13/07/24
Assassination attempt
Target: Donald J.Trump
Donald Trump, former president of the United States and the Republican candidate running in this year’s general election against Joe Biden, was speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday when he was shot in an assassination attempt that shocked the world.
While Trump got away from the rally relatively unscathed, minus a wound to his right ear, one bystander was killed in the shooting, and two others were critically injured, caught up in the crossfire of a fight against democracy.
The suspect?
20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks (Crooks is now dead having been shot by a Secret Service sniper on scene)…
Whether you agree with Trump’s politics or not (for context, I am writing this as someone who is vehemently against the Republicans), nothing justifies taking another human being’s life.
Not only were audience members quick to blame the Democrats for the attack, with Republican Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia going one step further in his accusation that Biden had personally ‘ordered’ the attack (Collins cites a report within which Biden used the phrase ‘It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye’,* during a call to donors on July 8th, as evidence of this), but Donald Trump himself was perhaps also too responsive in the immediate aftermath of the shocking.
*(There is no evidence that Joe Biden was involved in the shooting of Donald Trump. The quote above has been taken out of context and is referring to beating Trump in the election)…
Donald Trump, before being taken away by the Secret Service following the shooting, lifted his fist in the air, mouthing the words, ‘fight fight fight.’
Fight with whom?
Fight for what?
Trump, in calling for his audience members to ‘fight’, can be perceived in one of two ways…
1) He is trying to portray himself as a Martyr, someone who is killed or made to suffer because of their political beliefs, hoping that such a display of ‘strength’ and ‘tenacity’ will win him votes…
or
2) As a way to incite ‘revenge’ on the opposition (the democrats/Joe Biden)…
Alas, we cannot match violence with violence and hope for peace.
Can someone remind Trump of this, please?…
As former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wrote following the attack:
In a democracy, you must be able to speak freely and stand for what you believe in. Violence and intimidation must never be allowed to prevail.
Trump poses a threat to liberalism, not democracy. Democracy can exist without liberalism.
As Republicans are quick to brandish Democrats as communists, so too are Democrats quick to brandish Republicans as fascists. It is such fearmongering that drives people to take drastic action…
The condemnation of the attack, however, has subsequently been coming in thick and fast, from all sides of the political spectrum/from all sides of the globe…
‘There’s no place in America for this kind of violence. Everybody must condemn it’, wrote President Biden, a sentiment that was echoed by Obama too when he wrote,‘There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy.’
An attack on Trump is not just an attack on Trump, but an attack on democracy.
If we vow to kill anyone whose opinions differ from our own, then we can no longer say that we live in a democracy.
We can no longer berate authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin for killing people with opposing views, (Alexei Navalny, for example), when condoning the attack on Trump essentially makes us just as bad…
We cannot condemn violence by adopting the very mindset that causes it- an ‘us vs them’ mentality.
‘He didn’t deserve it but…’
There can be no ‘but’ when it comes to our right to have and voice opposing views, however controversial, when having different opinions is a fundamental right of living in a democratic society.
To echo Biden’s words regarding what happened to Trump, whatever your political stance, ‘everybody must condemn it.’
Pain cannot be used in pursuit of peace.
An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.
– Gandhi
ANARKISS 