"[E]ven the most wild-eyed anarchists share the fundamentally liberal conclusion that if you get rid of certain people, things will change."
Precisely! But wild-eyed anarchists aren't the only ones harboring this misconception. Add to the list Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump and all his flunkies, and a long list of anonymous assassins and power holders who thought that violence could solve everything...
I was in the same place you were concerning this story. Given the number of mass shootings we experience, this is nothing. Perpetrator attempts a mass shooting, nobody dies, suspect is arrested… nothing more to report on.
Thank you for this. If we are supposed to shrug off the murder of elementary school students, I'm not sure why I'm supposed to be extra-worked up over the non-murder of aging millionaires. This is the rule book they gave us. They hate it when it turns against them. The event mainly proved that TV reporters and politicians tend to be the most insufferable "survivors" in a crisis.
Excellent piece. My one issue with it is that I don't think what you imply about Stalin and the Trotsky assassination is quite right. Trotsky was just one person (prominent, to be sure, but so was Bukharin) in a sea of quite literally a million mass liquidation targets. That was of an entirely different order. It's also fundamentally different when those in power are doing the assassinating in a systematic way than when subaltern loners are doing it via one-time-only attempts before being (inevitably) taken down themselves. With regard to Trotsky, if he had been in Russia, he surely would have been subjected to a show trial and execution, but since he had escaped all the way to the Americas, a different approach had to be followed. I can't think of anything Stalin would have enjoyed more than an admission of guilt by Trotsky in a show trial after a stint in Lubyanka.
Well said. It is definitely the self-importance of the media folk that is behind their overwrought reaction. But I think it is because they are also oblivious, unable to imagine themselves ever being in the orbit of US violence.
Even though news outlets have been reporting about the upswing in US political and state violence––CIA black sites, torture, and extraordinary rendition in the 2000s, Gitmo as a site of US total power, summary execution of people on boats in the Caribbean today, extreme deprivation in detainment centers, the full-court press to build a literal gulag across the US––the DC press seem to have never imagined that they could be caught up in any boomerang effect.
They seem so shocked to see the same violence pointed back at the source, i.e. not just Trump and politicians but the adjacent grandees operating in the seat of US power. There was something darkly comical about all the people in tuxes and ballgowns––preparing to literally eat cake––being so stunned about their proximity to violence.
I wonder about the Venn diagram between attendees at the WHPC dinner and people who were on the ground covering the George Floyd protests. I imagine the former are of the NYT pundit class that was fine when the paper published Tom Cotton's "Send in the Troops" op ed, as opposed to the latter, who were getting tear-gassed and shot in the face with rubber bullets.
There are distinctions within "the press" for sure. The number of journalists who are dying in conflicts abroad is higher, and reporters here are getting roughed up without any apparent consequences for cops and officials.
“…if you discount the decadent New Left groups of the 1970s, who were either totally ineffective or, in the European case, mainly used as tools by cynical Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies to wreak havoc in the West”—that’s discounting a significant bit of history that shaped the left internally, provided a raft of its intellectuals and icons, and defined its public perception for roughly two decades. Do you roll the PFLP and the Japanese Red Army groups into “the European case?” What about the FARC and Shining Path in Latin America? The Kurdish PKK’s period of operating as a terror group overlapped with its Marxist-Leninist era. And the Viet Cong functioned essentially as a terrorist operation, up to trying to assassinate the South Vietnamese prime minister, during the ‘50s and early ‘60s.
Arguably what’s striking about today’s Marxists is that, despite inflammatory rhetoric online, they’ve engaged in unusually little violence.
And also a Marxist one. The PKK was and remains a nationalist movement. So for that matter was the FALN, the Puerto Rican Marxist-Leninists who bombed the Fraunces Tavern (among other locales).
I just don't think you can claim Marxist ideology is a kind of antibody against terrorist tactics. Political individuals and groups engage in terrorism based on some combination of the personal bloodlust of their members and their real or perceived inability to achieve desired aims through other means.
Cole Tomas Allen just shows that liberal ideology isn't either. The guy who shot up the Congressional baseball game in 2017 was, if memory serves, a Bernie bro. Another interesting present-day reality is that political terror *groups* are to be found almost nowhere on the left side of the dial. These have all been lone wolves.
By the way, have you read 'Man's Fate' by Andre Malraux?
Forgive me, but it does seem like you were saying something similar: that the Marxist emphasis on structural forces and mass mobilization over individual action and influence is intrinsically at odds with the terrorist approach. Which is an interesting argument—and interesting arguments are what I'm subscribed here for—but not one history has borne out.
I should say that '70s/'80s left terror groups, and the striking absence of similar organizations today, are a particular area of interest for me.
