will not work. He is indomitable.” The state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton sounded forbiddingly biblical: “The world is evil. Praise God that President Trump was able to walk away on his own. Praying for his complete healing and that this person is captured immediately.”
Republican Florida Senator Rick Scott also gave an inkling about how the shooting will be processed in the political mix. “Democrats and liberals in the media have called Trump a fascist. They’ve compared him to Hitler. They’ve tried to lock him up. They tried to remove his Secret Service protection.” This was nothing less than “an assassination attempt by a madman inspired by the rhetoric of the radical left.”
While the US is a republic proud of overthrowing a supposedly tyrannical monarch, it sports one unassailable kingdom: that of conspiracy. With its vast court, it exercises a curious tyranny over the mind. All can fall for it. There are those who will assume, and already have, that Trump staged his own shooting for the sheer convenience of it all. Nothing he will say will convince them otherwise, seeing that his relationship with truth is estranged beyond repair.
On the other side, there will be a narrative that lone shooters in these instances never exist. Behind the gun is a long cast shadow of the Establishment: the intelligence community, law enforcement, and other dark annexes of the Deep State.
As both Trump and Biden have been seen by their respective detractors as satanic guarantors of doom should they return to the White House, the moderates have a mere sliver to work with. The tedious words of “existential threat” are used as wounding weapons to excoriate opponents.
Despite such cheap language, the United States has previously endured an effort to constitutionally and tangibly divide it, leading to a Civil War that continues its haunting reach. It has also survived the assassination of its political figures, in large part because the Republic, at some point, took less interest in representative politics than politics bought. It was a point Gore Vidal proved relentless on: Why run for office when you can buy its occupants?
A mad patient, an inspired experiment, a cruel manifestation, a sprawling empire, the republic will continue surviving, even in decline, overseen by corporate boardrooms and unelected figures. “The lesson,” the Financial Review remarked optimistically, “is that American democracy has proven itself resilient.” Despite making the usual error about a political system that is distinctly not democratic – the Founding Fathers hated the idea of a fully represented demos – the paper is unlikely to be proved wrong. A spell of febrile lunacy, however, is likely to follow first.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.
Screenshot from BBC
The sound of gunshots on Saturday afternoon disrupted the atmosphere at Donald Trump’s campaign rally, causing shock and panic among the crowd and across the United States. The incident has raised urgent questions: What does this assassination attempt mean for American democracy? What does it say about the political system that allows such violent acts to occur? The attack is a stark reflection of the deep tensions and divisions in the U.S. and global politics and how these differences threaten to widen.
The first idea is that the recurrence of such events throughout history demonstrates that the U.S. has a violent political tradition. Moreover, before the shooting at the Pennsylvania rally, a Reuters/Ipsos poll revealed that political violence was at its highest level since the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The poll identified 213 incidents, with two-thirds involving physical assaults and confrontations and the remaining third primarily consisting of property damage. Notably, of the 76 individual acts of violence, 18 resulted in fatalities.
It’s difficult to overlook the ongoing spats from both sides, particularly after Donald Trump contested the 2022 elections and supported the Capitol riot. The former president has been a controversial figure, often encouraging violence against his opponents. Consequently, it is hard to forget the list of speeches, social media posts, policies, and interviews in which he defends his confrontational populism at all costs. In that sense, ironically, the unfortunate shooting in Pennsylvania has also been the result of his policies, including that regarding the right to bear arms.
However, that may not be the only reading of what is already being labeled as an assassination attempt on Trump.
Seconds after the incident, theories emerged about who, how, and why it had happened. Among these, some speculated that the Deep State or the Democratic administration, including the Secret Service, orchestrated the plot to eliminate the former president. Concurrently, other comments and theories have already proclaimed Trump as the inevitable victor of the 2024 election, portraying him as a resurrected figure, triumphant and unblemished.
Unfortunately, the volume of information we are exposed to today, the complexity of the events we observe, and the communicational void from bubble to bubble cause us to lose our relationship and our fundamental connection with the discourses that allow our life in the community. In that sense, to the accumulation of false reactions and messages is added the image of a bloodied Trump with his fist raised, muttering “fight,” “fight.” As psychology professor Roger J. Kreuz commented, “It was an image, and a gesture, destined for the history books.”
