Anger Explodes at Health Care CEOs
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Over 8,000 Americans die every day, many of them unnecessarily.
Why? Because the United States still doesn’t have a national health care system that guarantees everyone adequate medical attention.
One particular American’s death has driven that point home. On December 4, a gunman murdered Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s 50-year-old CEO. The bullet casings from the shooting read “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.”
Those three words neatly sum up the gameplan America’s giant insurers so relentlessly follow: deny the claim, defend the lawsuit, depose the patient.
Last year, United pulled down $281 billion in revenue, boosting annual profits 33 percent over 2021. Thompson himself pocketed $10.2 million in personal compensation. And Andrew Witty, CEO of the overall UnitedHealth operation, collected $23.5 million, making him the nation’s highest-paid health insurance CEO.
All private insurers profit by denying help to sick people who need it. But UnitedHealth’s operations have become especially rewarding thanks to the shadowy world of “Medicare Advantage,” the program that gives America’s senior citizens the option to contract out their Medicare to private health-service providers.
These private providers collect fixed fees from the federal government for each of the senior citizens they enroll. They profit when the cost of providing care to those seniors amounts to less than what the government pays them in fees. And that gives private providers an ongoing incentive to limit the care their patients receive.
No Medicare Advantage provider, the American Prospect’s Maureen Tkacik points out, has done more than UnitedHealthcare when it comes to “simply denying claims for treatments and procedures it unilaterally deems unnecessary.” Industry-wide, Medicare Advantage providers deny 16 percent of patient claims. UnitedHealthcare denied 32 percent last year.
The public’s frustration with health insurance companies erupted bitterly after Thompson’s murder. UnitedHealth’s official Facebook report on Thompson’s death quickly drew 35,000 responses using the “Haha” emote.
“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one reaction. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”
“Compassion withheld,” read another, “until documentation can be produced that determines the bullet holes were not a preexisting condition.”
Some of the fiercest reactions to Thompson’s death came from within the medical community.
“This is someone who has participated in social murder on a mass scale,” a medical student wrote in one typical post.
“My patients died,” a nurse spat out in another, “while those b—-s enjoyed 26 million dollars.”
“If there’s anything our fractured country seems to agree on,” mused Bloomberg’s Lisa Jarvis, “it’s that the health care system is tragically broken, and the companies profiting from it are morally bankrupt.”
“To most Americans,” agreed the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino, “a company like UnitedHealth represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it.”
Among wealthier countries, Americans “die the youngest and experience the most avoidable deaths” despite spending almost twice as much on health care as others, a recent Commonwealth Fund Study found. And 25 percent of Americans, Gallup pollingadds, have people in their family who have had to delay medical treatment for a serious illness because they couldn’t afford it.
Thompson’s murder won’t change those stats. The system that enriched him lives on — and the incoming Trump administration figures to make that system even worse. The corporate-friendly Heritage Foundation, in its controversial Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump term, is proposing that Medicare Advantage become the “default option” for all new Medicare enrollees.
That would “essentially privatize Medicare” and significantly raise the program’s cost, warns analyst Heather Cox Richardson.
With Thompson’s death, America’s health care powers feel and fear the American public’s anger now more than ever. The rest of us need to channel that anger toward ending this system that’s failed America’s health.
We need to remake health care into a vital public service — not a tool for profit.
Why Americans Appear to Love the UnitedHealthcare Assassin
December 13, 2024
Luigi Mangione.
On X, Luigi Mangione’s been dubbed the Claims Adjuster, or simply the Adjuster. The memes suggest a Punisher-style comic-book hero, hooded and masked, in a black jacket, with a silenced pistol. The narrative is about justice against the corporate elite and redemption and regeneration through violence. In this narrative, the villain is a sociopath deserving of death, the proof of evil his tenure since 2021 as executive of a predatory health insurance company whose corporate parent, UnitedHealth Group, has assets valued at $284 billion and is known to profit from denying care to its customers.
The basics of the event are by now well-known. On December 4, in the dawn twilight on 54th Street in midtown Manhattan, the Adjuster walked up behind the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, and shot him in the back with a silenced pistol at the entrance to the Hilton Hotel, where the executive was scheduled to present an earnings report at the annual investor conference. Thompson, wearing a blue suit, spun around, facing his assailant before collapsing to the sidewalk. The shooter fired two more times, perhaps for a coup-de-grace à la tête, manually sliding the action on the pistol.
