The point is
Derrick Jensen on making excuses for murder:
Peter Boghossian is right. This is much of what is wrong with postmodernism, academia, and the postmodern left.
Edit:
I know this is facebook, so my expectations are low already, but Jesus, the responses disappoint me. I’ll make this clear: The point is that NOBODY DESERVES TO BE MURDERED FOR THEIR IDEAS. And more than half the fucking people responding to this post seem pretty clearly to be more appalled by his words than by the fact that he was MURDERED FOR SPEAKING. As a writer of controversial materials who has received boatloads of death-threats by the postmodern left, a postmodern left who calls ME a nazi and a fascist for not believing that men can become women, I have a strong objection to people in any way rationalizing or seeming to rationalize the murder of people for expressing opinions that some people consider fascist. In fact, even if I weren’t the recipient of death threats, I would still object to someone being murdered because people don’t like what he says. I grew up believing, “I may not agree with you (and I may have no interest in listening to you), but I will defend to the death your right to express your opinion (to others).” Now, Jesus, I just read that something like half of all college students feel it’s okay to stop those you disagree with from expressing their opinions. I’m absolutely horrified by the response to the murder of a speaker. And I’m especially horrified by the response to the murder of a speaker by some radical feminists: if you (or JK Rowling) were murdered, do you really think they wouldn’t be calling you a fascist? And in any case, what the hell is wrong with us that for so many of us, our primary public response to the murder of a speaker is to be more appalled by his words than his murder for those words.
I can’t stand Judith Butler, but if she were murdered by people who also can’t stand her words, I would IMMEDIATELY disavow the murder of a writer. If you can’t see the horror of the murder of writers, and if the left can’t see the horror of the murder of writers, then you yourself are authoritarian, and the left is authoritarian. If you don’t like some writer, write a better goddamn fucking book. Do a better job. That’s a writer’s JOB.
I think that is relevant to the dispute we had here last week. I think I agree with it, and I also think I think that we can still talk about the writer’s work without endorsing the writer’s murder. Maybe I’m wrong? Maybe that’s hypocritical? Maybe I’m kidding myself?
I think so too. Someone’s ideas are not suddenly beyond critique because they’ve been killed over them. Ideally, I’m sure the writer would prefer that the discussion he or she started would continue, not that their view would get a free pass because they’ve been killed. Just because you disagree with their ideas, or think they’re horrible, that doesn’t mean you’re going to give their assassin a high five. It shouldn’t mean that the person’s supporters and friends get to win the debate by default, or that opponents get rounded up for arrest as the writer’s murder is instrumentalized to crush opposition to a broader program of authoritarianism the writer may or may not have supported. Bad, harmful ideas are still bad harmful ideas; we can abhor the killing without having to abandon our own position in opposition to those bad ideas.
I think not only can we, but we must. I’ve seen too many times when ‘not speaking ill of the dead’ becomes ‘the dead was the best’. Ronald Reagan, for example. A lot of people have forgotten what he did, what he said, and the kind of president he really was, and elevated him to a saint.
His ideas were benign compared to Kirk’s.
Father Boghossian is full of resentments for his time in academia, and has turned bitter towards “the left.” While he may have salient points about some issues, he is one of the ones that I was referring to in a previous comment on a different topic, this seems to have caused him, and Derrick and others to solidify their position that the left is more dangerous than the right for whatever reason. I don’t claim to know all that’s gone on, and personal relationships that went sour, but ever since he crowed about his own attempt at a Sokal Hoax, I have not been all that interested in what he has to say.
I just posted a piece in Facebook about how those who lecture the left on the response to Kirk’s death do not have the context of his humiliation of black people at any turn he could take, and especially in his participation in the sort of Dunn Nuffin memes that were spread after notable deaths of black people at the hands of the police or white racist attacks.