People, exposed to the speed of the moment, economic stress, and poor technological-digital literacy, prefer to trust an easy narrative that organizes all these elements into what is closest to us: the natural drama of life, the competition of the forces of nature, good versus evil, the resurrection of Jesus, the birth of the hero as an essential figure in the spiritual life of a nation, among other myths.
The moment also reminded me of Alain Badiou, in a text called The Joint Disappearances of Man and God, which tells us that neither the grand narratives of the final battle between humanist democracy and religion nor the ideological simplifications of the clash of civilizations can hide the true drama of our time, the search for a path towards political and social emancipation in a post-ideological world.
Authoritarianism and the phenomena that gravitate around it, with their false promise of order and security, are nothing more than a reflection of our collective inability to imagine and build alternatives to chaos and inequality. They are nothing more than comforting stories, oral narratives that seek to fill a void of meaning only a system has provoked and incentivized: the current world order based on techno-capitalism.
Nor do I think, as CNN and other television networks have advocated, that the shooting in Pennsylvania is a mere wake-up call that will make the American people reflect that they must unite in the face of tragedy. There are indications that this is a much deeper and global process.
What if we look at the violent logic inherent in the current system in more everyday examples? Only in the U.S. more than 120 people die by gunfire, and shootings injure more than 200 daily. Firearms are the leading cause of death among American children and teenagers, with almost 2,600 children and teenagers dying each year from gun-related homicides. Recently, in Chicago alone, 109 people were victims of shootings, with 19 dead, during the long holiday weekend of the last July 4.
This internalization of violence is compounded by the violence of war, as evidenced by the two examples that are almost daily headlines: the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine and the genocide against the Palestinian people. All this and other examples I do not mention for brevity speak not of a president, country, pseudo-theoretical conspiracies, and comforting mythical narratives but of a system in crisis that demands an imminent collective resolution.
It is easy to think and blame the Secret Service for being in combination with the Democratic administration if what is sought is simply a victory for Trump in November. Or to condemn the violence solely on Trump’s Republican supporters for their daily campaigns against the current administration. It is also easy to think that Trump already has the election in the bag. Yes, myths move people. However, the campaign is months away, and ultimately, the issue itself is not even who wins the election. In the end, the game is between two similar choices, and as many have said, the U.S. is stuck voting between false choices: a pathological liar and a person who is no longer fit for office.
I therefore propose to put the Trump and Biden issues in brackets. If you like, I propose to think of them only as part of a larger set of forces. That is to say, it is not just an act or a crime; it is more about events that extend throughout our lives because political violence is only an expression of systemic violence and a regime of social death.
There is an intrinsic relationship between the Trump assassination attempt and NATO’s support for military campaigns in other parts of the world, just as there is a connection between Putin’s efforts to silence the opposition in Russia and the ongoing war against Kyiv. These connections, to cite just two examples, illustrate a broader pattern: violence that manifests itself in dramatic and visible acts, such as assassination attempts and military conflicts, is a reflection of deeper, systemic violence embedded in the world order. This systemic violence perpetuates a cycle in which internal political struggles and external military aggressions feed each other, reinforcing an order based on conflict and domination. In essence, these small, shocking, and rapid events are not isolated incidents but rather symptoms of an entrenched system that thrives on violence and discord on a planetary scale.
In fact, as K. Marx demonstrated in Das Kapital, the origin of capitalism depends on a primitive (or original) accumulation of capital that is only possible with the constant, daily, and routine sacrifice of the subject. That is the first act of violence we must consider: the “divorcing” of “the producer from the means of production.” Clearly, this occurs today in many forms and under various circumstances. Nevertheless, it is ultimately the defining feature of the current world order: the perpetuation of violence rather than cooperation between individuals. To grasp this point, we must prioritize a transversal anti-systemic logic that dismantles contemporary political discourse, insufficiently based on artificial Left and Right divisions that do little or leave little to understand.
However, I must be honest. Another silent bullet has been tearing through the wind for decades and centuries, which has already broken our ability to think critically and act collectively.