From what we know, Thompson died instantly. The Adjuster walked away as if he’d bought a bagel, breaking into a slow jog as he crossed 54th, after which he escaped across Central Park on a bicycle – in what looks, from video footage, a leisurely pace — and made his way out of the city via taxi cab and a commuter bus.
One of the first pieces of publicized evidence in the wake of the killing was that three 9mm cartridges left at the scene were found to have been labeled with three phrases: “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.” It was speculated the first two phrases referred to the oft-cited practice of health insurance companies to deny coverage to clients and defend these decisions with legalistic trickery. “Depose,” of course, has multiple meanings, but in this context just two: one might depose a health care company CEO in court, and one might also depose a figure of terrific unaccountable authority, such as a king or tyrant.
As the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino noted, Thompson’s company, UnitedHealth, is a notorious symbol of such unaccountability in our health care system, with the highest claim-denial rate of any private insurance company:
A 2023 class-action lawsuit alleges that the NaviHealth algorithm [used by UnitedHealth] has a “known error rate” of ninety per cent and cites appalling patient stories: one man in Tennessee broke his back, was hospitalized for six days, was moved to a nursing home for eleven days, and then was informed by UnitedHealth that his care would be cut off in two days…After a couple rounds of appeals and reversals, the man left the nursing home and died four days later.
Such stories explain the instant folk heroization of the killer on social media. Thousands of posts that lauded his crime—or, at least, pointedly refused to condemn it—were shot through with the rhetoric of revolution, as if the Adjuster’s murderous act had been the opening move in a class war. There was also romance and raw attraction. In an initial photo made available by police, the public glimpsed a handsome smile on the Adjuster’s half-hooded face, as he appeared to flirt with an employee at the hostel where he holed up prior to the attack. This, as with subsequent photos of the suspect now in custody, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, have given rise to a number of “thirst trap” posts by adoring female fans.
Among the belongings found following Mangione’s arrest on Monday at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Penn., was a 262-word manifesto that appeared to confess to the crime. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” stated the manifesto.
Just as widespread on social media was the gleeful response to Thompson’s death, which often descended into death-delighted schadenfreude by people who apparently don’t care one whit about the gunning down of a 50-year-old father of two from the quiet suburban city of Maple Grave, Minnesota.
After all, Thompson was a parasite, and a terribly destructive one.
The humble Facebook eulogy by UnitedHealth for Thompson garnered so many emoji laughs and claps – 77,000 at last count – that comments were shut down. At LinkedIn, UnitedHealth Group opted to stop comments on its post about Thompson’s death because of the flood of people liking, hearting, and clapping it.
Genuine laughter abounded. A commenter on X worried whether the sidewalk where Thompson collapsed was okay, and another declared Thompson’s gunshot wound a pre-existing condition not covered under UnitedHealthcare policy. “My condolences are out of network,” became the common mocking refrain. Another stated, “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers.”
Meanwhile, internet sleuths who had in other unsolved cases come together to find murderers decided to sit this one out with aggressive displays of indifference.
Another post on X in favor of the Adjuster, captioned “My official response to the UHC CEO’s murder,” showed two graphs that compared wealth distribution in late eighteenth-century France to wealth distribution in present-day America. The two graphs were roughly the same. Under this post was one that showed a cartoon of the Lorax in colorful Seussian splendor standing by a guillotine and rhyming, “UNLESS someone like you brings out the chippity chop/Nothing’s going to get better. It’s not.”
This was followed by a poster who quoted the French Revolution’s bloody anthem, the Marseillaise, which goes:
Listen to the sound in the fields
The howling of these fearsome soldiers
They are coming into our midst
To cut the throats of your sons and consorts.
In American history, has the assassination of an industry executive in the private sector ever elicited such enormous and widespread support? The last attempted political assassination of a major corporate executive occurred in 1892, when Alexander Berkman tried to kill industrialist Henry Frick over his murderous treatment of steelworkers on strike. The script then, even at the height of the Gilded Age, was very different. Berkman was publicly excoriated and widely condemned as an agent of foreign radicalism, while Frick was put on a victim pedestal. The American public turned against the steelworkers and Berkman was sent to prison.