Sure, that's how their propaganda line went, but the Shining Path went in for the whole terrorist bill of fare: bombings, assassinations, hostage taking, and assaults on civilians.
You can draw a line between guerrilla groups and terror outfits, but the Shining Path pole vaulted over it sometime around 1983.
Oh for sure I just meant that "Marxist political violence" includes Marxist-Leninist urban and rural guerrilla groups like the Red Brigades, FARC, etc and then explicitly Maoist "people's war" groups that have a different understanding of the role of violence in the revolutionary struggle (more a long-term instrument of producing revolutionary power in the rural base).
What this all points up to me is the fundamental malleability of both ideology and tactics. When Trotsky denounced terror, his chief foes were the bomb-throwing and revolver-wielding SRs—who in 1911 I believe would have just taken out Stolypin. (Which, contra Trotsky, did considerable damage to the Tsarist state, due to its acute lack of figures with the requisite human and political capital to manage development). The Bolsheviks also were an urban formation, with the SR program looking toward Russia's peasant masses.
But Mao, banished to the hinterlands, needed the peasants: thus a new genre of Marxist thought and political strategy were born.
The international alphabet soup of leftists of the '70s consisted primarily upper-middle- and upper-class students with little mass base but access to elite targets. Voila! Urban terrorism. All rationalized in a Marxist framework, of course.
Right when the event occurred I opened the NYT. On those little live updates you could tell that Haberman and Swan were nearing climax. Couldn't close the app fast enough.
Violence is very personal, very emotional. You didn't mention the tremendous number of killings, raping, maiming of women by a disgruntled, or somehow dissatisfied, boyfriend, husband, or other entitled male. We elected a president who bragged about assaulting women, was convicted of an assault, and is implicated in a wide ranging trafficking program. I wish the media would spend more time on the real roots of this violence rather than the "motives" as specified by the perp or how they got the gun or whatever. We never make headway. Is it possible to? Can we explore that?
The big counter-example to assassinations upholding the status quo I can think of is Gavrilo Princip assassinating Franz Ferdinand. Arguably because he was a Serbian nationalist he wasn't of the left, but he was acting against the prevailing order, and arguably toppled it in a way no one could have predicted.
The Trotsky quote mentioning anarchists is interesting. Do they historically favor assassinations more than socialists and communists? I'm originally from Idaho, and it was a major story 120+ years ago when ex-governor Frank Steunenberg had his mailbox dynamited in revenge for a mining strike he had crushed in Northern Idaho. It's a wild story, Pinkerton agents tracked down the assassin, who was then represented in court by Clarence Darrow.
True that! But the key phrase here is "in a way no one could have predicted." Violence can definitely change the world, but very seldom in the way assassins, anarchists and fascists intend it to.
This brought...quite literally...tears to my eyes. The self involvement of this "not greatest generation" is staggering. Our poor schoolchildren now live through the daily terror of a bad man walking into their classroom with an AK15. And so many have lived...and horrifying DIED... through a real event. Agree with Ganz... get an effing grip.
Yes, I completely agree with your point that killing someone is a poor substitute for real political action an example of which is organizing labor, or something like the No Kings protest or organizing like neighbors did in Minnesota to stop illegal behavior of ICE. And deliver me from prayers as a mawkish response to any outrageous event.
Thank you for finding that wonderful peroration by Trotsky. No more needs to be said on the topic. And thank you for your meditation on the latest circus in which the US media likes to participate.
You willfully misunderstand anarchist history to your detriment, lots of anarchists have advocated mass action alongside the propaganda of the deed. There’s a long storied of anarchists arguing amongst each other about these things, too. Calling anarchist “liberals” when they are the most targeted demographic on the Left right now is mad corny. Anarchists and antifa are being targeted by the Trump administration, even if you find them impotent. Ken Klipperstein has written about this stuff. I encourage you to read about the Prairieland trial that just happened or the RICO charges against the Stop Cop City defendants. Over the past 10 years, many anarchists have faced jail time for their participation in social movements that probably wouldn’t have existed in the same way. I faced decades in prison as a teenager for attending an anarchist march (definition of a collective action), even though I barely knew what anarchism was at the time. Anarchists and other leftists in Texas are facing life in prison for going to a demonstration.
"[E]ven the most wild-eyed anarchists share the fundamentally liberal conclusion that if you get rid of certain people, things will change."
Precisely! But wild-eyed anarchists aren't the only ones harboring this misconception. Add to the list Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump and all his flunkies, and a long list of anonymous assassins and power holders who thought that violence could solve everything...
I was getting so annoyed at the coverage and you articulated why when I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Great writing and thinking.
