On Trump’s assassination attempt: political violence does not come from the margins any more
With each shift in the poles of global power, we can bet on where the first cracks appear, where conflicts will also be exported, with the onset of capitalist globalisation. The Middle East, the Pacific, the Caribbean? Or the Balkans Central Europe, the Caucasus? Perhaps the Southeastern Asia or northern shores of South America? But we live in the times when violence is not so much globally exported out to the (semi)peripheries, but also infiltrating societies of the centre. This is not entirely new: Europe remembers (or should remember) the anarchists of the belle époque, the 1914 assassination of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, the crazy twenties and the darkness of the thirties. The US, too, had the assassination of JFK. Is history repeating itself, or is it showing us a new, only slightly familiar face?
Today, terrorists don’t have to come to us. They don’t have to frighten us with their knives, bombs, kidnappings and semi-automatic pistols. If we are to believe the media, we have them every day, in the street, on the radio, TV, offices, and parliaments! If we are to believe the media, we have been ruled by new incarnations of the moustached Viennese painter, or by new Stalins. It often takes very little to be proclaimed a red murderer. The axis of evil is invisible but palpable a moment after turning on the newspaper, entering Twitter or turning on the TV.
Accusations of fascism? We hear them every day, addressed at this or that person in power. Depending on the local specifics, we can also hear about certain parties or politicians (because attacking an individual sells better) wishing to overthrow the republic and introduce gulags. But sorry, we already have the gulags! I mean, toilets for non-binary people. And have you heard about red fascism coming? Immigrants, taxation, promotion of autonomy and real democratisation, well, who cares? The media don’t read the programmes. Instead, they create fear. This party, they say, supports Arab guerillas, they will introduce red Islamism here.
Does any of this make sense? Of course not. And I am only giving examples of ‘political debate’ in countries whose democratic character is not to be questioned.
In the past, the political violence, culminating in politicians’ assassinations, stemmed from the margins of discourse and sometimes from extreme groups within a political faction.
This was the case with the so-called left-wing urban partisans, or the security-inspired actions of the right in the Italian Anni di piombo era, for example. But today it is enough to take seriously what one can hear in the mainstream to feel pushed towards violent steps.
Switching through the channels of the daily media pulp, we may learn that a fateful confrontation is taking place just now. On one side, there are the Bolsheviks, on the other, the Nazis return. If we watch another channel, we might find the metaphorics reversed. But even if we stay faithful to one information source, we can realise that the ultimate evil has moved to what had previously been the good side. For a faithful audience, this convoluted dialectic is not a problem.
And now very seriously. How much Stalinism is there in Biden or Fico? How much real Nazism in Trump? As much as nothing. These are new phenomens, new beasts if you wish, and they deserve a proper examination and naming. But for the media sphere of today, emotions seem more valuable than analysis and heating up the polarization sounds better (and more profitable) than explaining things. And a confrontation between good and pure evil does not deserve much explanation.
The truth has nothing to add here. There is no place or it. Heating up emotions, that is the thing.
The attempted assassination of Trump is not only the return of political violence to the mainstream. It is the result of feeding the polarization, an extreme effect of putting people against one another. And this process was going on in the mainstream media, and not on the outskirts of politics. Just like the earlier shooting of Slovakia’s Robert Fico. The mainstream media worked hard to portray him as ultimate evil and, when he was lying in hospital, suggested that, at the end of the day, he deserved to be attacked. In the case of Trump, neither the liberal nor right-wing media take prisoners. Mercilessly attacked by the opponents, Trump has been hailed as a (nearly) martyr by his media friends. Millions of his supporters now believe in divine intervention in defence of their leader.
No one has had the courage to stop the spiral of violence. Some of the journalists might complain about low quality readers and the polarization, but almost nothing is done to educate people instead of sending them to political wars. Who profits from this, never mind who will be living in the White House in 2025? Probably only the media… and the arms dealers.
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