by John Pickard (Republished from the UK Socialist Website, Left Horizons)
The far right in the USA – which includes some people very close to Donald Trump and his administration – is practically foaming at the mouth over the assassination of one of its chief rabble-rousers, Charlie Kirk. All kinds of spokespersons are threatening Hellfire and damnation against the entire ‘left’ and liberal community.
Elon Musk, that great friend of democracy, a man whose enormous ego is only matched by his bank balance, described the left in general as the “party of murder”. Liberals, another prominent influencer, suggested, had “blood on their hands”. Another blogger suggested that every Democratic politician “must be arrested and the party banned”. (Financial Times, September 11).
Kirk was not a political commentator of the usual sort. He was a white supremacist and a vicious and incorrible inciter of hatred: of racism, misogyny, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-science and antisemitism (which, as an aside, makes the Israeli government’s view on him completely contradictory). He was opposed to every principle and outlook that could define in a normal, civilised country, even a capitalist country. In other words, he was a thoroughly obnoxious character. (See here, also).
The Guardian published a sample of Kirk’s words of wisdom, and they are worth looking at here. But even a small sample shows what this disgusting person was like:
If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor [Swift]. You’re not in charge.
We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.
America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.
And so on…
There is now genuine fear in the USA about the possibility of the use of Kirk’s assassination as an excuse to bring in even greater state measures against the left. In both pre-war Italy and Germany, the fascist and Nazi parties used assassinations of individual party members as pretexts to suppress workers and left organisations even further, and in the latter case, to intensify attacks on Jews.
No matter how despicable the target might be, the Kirk assassination shows the utter futility of individual terrorism as a political tool: it does nothing whatsoever to further the interests of ordinary workers, but only provides more opportunities for reaction to assert itself.
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Some now fear President Donald Trump, already broadening the supposed limits of executive power, and making up laws and rules as he goes along, could use the Kirk killing as an opportunity for a crackdown on the American left.
“Trump clearly has a light trigger finger when it comes to declaring emergencies and circumventing norms, laws and even the constitution,” said Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die, speaking to the Financial Times. “This could be used as an accelerant for troops on the streets, [and] efforts to persecute the opposition.”
Those fears will have increased after Donald Trump released a video (above) on his misnamed social media platform, Truth Social, in which he blamed the left in general for the episode – even before the assassin had been identified, arrested or his motives known. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Trump repeated this the day after his broadcast, but now adding an ominous warning. “We have a radical left group of lunatics out there, just absolute lunatics,” he said, “and we’re going to get that problem solved.”
What does it mean, get “that problem solved”? “The worst-case scenario”, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told the Financial Times, “is…that the murder of Kirk is used to justify a government crackdown on protected speech.” That is not beyond the bounds of possibility, given Trump’s track record.
Attempts on the lives of Democratic politicians
Leading representatives of the Democratic Party have been targeted by attacks in recent months. In June, a Minnesota state representative, Melissa Hortman, was shot and killed alongside her husband. The same day, state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were also shot, although they survived. Two months earlier, in April, the home of the Pennsylvania governor, Democrat Josh Shapiro, was set on fire, even though he and his family were inside sleeping.
But Republicans have conveniently short memories. Instead, they point the finger at the Democrats as instigators of violence. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, told reporters on Wednesday, the day of the assassination, that “Democrats own what happened today.”
These really are dangerous times for the left in the USA. But some of the responsibility for that lies with the supine stance of both the Democratic Party and the US trade union leaders, neither of whom are capable of thinking beyond an economic system rigged against working class people.
Today there are thousands of heavily-armed troops and national guards patrolling US troops. A highly militarised ICE organisation patrols commuter trains, makes raids and struts around like a latter-day SS, looking allegedly for ‘illegal immigrants’, but actually targeting anyone whose appearance marks them as non-white.
Yet with a few honourable exceptions, the trade union leaders – who could mobilise a significant and weighty opposition to the creeping totalitarianism in the USA – have sat on their hands.