I was in the same place you were concerning this story. Given the number of mass shootings we experience, this is nothing. Perpetrator attempts a mass shooting, nobody dies, suspect is arrested… nothing more to report on.
Thank you for this. If we are supposed to shrug off the murder of elementary school students, I'm not sure why I'm supposed to be extra-worked up over the non-murder of aging millionaires. This is the rule book they gave us. They hate it when it turns against them. The event mainly proved that TV reporters and politicians tend to be the most insufferable "survivors" in a crisis.
Excellent piece. My one issue with it is that I don't think what you imply about Stalin and the Trotsky assassination is quite right. Trotsky was just one person (prominent, to be sure, but so was Bukharin) in a sea of quite literally a million mass liquidation targets. That was of an entirely different order. It's also fundamentally different when those in power are doing the assassinating in a systematic way than when subaltern loners are doing it via one-time-only attempts before being (inevitably) taken down themselves. With regard to Trotsky, if he had been in Russia, he surely would have been subjected to a show trial and execution, but since he had escaped all the way to the Americas, a different approach had to be followed. I can't think of anything Stalin would have enjoyed more than an admission of guilt by Trotsky in a show trial after a stint in Lubyanka.
I also wouldn't take anything that Trotsky wrote too seriously, like Lenin he tended to write one thing and do the other.
Well said. It is definitely the self-importance of the media folk that is behind their overwrought reaction. But I think it is because they are also oblivious, unable to imagine themselves ever being in the orbit of US violence.
Even though news outlets have been reporting about the upswing in US political and state violence––CIA black sites, torture, and extraordinary rendition in the 2000s, Gitmo as a site of US total power, summary execution of people on boats in the Caribbean today, extreme deprivation in detainment centers, the full-court press to build a literal gulag across the US––the DC press seem to have never imagined that they could be caught up in any boomerang effect.
They seem so shocked to see the same violence pointed back at the source, i.e. not just Trump and politicians but the adjacent grandees operating in the seat of US power. There was something darkly comical about all the people in tuxes and ballgowns––preparing to literally eat cake––being so stunned about their proximity to violence.
I wonder about the Venn diagram between attendees at the WHPC dinner and people who were on the ground covering the George Floyd protests. I imagine the former are of the NYT pundit class that was fine when the paper published Tom Cotton's "Send in the Troops" op ed, as opposed to the latter, who were getting tear-gassed and shot in the face with rubber bullets.
There are distinctions within "the press" for sure. The number of journalists who are dying in conflicts abroad is higher, and reporters here are getting roughed up without any apparent consequences for cops and officials.
“…if you discount the decadent New Left groups of the 1970s, who were either totally ineffective or, in the European case, mainly used as tools by cynical Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies to wreak havoc in the West”—that’s discounting a significant bit of history that shaped the left internally, provided a raft of its intellectuals and icons, and defined its public perception for roughly two decades. Do you roll the PFLP and the Japanese Red Army groups into “the European case?” What about the FARC and Shining Path in Latin America? The Kurdish PKK’s period of operating as a terror group overlapped with its Marxist-Leninist era. And the Viet Cong functioned essentially as a terrorist operation, up to trying to assassinate the South Vietnamese prime minister, during the ‘50s and early ‘60s.
Arguably what’s striking about today’s Marxists is that, despite inflammatory rhetoric online, they’ve engaged in unusually little violence.
yeah fair point
Ill just reply that those are all post revolutionary era and failed
except the viet cong a nationalist movement
And also a Marxist one. The PKK was and remains a nationalist movement. So for that matter was the FALN, the Puerto Rican Marxist-Leninists who bombed the Fraunces Tavern (among other locales).
I just don't think you can claim Marxist ideology is a kind of antibody against terrorist tactics. Political individuals and groups engage in terrorism based on some combination of the personal bloodlust of their members and their real or perceived inability to achieve desired aims through other means.
Cole Tomas Allen just shows that liberal ideology isn't either. The guy who shot up the Congressional baseball game in 2017 was, if memory serves, a Bernie bro. Another interesting present-day reality is that political terror *groups* are to be found almost nowhere on the left side of the dial. These have all been lone wolves.
By the way, have you read 'Man's Fate' by Andre Malraux?
I wasn't claiming that
Forgive me, but it does seem like you were saying something similar: that the Marxist emphasis on structural forces and mass mobilization over individual action and influence is intrinsically at odds with the terrorist approach. Which is an interesting argument—and interesting arguments are what I'm subscribed here for—but not one history has borne out.
I should say that '70s/'80s left terror groups, and the striking absence of similar organizations today, are a particular area of interest for me.
I think Shining Path was more a Maoist insurgency, though, like the Naxalites in India.
Sure, that's how their propaganda line went, but the Shining Path went in for the whole terrorist bill of fare: bombings, assassinations, hostage taking, and assaults on civilians.