The reaction to the street-side slaughter of Thompson suggests that, were Berkman to stand trial today, he would enjoy more support than he did during his time. For a number of people, when a predatory-parasitic power elite proves itself willing to sacrifice the public good for its private aggrandizement, shooting them in the head has become an acceptable solution. We’ve tried lawsuits, petitions, elections; nothing has worked.
A Return of Anti-Capitalist Vigilantism is Proving Surprisingly Popular
Youtube screenshot.
Suppose a company is operating on a business model that demonstrably depends on letting people die through intentional neglect. Is it murder for someone who becomes aware of that crime to take violent action to try to prevent more deaths? Take, for example, a nursing home that decides to save money by leaving elderly inmates with a deadly and contagious disease to share rooms with vulnerable, non-infected but bedridden inmates because there are not enough beds available to put all the infected patients together in a hall separate from the as-yet-uninfected. Would that be criminal and justify violent action if nothing else could prevent the continuation of the deadly practice? Or what if a mining company sent coal miners underground to work knowing that its air monitors for dangerous explosive methane buildup and that safety equipment to allow miners to survive a resulting cave-in was defective and out-of-date?
Say hypothetically that in each of the above cases (both real) one person was aware that the senior manager each of those companies not only knew of the risks but was not acting to correct them (because he or she was getting fat bonuses by the companies’ boards of directors for the savings being made by continuing those deadly policies), and the two individuals who were aware of them could not get anyone to pay attention and take action to prevent disaster?
Would violent action to put a halt of those life-threatening abuses be justified if attacking or slaying the guilty managers finally led to action to end them?
That is the question inevitably raised by the assassination on December 5 of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, 50, gunned down in the early morning in midtown Manhattan as he was heading into an investor gathering where he was to report on the record profits of his company, the largest health insurance and health management company in the US. His alleged assailant, Luigi Mangione, 26-year-old scion of a wealthy Baltimore property tycoon, was captured after a five-day nationwide manhunt. He was spotted sitting in an Altoona McDonald’s restaurant eating a burger on a tip to local police from an employee who recognized him from widely published photos in the media. He was reported to have been captured with the gun used in the slaying — a 3D-printed “ghost gun” —as well as with a three-page manifesto explaining his reasons for the action.
Mangione, described as the “brilliant” valedictorian graduate of a prestigious private high school in Baltimore, who went on to get a BA and MS in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, in his statement, described UHC and other so-called “healthcare” companies like it “Mafiosi” which were killing insured patients by denying them treatment for deadly diseases. He wrote that while others had exposed their corruption to no effect, he was “the first to face it with such brutal honesty,” adding, “These parasites had it coming.”
One of the first bits of evidence suggesting the assassination of Thompson might have been a vigilante set against an evil corporation and its top executive were three 9mm shell casings discovered at the scene of the shooting, which had, before being placed in the gun’s magazine, had been etched with the words “Delay,” “Deny” and “Depose.”
The first two of these words are the beginning of the title of an exposé of the health insurance industry’s deadly practices. Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It by J. M. Feinman, published in 2010, was favorably cited by Mangione in his three-page document found on him when he was arrested. The document also included the line: “I apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
As the NYPD Chief of Detectives, Joseph Kenny, told reporters with considerable understatement, “It does seem he has some ill will towards corporate America.”
This fatal attack upon the chief executive of a major US corporation recalls Theodore Kaczynski, a man dubbed the Unabomber, whose attacks, described by him in writings as targeting corrupt capitalism, eluded police capture for 18 years and killed three people, injuring another 12.
Few praised Kaczynski, who died at 81 by suicide while serving serving a life sentence for his actions. But Mangione’s slaying of Thompson seems to have struck a chord with many Americans and has frightened health insurance executives and perhaps executives of other industries perceived as destructive or dismissive of human life.
“Are we going to be killed next?” Health industry and finance industry executives were reportedly asking each other anxiously as they were were heading to attend the same investor meeting at the New York Hilton as Thompson was walking towards when he was gunned down — a meeting which was abruptly cancelled after the shooting.
