Don't Shoot, Organize!

Between the tactics of organizing the working class or engaging in political violence, it's very clear to me which way is the way forward.

Three weeks ago I got an email from someone who was inquiring about whether I had ever updated a song I recorded in 2002, "I Have Seen the Enemy," replacing the target of this song, which might be accurately understood to be a presidential assassination fantasy, with a more contemporary one.

It felt like a very long time between hearing about the shooting of Donald Trump and learning of the identity of the shooter.  I was somewhat relieved that it was not anyone I knew. 

Listening to news reports about the shooting, and backgrounders on recent political violence in the USA, the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband in San Francisco has been mentioned often.

I certainly hope that I can't take any credit for inspiring whatever David DePape was trying to accomplish that night in the wee hours of October 28th, 2022 at the Pelosi residence, but DePape is reportedly a fan of my music.

There are a lot of contemporary and historical social movements, political struggles, and events that I think are very worthy of writing songs about, and remembering, for so many reasons.  I've written hundreds of songs about these sorts of things, and that's undoubtedly connected to what would seem to be the fact that people who like my music are disproportionately likely to spend time in prison or die an early death in the course of their militant political activities of one kind or another.

People talk about political rhetoric leading to political violence.  Without laying any claim to my own political rhetoric directly leading to any political violence, I have no doubt that political rhetoric is a factor that leads to political violence, among many other factors.

As a songwriter, I have long rejected the notion that it is the job of the storyteller to sum up the moral of the story at the end.  I have long been of the opinion that the most effective way to tell a story is just to tell the story.  Let your listeners or readers come to their own conclusions about it.  I have written a lot of songs telling stories about strikes and other forms of mostly nonviolent collective action ("Winnipeg," "Cordova," "East Kilbride"), but I've also written a lot of songs about armed uprisings ("Cheese and Bread," "Rojava," "Up the Provos"), as well as songs about desperate, very violent acts such as suicide bombings ("Promised Land," "Jenin"), and even political assassinations or fantasies thereof ("Ram Mohamed Singh Azad," "I Have Seen the Enemy").

As a teller of stories about the world we live in and also stories from history, I think it's vitally important for us to understand what gave rise to many different acts of violence that might seem extreme and hard to make sense of -- whether we're talking about understanding the factors that gave rise to the existence of a group like Islamic State from the ruins of occupied Iraq, whether we're trying to comprehend what would motivate a certain group of Italian anarchists to carry out a campaign of assassinating or attempting to assassinate top US government officials in the early twentieth century in the wake of the horrible massacres of mostly Italian miners and their families in Colorado, or why a survivor of a massacre in India would spend the rest of his life getting himself into the right position so he could assassinate one of the top colonial authorities ruling Punjab at the time of the atrocity.

A lot of stories, events, and decisions made by people today and historically are well worth understanding, and even celebrating in various ways, whether or not they represent our way forward as a society or as a social movement or political struggle of one sort or another today.

While I'm fully cognizant that the people who listen to my music don't necessarily read my essays, while I know that I intentionally wrote a lot of these songs to be open-ended in terms of my conclusions about the event I'm writing about, and while I'm really glad different kinds of people with different political viewpoints can sometimes all appreciate the same song, in the wake of the shooting of Donald Trump I feel inclined to share a few thoughts about tactics.

In so many of the instances I have written about, political violence takes place in a violent atmosphere.  Armed rebellions and campaigns of assassinations of government officials have historically taken place in instances where violent repression and massacres were the norm, where less violent forms of organizing were virtually impossible.  In such an atmosphere, such extreme tactics have sometimes had popular support and have sometimes been very effective, resulting in things like the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Russian Revolution, etc.

Barring such extreme circumstances as Tsarist Russia during World War 1 or the atmosphere in China after the departure of the Japanese Empire, in places where all options but violent ones have not been exhausted, violent tactics tend to backfire horrendously and be very counterproductive.