You can draw a line between guerrilla groups and terror outfits, but the Shining Path pole vaulted over it sometime around 1983.
Oh for sure I just meant that "Marxist political violence" includes Marxist-Leninist urban and rural guerrilla groups like the Red Brigades, FARC, etc and then explicitly Maoist "people's war" groups that have a different understanding of the role of violence in the revolutionary struggle (more a long-term instrument of producing revolutionary power in the rural base).
What this all points up to me is the fundamental malleability of both ideology and tactics. When Trotsky denounced terror, his chief foes were the bomb-throwing and revolver-wielding SRs—who in 1911 I believe would have just taken out Stolypin. (Which, contra Trotsky, did considerable damage to the Tsarist state, due to its acute lack of figures with the requisite human and political capital to manage development). The Bolsheviks also were an urban formation, with the SR program looking toward Russia's peasant masses.
But Mao, banished to the hinterlands, needed the peasants: thus a new genre of Marxist thought and political strategy were born.
The international alphabet soup of leftists of the '70s consisted primarily upper-middle- and upper-class students with little mass base but access to elite targets. Voila! Urban terrorism. All rationalized in a Marxist framework, of course.
The RevComs of Refuse Fascism have great branding but they're honestly kind of annoying lol
Right when the event occurred I opened the NYT. On those little live updates you could tell that Haberman and Swan were nearing climax. Couldn't close the app fast enough.
Violence is very personal, very emotional. You didn't mention the tremendous number of killings, raping, maiming of women by a disgruntled, or somehow dissatisfied, boyfriend, husband, or other entitled male. We elected a president who bragged about assaulting women, was convicted of an assault, and is implicated in a wide ranging trafficking program. I wish the media would spend more time on the real roots of this violence rather than the "motives" as specified by the perp or how they got the gun or whatever. We never make headway. Is it possible to? Can we explore that?
The big counter-example to assassinations upholding the status quo I can think of is Gavrilo Princip assassinating Franz Ferdinand. Arguably because he was a Serbian nationalist he wasn't of the left, but he was acting against the prevailing order, and arguably toppled it in a way no one could have predicted.
The Trotsky quote mentioning anarchists is interesting. Do they historically favor assassinations more than socialists and communists? I'm originally from Idaho, and it was a major story 120+ years ago when ex-governor Frank Steunenberg had his mailbox dynamited in revenge for a mining strike he had crushed in Northern Idaho. It's a wild story, Pinkerton agents tracked down the assassin, who was then represented in court by Clarence Darrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Steunenberg#Assassination?wprov=sfla1
Yeah it's always the anarchists. "Propaganda of the deed."
True that! But the key phrase here is "in a way no one could have predicted." Violence can definitely change the world, but very seldom in the way assassins, anarchists and fascists intend it to.
This brought...quite literally...tears to my eyes. The self involvement of this "not greatest generation" is staggering. Our poor schoolchildren now live through the daily terror of a bad man walking into their classroom with an AK15. And so many have lived...and horrifying DIED... through a real event. Agree with Ganz... get an effing grip.
Really brilliant. And I learned a lot from the quote from Trotsky.
The normies ARE furious.
Yes, I completely agree with your point that killing someone is a poor substitute for real political action an example of which is organizing labor, or something like the No Kings protest or organizing like neighbors did in Minnesota to stop illegal behavior of ICE. And deliver me from prayers as a mawkish response to any outrageous event.
Thank you for finding that wonderful peroration by Trotsky. No more needs to be said on the topic. And thank you for your meditation on the latest circus in which the US media likes to participate.
You willfully misunderstand anarchist history to your detriment, lots of anarchists have advocated mass action alongside the propaganda of the deed. There’s a long storied of anarchists arguing amongst each other about these things, too. Calling anarchist “liberals” when they are the most targeted demographic on the Left right now is mad corny. Anarchists and antifa are being targeted by the Trump administration, even if you find them impotent. Ken Klipperstein has written about this stuff. I encourage you to read about the Prairieland trial that just happened or the RICO charges against the Stop Cop City defendants. Over the past 10 years, many anarchists have faced jail time for their participation in social movements that probably wouldn’t have existed in the same way. I faced decades in prison as a teenager for attending an anarchist march (definition of a collective action), even though I barely knew what anarchism was at the time. Anarchists and other leftists in Texas are facing life in prison for going to a demonstration.
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-state-vs-the-emma-goldman-book-club/
I was quoting Trotsky talking about anarchists in 1911. I was not denigrating anarchists.
Couldn't agree more. I meanderingly tried to get at much of this back in December 2024.
https://jamestalley.substack.com/p/why-i-dont-shoot-people