They may be right to be worried. Right too are the private security execs now rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of new clients to guard, as they did as leftist groups like the Bader-Meinhof Red Army Faction in Germany and The Red Rossa (Battalion) in Italy were gunning down big capitalists in Europe during the 1970s – 90s.
The anger that has been simmering over the insurance industry profiteering that has increasingly made the US the costliest place in the world for obtaining needed health care, and the richest country with the largest percentage of its citizens who cannot afford to see a doctor or go to a hospital without ending up bankrupt, has suddenly erupted in a volcano of fury following word of this particular gun murder, which is strikingly different from the almost routine street shootings that plague our nation’s cities.
This shooting was not about robbery or a gang grudge or a road rage incident. Nor was it something that was the result of a sudden fit of uncontrolled rage at some perceived insult or a desire to commit “suicide by cop.” This was, by all the evidence reported so far, seemingly a carefully worked out plan for and act of retribution against the leader of a corporation who was seen as directly responsible for the denial of care, treatment or medication for large numbers of people — perhaps some known to the shooter. It was an act allegedly committed by a young man from a wealthy family, but one who, according to published reports by friends, was well acquainted with the healthcare industry because of a congenital spinal deformation that had led to his requiring major back surgery with the implantation of a number of metal pins in his lower back that he complained caused his back and hips to lock up painfully.
In Mangione’s writings, he talks about how UHC has been a leader in the corrupt and often deadly practice of ramping up profits by denying insured people reimbursement for required medical care and procedures and for declining life-saving treatment to people it insures, even when such treatments are recommended by physicians in UHC’s own participating provider groups.
Given the huge spread of such private insurance coverage thanks to the Affordable Care Act, it’s a problem the majority of Americans too old for Medicare — and even many of those who are old enough for Medicare but who instead have switched to private so-called Medicare Advantage Plans — can readily relate to.
According to Census figures, over 200 million Americans are over 18 and under 65. In our country, that means that if they want to have medical insurance, they have to buy it on their own or get it through an employer or through the Affordable Care Act “marketplace.” According to the Commonwealth Fund, in 2024, 44% of that working-age demographic, or some 85 million adults, had either no health insurance (9%), were underinsured, meaning they didn’t have access to needed healthcare with whatever plan they had (23%) or had a gap during the year during which they had no insurance coverage (12%). And remember, these individuals are often parents of children who also likely don’t have health coverage when the parent doesn’t — making the total number of underinsured even higher.
The anger shown in a wave of disgust, rager or mockingly cynical comments about the Thompson shooting following articles on line, many of which get pulled down later. As one cold-hearted wag in a posting in the comment section of a story about the Thompson shooting, noting that the shooter was angry about treatment denials, put it, “That’s 50 million or more potential suspects that police have to consider.” Another comment from a nurse on a Reddit string wrote, “If you would like to appeal the fatal gunshot, please call 1-800-555-1234 with case # 123456789P to initiate a peer-to-peer within 48 hours of the fatal gunshot.”
This one shooting has opened the door to a dark room that America hasn’t really seen the inside of since the Weather Underground and other small armed groups were blowing up banks, science labs, and robbing Brinks trucks in the 1970s or a wave of killings in of corporate executives into the ‘80s and ‘90s.
One might wonder why the American public in this case seems to be responding with such understandable rage, not at the killer, but at the victim and his company. Why not the same kind of targeting of oil and gas industry executives, whom we know have been deliberately pumping out more and more carbon-based fuel and worsening the already dreadful climate change the Earth is experiencing and facing, all the while lying about how “green” their businesses are? Or why not the arms industry execs who are behind and lobby for the trillion-dollar-a-year military monstrosity that is sucking up all the taxes collected from hard-working Americans to go towards fomenting pointless wars, death and chaos around the world?
The answer I think, is that so far, those who suffer from climate change are mostly in remote arid or flood-prone regions like western Africa, Bangladesh, the Caribbean, or superheated regions like parts of the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, and the threat here in the US won’t become undeniable for at least another decade or maybe longer. Meanwhile, expensive corporate PR campaigns are funded to convince people as long as possible of the lie that the dangers of climate change aren’t real or can be avoided. Similarly, the arms industry is great at appealing to fear and patriotism to make Americans believe that there is a dangerous world out there that only massive arms spending can save us from attack.
