The chorus of condemnation was predictable and not in itself a problem: There’s nothing wrong with desiring a world without stochastic assassination attempts, even against political opponents. But when you have Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, Israel Katz of the fascistic ruling Likud Party, tweeting, “Violence can never ever be part of politics,” the very concept of “political violence” is evacuated of meaning.
The problem is not so much one of hypocrisy or insincerity — vices so common in politics that they hardly merit mention. The issue, rather, is what picture of “political violence” this messaging serves: To say that “political violence” has “no place” in a society organized by political violence at home and abroad is to acquiesce to the normalization of that violence, so long as it is state and capitalist monopolized.
As author Ben Ehrenreich noted on X, “There is no place for political violence against rich, white men. It is antithetical to everything America stands for.”
Disagree. Every state will characterize the violence it receives differently than the violence it enacts. Even a well-intended egalitarian state can never equivocate acts of violence against its officers with those done by its officers, because if the state fails to produce an immune response against one attack, it will soon find itself overwhelmed by more. The state has to treat vigilante justice and especially attacks against its officers as illegitimate on principle, or else it will cease to be.
States claim a monopoly on legitimate violence, and I’d even say that’s what makes a state a state. If a given geographic region has a hundred different entities that can enact violence without each others’ permission, you don’t have a state, you have a hundred states.
You cannot ask officers of the state to equivocate violence by and against the state. That’s not their job. That judgement is our job.
(You can also argue that the state shouldn’t exist, but that’s a different and far more interesting discussion than the one the article poses.)
I think you’re viewing the issue from a strategic lens, whereas this article is looking at it from a moral one. Obviously, we can’t expect a state to be even-handed with its application of violence for the very reasons you state here. But obviously… that doesn’t make it okay.
In short, I don’t think you’re actually disagreeing with the article at all.
I agree with everything you’ve written.
And yes, I would argue that the State, in it’s current incarnation, shouldn’t exist, and that is exactly why we should not as citizens acquiesce to this current power grab (albeit an ideological one), attempting to enshrine political violence as legitimately the domain of the State.
If you look at the course of just even US history, you will see that the State has grabbed more and more expansive power than could ever have been imagined, and that the original conception of the role of the government (in its immediate rejection of authoritarian Monarchy) was far less dangerous than it exists as today (yes, it was racist, imperialist, sexist, and violent even back then, but it still is, and now it has nukes and black sites and massive pervasive surveillance, and so much more). But power creep is inevitable; power is how States compete with each other, so of course that power creep also extends to its own citizens.
That one State entity (let alone multiple ones) can truthfully claim to possess the ability to destroy human civilization writ large, and the clear willingness to wield it, should serve as proof that States cannot be trusted to wield violence (which, as you note, States must in order to exist).
But like you said, that’s beyond the scope of the article.