It’s not our place to tell people who’ve been Kirk’s targets the proper way to respond. It’s incredibly paternalistic and lacks empathy, it refuses to acknowledge the pain he caused people in life. Did he speak up when white people were sharing memes of “Trayvonning” poses laying down on the ground with a Skttles nearby? Did he speak out when people were blaming George Floyd for his own death? He only seems to worry about it now that a white person was killed, but somehow it’s indicative that the left are evil.
I think it would be redundant to start every post about Kirk with a “I don’t like murder” disclaimer, but people insist on it. No one likes murder. But, sometimes there is reason for people to be happy that someone is dead.
We need to stop thinking in terms of left and right. We want the world to fit in our little number line from -20 to +20, but even a three dimensional model does not help illustrate the complexity of human relationships. It’s convenient to stake your position based on your perspective on the left – right scalar that is assigned to them, but there are a few things I have noticed, and especially since I became aware of how people are responding to the trans issue. I had to listen to women to understand the problem and I hadn’t been ready, because all the messaging that I had had was that this was the left position, that gender skepticism is bigotry. And I can see the wall, but I can’t find the loose bricks that I can move in order to break through the message to people who consider themselves correct because they stick to their ideology.
So, when I see people like Lierre, and Derrick, and Peter, post that “here’s another example about the left,” I realize that they have built their own new ideology rather than expanding their awareness. If they have their bones to pick, I get it. But, like Mr. Disaffected, they just move from one pile of bones to a complelely new set of bones and make sure that everyone knows how awful was the other pile of bones.
We have gone from the mind expansion attitudes that excited me as a teenager in the 1970’s (not related to Timothy Leary but being open to what people say on their own experiences) and replaced it with “I know better than you what you should think.” I would like to blame David Horowitz for his attacks on academia that Charlie Kirk and Christopher Rufo have carried on, but I think we are all to blame. We find the position that fits our ideology and stick to it, demanding that people listen rather than engage to learn.
It reminds me a lot of the “All Cops are Bad”/”Defund the Police” thing: it’s luxury-belief horseshit, and it infuriates me, having experienced homelessness and abuse and having experienced a fatherless childhood in a broken home that was shattered by the people who murdered my father in cold blood. Yes, there’s fuck-tons of corruption in the police. No, the answer isn’t “no police! no jails! kumba fucking ya!”. That’s limbic-response, reactionary, turn-your-frontal-cortex-off juvenile undeveloped-brain horseshit. The answer is *fix* the police and *fix* the jails. *More* resources for *better* law enforcement and *better* criminal rehabilitation. The only people naive enough to think crimes will go away if the police go away are people who’ve been sheltered their whole lives from the pure danger that unstable men pose to everyone in their vicinity.
But back to the “murder is justifiable when I’m angry and my primitive lower ape-brain is feeling frightened and having a tantrum” crowd: On every level of reasoning, and in every time frame, it makes no sense to give in to murderous impulses: from cold, calculated realpolitik to emotion-driven mass-market media messaging; from the short term, to the medium term, to the the long term… Politcally-motivated murder virtually always benefits the other side. Martyrs are powerful figures on the political chess board. If you’re stupid enough to gift one to your opponents, you’re guaranteed to lose the game.
Mike – I read your comment so went to Facebook to look for the post you mentioned and didn’t have to look because it was there at the top – which made me feel as if Facebook has hijacked my eyeballs. Borderline creepy.
I also agree that, talk of justifying putting bullets in people aside, there’s no reason to withhold from talking about Kirk’s odious politics and terrible behaviour. It’s awkward, at least in the short term, having those conflicting feelings — wanting to signal clearly that one abhors his murder and that one stands with those who oppose it, while also holding firm in the position that he espoused terrible things and appeared to have terrible motives and was far from what I’d call a model citizen of a modern democratic civilization.
Maybe it’s times like these where we reach for less-judgmental adjectives to try and find common ground: that he wasn’t “pure evil” but rather, say, “misguided” or something? I don’t know. From the little I know of him, he seems to have been a pretty self-serving, bad-faith actor from top to bottom. I struggle to find nice things to say, other than that he should absolutely not have been murdered.