When it comes to healthcare, however, the evils of the profit-crazed capitalists running the health insurance scam are identifiable and the impacts are as plain as day in their perfidy. When these companies deny needed cancer medication or treatment to a dad or mom with a third- or fourth-stage malignancy, or rehab therapy to a chronically weakened grandmother living alone, or emergency treatment for a wife with severe bleeding from endometriosis, the resulting damage is personal. When a loved one suffers terribly because of a denial of care by an insurer or even dies, it’s also clear right away who is the guilty party. This kind of abuse is happening all the time So it shouldn’t be surprising that some will react in the way Americans are so prone to act — with violence and particularly with guns or explosives.
United Healthcare, the fifth largest industry on the Fortune 100 List, got there by dint of its obscene if coldly mechanistic algorithms to deny care and it leads the pack with 32 percent of its clients’ claims denied. But it is not alone in its denials. As a chart in an article by Jeffrey St. Clair on Dec. 6 in CounterPunch shows, Medica and Anthem were not too far behind UHC, which boasted 27% and 23% denial rates, respectively. BlueCross/BlueShield, the purported not-for-profit that I personally discovered while trying to help an elderly friend get care covered, subcontracts with one of several for-profit companies to handle its denials and is in the mid-range with a denial rate of 17 percent of claims. (Given the industry denial rate average is 16 percent, so much for the Blues’ claim of being more caring because they are “not-for-profit! Although, in fairness, not-for-profit Kaiser Permanente did show the lowest denial rate at 7% of claims denied (a rate which UHC would define as worst, not best).
The Kaiser Family Foundation, a health research organization, reports that one in five Americans has experienced a denial of care by their insurer within the 12-month period studied. That’s a rate twice as high as with Medicare and Medicaid, which reportedly have a denial rate of 10%. Often those denials leave patients and their families bankrupted if they decide they have to pay themselves for denied but needed care, as often happens. (The leading cause of bankruptcy in the US is unpayable medical bills.) For those who are not as well off financially, denials can in many cases be fatal.
It needs to be noted here that UHC’s rapid growth and profitability under Thompson’s leadership (for which he received hefty bonuses), is also intimately linked to the giant Medicare privatization scheme of government-promoted encouragement of Medicare Advantage plans, the insurance industry replacement of Government Medicare which is deceptively luring elderly people away from government Medicare covered into private insurance products that offer deceptively attractive perks like free gym membership, dental coverage and no deductible. Left unsaid by these plans is that they restrict coverage of serious medical conditions by requiring prior approval authorizations, gateway doctor referrals, and use of doctors within an approved group, making them essentially HMOs. As the Medicare Advantage subscribers age and get less healthy, they discover that if the plan doesn’t have the specialist they need or if no gateway doctor in the plan will authorize a specialist or costly testis needed, they’re out of luck. One of the biggest companies that make those key decisions on a subcontractor basis is UHC, which also handles an enormous amount of the care coverage decisions (denials) for Medicare and Medicaid, getting rewarded for the number of denials it issues.
It’s easy to see how in a country where violent and deadly road rage is epidemic, and there is a tradition of going back to the country’s early days of vigilante justice, health care denials by health insurers could lead to more cases of vigilante “justice.”
Of course, the people who knew Brian Thompson are saying what a “warm and loving person” he was and what a loving father to his two young sons. I’m sure that’s all true. He might even have convinced himself that by denying care to 32% of his company’s insured clients he was aiding society at large by helping to keep medical costs down for the other 68% (until they start getting care denied too). But I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a reporter for the NY Times who had covered the bloody civil war in El Salvador and who remarked to me how Roberto D’Aubuisson, the leader of the right-wing death squads in that country who nightly led his men out to slaughter and butcher hundreds of peasant backers of the guerrillas, and was behind the murder of liberation theology Archbishop Oscar Romero and six priests. He said D’Aubuisson was a neighborhood Cub Scout den leader, a good neighbor, mowed his own lawn and seemed like a “nice suburban guy.”