In this sense, the challenge we face as a society is twofold: on the one hand, to unravel and understand the logics that sustain authoritarianism and similar manifestations, and on the other hand, to actively commit ourselves to the construction of spaces for dialogue, criticism, and political action to overcome divisions and face common challenges with solidarity and a vision for the future. Only in this way can we aspire to a human community where power serves everyone, not just a few, and political violence ceases to be the common language in and between human groups.
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Jorge González Arocha
Dr. Jorge González Arocha earned his PhD in Philosophy in 2017 and has served as a professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Havana. He is the author of "Una pasión inútil. Muerte y libertad en la Obra Filosófica de Jean-Paul Sartre". He has co-authored various anthologies and texts in social sciences and philosophy. A seasoned essayist, Dr. Arocha has published in both digital and print media, such as Dialektika, Sin Permiso, Sophia, Rebelión, Kamchatka, OnCuba, among others. He serves as the General Editor of Revista Publicando and Executive Director of the non-profit organization Dialektika: Global Forum for Critical Thinking, Humanities, and Social Sciences.
A Time of Shame and Sorrow: When It Comes to Political Violence, We All Lose
Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily—whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence—whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
— Robert F. Kennedy on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)
There’s a subtext to this assassination attempt on former President Trump that must not be ignored, and it is simply this: America is being pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.
More than 50 years after John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, America has become a ticking time bomb of political violence in words and deeds.
We are imploding on multiple fronts, all at once.
This is what happens when ego, greed and power are allowed to take precedence over liberty, equality and justice.
This is the psychopathic mindset adopted by the architects of the Deep State, and it applies equally whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Beware, because this kind of psychopathology can spread like a virus among the populace.
As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”
People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”
By failing to actively take a stand for good, we become agents of evil. It’s not the person in charge who is solely to blame for the carnage. It’s the populace that looks away from the injustice, that empowers the totalitarian regime, that welcomes the building blocks of tyranny.
This realization hit me full-force a few years ago. I had stopped into a bookstore and was struck by all of the books on Hitler, everywhere I turned. Yet had there been no Hitler, there still would have been a Nazi regime. There still would have been gas chambers and concentration camps and a Holocaust.
Hitler wasn’t the architect of the Holocaust. He was merely the figurehead. Same goes for the American police state: had there been no Trump or Obama or Bush, there still would have been a police state. There still would have been police shootings and private prisons and endless wars and government pathocracy.
Why? Because “we the people” have paved the way for this tyranny to prevail.
By turning Hitler into a super-villain who singlehandedly terrorized the world—not so different from how Trump is often depicted—historians have given Hitler’s accomplices (the German government, the citizens that opted for security and order over liberty, the religious institutions that failed to speak out against evil, the individuals who followed orders even when it meant a death sentence for their fellow citizens) a free pass.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
None of us who remain silent and impassive in the face of evil, racism, extreme materialism, meanness, intolerance, cruelty, injustice and ignorance get a free pass.
Those among us who follow figureheads without question, who turn a blind eye to injustice and turn their backs on need, who march in lockstep with tyrants and bigots, who allow politics to trump principle, who give in to meanness and greed, and who fail to be outraged by the many wrongs being perpetrated in our midst, it is these individuals who must shoulder the blame when the darkness wins.
We are on the wrong side of the revolution.
“If we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution,” advised King, “we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.“
Freedom demands responsibility.
Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings, or at the very least, Americans.
JFK was killed in 1963 for daring to challenge the Deep State.
King was killed in 1968 for daring to challenge the military industrial complex.
Robert F. Kennedy offered these remarks to a polarized nation in the wake of King’s assassination:
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. [Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization…filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort … to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love… What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
Two months later, RFK was also killed by an assassin’s bullet.
Fifty-plus years later, we’re still being terrorized by assassins’ bullets, but what these madmen are really trying to kill is that dream of a world in which all Americans “would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
We haven’t dared to dream that dream in such a long time.
But imagine…
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to stand up—united—for freedom.
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to speak out—with one voice—against injustice.
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to push back—with the full force of our collective numbers—against government corruption and despotism.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, tyranny wouldn’t stand a chance.
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