(sorry, my comment keeps growing and growing as I add more thoughts…)
There’s also the fact that liberal political advocacy and conservative political advocacy aren’t symmetrical. Liberalism is eat-your-veggies: it’s an appeal to the better angels of our nature, at the expense of immediate, instinctual gratification. Conservatism — especially Evangelical Christian American conservatism — is pure instinct over intellect. It’s a frightened, frontier mentality: a shotgun and a shout of “get off my property!” where liberalism is happily paying your taxes knowing that today’s sacrifice is tomorrow’s better world for your family and for your neighbours’ alike.
The problem with eat-your-veggies liberalism is that it’s demanding mental work and patience from people, which means by nature it has an obligation to be the better role model. That’s why it’s a pretty consistent fact that liberal politicians suffer from small scandals while conservatives can ride out relatively larger ones. Liberals are perceived as hypocrites when they don’t consistently demonstrate that they’re taking the high road.
Because what’s the point of eating your broccoli if it turns out it’s not even all that much better for you than, say, an orange Cheeto. It has to be much more nutritious, because that’s its main selling point, and it’s competing with junk food and instant gratification.
So acts like murder and cancel mobs and irrational behaviour on the left are a much, much harder sell than such acts coming from the right, for the simple reason that we’re expected to be better than that.
It’s the curse of liberalism: we can’t just be better than the right, we have to be *far, far* better, and obviously so, or people simply won’t vote for us.
Thank you, Arty, and no Ophelia I didn’t put a spell on you.
Yes, I could not stay friends with people who put “ACAB” in their bios. It’s as evil and othering as any form of racism or cultural ostracism. It turns people into targets. I want police accountability, I don’t want any of them to be killed for wearing a badge. While Reservoir Dogs may have been an interesting movie with high drama, the depiction of he torture and murder of a cop just because he was a cop disturbed me greatly.
What happened in Minneapolis in 2020 is that once again the MPD responded more to the union than it did to the people who had been affected by the way that George Floyd was killed, and that the EMT’s merely left his body on the street rather than attend to him to try to revive him. There was deliberate provocation of peaceful protests to turn them into riots, and some of it was done by the police who were shooting rubber bullets directly at people and reporters. The media message turned from the historical nature of the conflict between the Minneapolis government and black residents, and the unequal treatment they receive at the hands of the police. There were outside agitators who started fires for this purpose, and that’s not conspiracy. They have been convicted of it.
But the message that people take is that the Left stoked violence in 2020. None of the root causes have been examined. And here we are with the President declaring that Antifa is a criminal organization, and “reasonable people all too ready to chime in at how awful the left are. It raises the temperature. I can see it happening all too clearly. This is what Trump needs. Riots, and even though we must protest, we need to be on guard for those who will turn the protests into riots.
This topic brings to mind a number of things that are related in my mind, if not in anyone else’s.
JK Rowling was verbally attacked and threatened. People talking about it seemed frequently to say “I don’t care for her writing, I didn’t like Harry Potter, but…”
Harvard University was attacked by Trump and his lackeys, and the university resisted doing what was demanded, under threat of restrictions and reduced funding. Many people seemed to find it necessary to say, “Harvard has all these problems, I disagree with what they were doing, but…”
Jimmy Kimmel was recently (temporarily) pushed off the air. People found it necessary to say “He’s not funny, but…”
There is nothing whatsoever wrong with criticizing Kirk’s statements and expressed views, or the writing of Harry Potter, or the actions of Harvard, or the comedy of Kimmel. There seems to be some unspoken assumption, though, that if you defend XYZ you must therefore like XYZ, so people take pains to clarify, right then and there, at the moment of expressing defense, that this is not the case. Maybe that kind of assumption is widespread, and so must be countered immediately. Or perhaps the fact that XYZ is currently noteworthy means all topics about XYZ are equally noteworthy right now. I don’t know. Sometimes these discussions about XYZ feel like two valid conversations that don’t really need to happen at the same time, but that’s just the way I think about things. Many other people merge topics together that to me seem better separated. I get in trouble with that all the time.
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