At this point, reading the comments following reports on the case of the Brian Thompson assassination, it’s looking like suspected assassin Mangione is being increasingly viewed as a potentially sympathetic figure — perhaps a Jesse James-type folk hero — even before it’s fully known what in his life happened that might have driven him to plot and carry out such a violent act of murder. With a single act, this vigilante act has opened Americans’ eyes to the sickness of capitalism in one huge US industry: healthcare. That awakening is not going to fade away. And it may well spread to the rest of corporate America and to the corruptness of the supposedly democratic government in Washington that is actually owned lock, stock and barrel by corporate money and the wealthy.
The government will no doubt try, and will likely succeed in preventing Mangione’s defense from presenting evidence about UHC’S deadly crimes of denial of care as an argument either against guilt or even as a mitigating circumstance in deciding on the penalty in case of conviction. Given his family’s money, he should locate an attorney of the caliber of the late William Kunstler or Leonard Wingless — lawyers who knew how to get jurors to see the politics of an alleged crime and to ignore the skewed instructions of judges in steering them towards supporting the arguments and evidence of the state.
Maybe Mangione or his family should call New York attorney Marty Stolar, who managed to get the Camden 28, a group of mostly Catholic anti-war activists who raided a Camden, NJ draft board in 1971 and destroyed thousands of records of young men classified 1-A (suitable to be drafted) acquitted despite their guilt having been documented by FBI agents who had secretly monitored the whole break-in. In their case the jury, convinced by the testimony of defense witness and leftist activist historian Howard Zinn that their principled act of civil disobedience against an unjust war, and the widespread opposition to that war by that time, merited jury nullification: Jurors, thinking for themselves about the charges and the evidence, decided no crime had been committed.
Because of their unanimous decision, the government couldn’t appeal or retry the case.
Another way out:
The propaganda of violence
From Prism
December 10, 2024
by William C. Anderson
The UnitedHealthcare CEO’s assassination is a good time to observe the history of class warfare, grievance, and the classic anarchist militancy of “the propaganda of the deed”
“Who is it that provokes the violence? Who is it that makes it necessary and inescapable? The entire established social order is founded upon brute force harnessed for the purposes of a tiny minority that exploits and oppresses the vast majority.” – Errico Malatesta
“Once a person is a believer in violence, it is with him only a question of the most effective way of applying it, which can be determined only by a knowledge of conditions and means at his disposal.” – Voltairine de Cleyre
The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the morning of Dec. 4 may have shocked people for several reasons. A masked gunman committing a targeted killing with tactical precision before making an illusive escape stunned authorities and captured the imaginations of others, offering him instant celebrity status. Gunning down an insurance executive became a cathartic scene with all the trappings of cause célèbre. The initial reaction should be analyzed to understand what it communicates to us. This sort of violence holds a special place in the history of insurrectionary anarchism, which has not only theorized about it but actively practiced it to world-changing ends. A killing is not just a killing, and the popular reaction to the shooter can supply us with some important lessons just as police close in on a suspect. If the authorities are not careful with this case, they may end up uniting people behind common interests. Now is a good time to observe the history of class warfare, grievance, and the classic anarchist militancy of a form of direct action meant to catalyze revolution, known as “the propaganda of the deed.”
In 1885, the Chicago Tribune quoted the formerly enslaved Black anarchist Lucy Parsons saying something many wouldn’t dare say almost 150 years later: “Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination and without pity.” Far beyond a mere call for sporadic violence, it’s essential to understand that the impulse to make such a confrontational statement was not so unconventional back then. Different factions of anarchists used calls for revolutionary violence toward different ends and influenced one another.
While some, like Parsons, worked with organizations like the International Working People’s Association (IWPA), doing pivotal work to transform labor conditions, others had individual motives based on self-organized immediate interventions. The historian Paul Avrich noted that the violent rhetoric of anarchists like Parsons attracted the “skilled and unskilled, employed and unemployed” based on the “hopes of immediate redemption.” However, some people took that mandate into their own hands, targeting some of the world’s most powerful elites.
