In 2011, then president Barack Obama announced to great fanfare that Navy Seals had killed terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden. That night, crowds at baseball games and professional wrestling matches broke into chants of “USA! USA!” when they heard the news. There were spontaneous street parties in New York City and Washington, DC.
I didn’t join the merriment. I was and am disturbed by the idea of extrajudicial assassinations carried out far from any war zone. It would have been far better to capture Bin Laden alive so he could stand trial for his crimes.
Even so, I didn’t feel the slightest temptation to memorialize Osama Bin Laden as a great man or whitewash his crimes. It’s possible, and in fact quite easy, to agree that it was bad to kill someone without retroactively sanitizing the victim.
When Luigi Mangione shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson with bullets that had “deny,” “delay,” and “depose” written on them, he was acting out the raw outrage against the health insurance industry felt by huge numbers of Americans across the political spectrum. I can understand why many celebrated. But again, I didn’t.
Killing people is almost always wrong, and it’s certainly wrong when it doesn’t lead to any positive effects. We’ve already very thoroughly tested the theory that these kinds of spectacular acts of individual violence — what used to be called “propaganda of the deed” — will lead the masses to rebel against unjust systems. Assassins around the world, under a dizzying variety of circumstances, have been running that experiment since the nineteenth century, and the results are in. Vigilante violence doesn’t lead to enduring systematic change.
But it’s entirely possible to acknowledge this without…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