It should not be the least bit surprising to anyone that the notion of assassinating a prominent political figure, especially a leader frequently denounced as a fascist and the end of democracy, etc., would be one that would get some traction.  Anyone who grew up in post-World War 2 America has been bottle-fed the concept of going back in time in order to assassinate Adolf Hitler, in order to prevent the rise of fascism in Germany and all the death and destruction that followed.

While exploring fantasies of assassinating Hitler and how that might have impacted the world may be a perfectly valid subject for fiction of all sorts as well as a fine subject for historical conjecture, I think it's really vital to understand that it's largely based on so much liberal nonsense.

Only if you have swallowed the wildly inaccurate, high school textbook version of world history can you believe in the fantasy of changing the course of world events by assassinating a political leader such as Adolf Hitler, or, I would add, Donald Trump -- or, for that matter, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Narendra Modi, Bolsonaro, etc.

Which is not to say that assassinating prominent figures doesn't change world events -- I'm sure it can and has done just that.  But when it comes to people who represent a large and growing political tendency or political party, especially a popular political tendency within a party that's already one of the ruling parties of the land, regardless of how horrible the party and its policies or intentions may be, there will be people to replace any leaders that get assassinated.  And whether or not an assassination attempt is successful, it will tend to increase the popularity of the party or the movement the assassinated leader represented.

People who fantasize about assassinating such political leaders are everywhere -- how could they not be?  It all fits neatly within the liberal narrative, that individual leaders matter, while all the forces that actually brought them to power are much less important.

In our neatly- and ridiculously-summarized high school textbook version of history, the rise of fascism in the world was mainly a German phenomenon, and not so much a German problem but a Hitler problem.  It was all about this crazy, charismatic megalomaniac, and if he hadn't been on the scene, everything would have been fine, and all those tens of millions of people dead and continents laid to waste wouldn't have happened.

In actual historical reality, the rise of fascism was a response to the inadequacies of capitalism and neoliberal democracies to provide for the basic needs of the people in so many countries, very much including Germany, but also lots of others.  What stopped fascism from taking over in places like England or the US at that time had nothing to do with a lack of charismatic leaders on the right or the left -- there were plenty of both, in both countries.  What was especially different in different countries were the broader historical and material circumstances they found themselves in.

One of the factors that is often very significant, and even decisive, in defining those broader historical circumstances are social movements.  The cooperative movement in Scandinavia that gave rise to the specifically Scandinavian forms of social democracy led to stable societies where, throughout the twentieth century, fascism was never particularly popular.  With no shortage of charismatic leaders there, fascism just failed to ever really take root, not counting the years of German occupation.

The history of the rise of fascism in Germany illustrates brilliantly how widespread political violence can contribute to the popularity of fascism, rather than suppressing it.  This is precisely why the rightwing media is especially fond of stories about chaos on the streets.  This is why they loved to give blanket coverage to the protests and dumpster fires in Portland, Oregon in 2020.  It's not that people don't have lots of great justifications to protest, to riot, or to engage in political violence.  But justifications or explanations don't equal effective actions.

Political assassinations, political violence, attacking politicians, attacking or shouting obscenities at members of the right or at Republican Party events (or Democratic Party ones, for that matter), are tactics that will only tend to increase the popularity of authoritarian solutions in society at large.  What's needed, according to my analysis of the current atmosphere in society, and from my understanding of historical precedent, is a lot less outrage, and a lot more mutual understanding and effective organizing.

An organized, vibrant, welcoming, inclusive, musical left movement needs to bring society together to fight for common goals like actually affordable housing, health care, education, and an end to militarism and wars of empire.

An organized, astute left movement needs to understand the appeal of people like Trump and Vance talking about the farmers and the workers, and respond with on-the-ground organizing of unions of workers, tenants, farmers, and the homeless.

This is the kind of organizing that led the United States on a notably different path than Germany's during those crucial first few decades of the twentieth century -- not assassinating the opposition, but organizing the working class.