Anarchists went after and often successfully assassinated multiple heads of state, politicians, businessmen, military figures, and police around the world under the proclamation of propaganda by the deed. The idea that killing reviled and oppressive authority figures would be a catalyst for revolution has long been debated. These ideas are not limited to just one faction of anarchists or only the anarchist segments of the historical socialist and communist movements. Furthermore, their effectiveness often produced unintended consequences that the purveyors couldn’t have necessarily predicted. For example, when a self-professed anarchist killed President William McKinley in 1901, it led to the creation of the FBI and a proto-“war on terror” that reshaped international policing and worldwide immigration policy and nearly destroyed anarchism. Understanding this in the context of Thompson’s killing in New York should let us know that the ruling class won’t simply accept this. The protectors of their interests and property, the police, will do their bidding to make an example of the killer (or a necessary scapegoat). Authorities will also be hard at work deciding what agencies, legislation, or punishment should be meted out to stop lethal direct action from becoming too popular. Just as it has been throughout anarchist history, quashing such jubilance and excitement about the collective awakening to the possibilities of violent resistance will be necessary.
Anarchist proponents of violence like Errico Malatesta, Johann Most, and Luigi Galleani saw attacks as a necessary response to the oppression of the working class, immigrants, poor people, and the enslaved. Even Alexander Berkman, who wrote about the anarchist movement’s departure from the propaganda of the deed, attempted to assassinate the industrialist oligarch Henry Clay Frick who turned guns on workers and was tyrannical in his business practices. Berkman once wrote, “You don’t question the right of the government to kill, to confiscate and imprison. If a private person should be guilty of the things the government is doing all the time, you’d brand him a murderer, thief and scoundrel. But as long as the violence committed is ‘lawful,’ you approve of it and submit to it. So it is not really violence that you object to, but to people using violence ‘unlawfully.’”
Berkman’s nearly 100-year-old perspective still holds, though what’s interesting now is seeing a murder bring people together. Anarchist history shows that sometimes it’s unexpectedly hard to find a prominent figure so universally reviled that nearly everyone celebrates their ending. Though many have prefaced their commentary on the current moment with the need to say they don’t “condone” violence, Berkman’s point bites back at inconsistency. The monopoly on violence known as “the state” conducts regular killing both directly and indirectly the world over daily to maintain itself. Also, do those who don’t condone the killing of a businessman by a vigilante announce they don’t “condone” violence before using their conflict mineral technologies with apps that use artificial intelligence powered by slave labor? Do they announce that they don’t condone violence when they pay taxes to fund a genocidal onslaught or militarism that destroys the planet? What about the violence on our plates in our food or in the “fast fashion” we wear? No, that inescapable violence is accepted as ordinary and not worth showy moralizing statements.
Those who denounce killing in response to the shooting of Thompson reinforce the imbalance that upholds oppression. Blood has different weights depending on where it spills from. Who has the power to kill as an acceptable norm versus who doesn’t is what tips the scale. The gravity given to those this society privileges, empowers, and prioritizes dictates how much we’re supposed to care about deaths. It also dictates what’s even considered violent. That’s why we are instructed to mindlessly condemn any and every act of violence that threatens the status quo of capitalism, imperialism, and class-based society. We should be able to respect those who choose not to practice violence while distancing ourselves from those who make false equivalencies out of it. Their “peace” comes at the expense of the most abused, whose screams are drowned out. This is the “peace of the pharaohs, the peace of the tsars, the peace of the Caesars,” as Ricardo Flores Magón once wrote and rightly concluded, “Let such a peace be damned!”
It would be helpful if more of us accepted the fact that we cannot indeed be anti-violence in a society where even our most passive actions are reinforcing the most deplorable crimes against oppressed people around the globe. This is why I’ve argued that we should identify the counterviolence we need in our politics. So, rather than projecting onto a mysterious shooter or endlessly looking for a hero to venerate, the questions of the utility of violence here are answered by past instruction. However, I do not invoke all this history and quotation to suggest it’s inherently instructive for mimicry. Instead, I think it helps us realize that there is something beneath the surface here that people yearn for. There’s a confrontation dying to be taken up by those who refuse to wait for more tragedy and endless pain. Such a clash isn’t expected to be neat, nice, or consistently nonviolent. If force is the tool used to shape our subjugation, then pushing that oppressive momentum back so that we can completely throw it off of us should be the standard.
