Decapitate and Dethrone
A Fitting Rebuke to the Insurance Industry’s Unjust Delays and Denials?
By
David Gottfried
I deplore Violence.
However, when I consider the assassination of the CEO of that behemothic health insurer, United Health Care, I seriously question blanket condemnations of violence.
Perhaps the death of that insurance company CEO, that glutton of privilege, presages the dawn of a new wave of political and economic resistance ala the anarchist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At that time, people expressed their ire toward unprecedented wealth and income inequality through a spate of assassinations against haughty and hateful Rulers. These anarchists believed in “Propaganda by the Deed,” hoping that each assassination would spark additional assassinations, that each murder would mushroom into more murders until the Proud Tower of European and American empires, both royal and commercial, collapsed in an epic spasm of popular revulsion reminiscent of the Walls of Jericho or the Tower of Babel “tumbling down.”
Indeed, Diamond and Ruby encrusted monarchs bit the dust in swift succession: Tzar Alexander the Second was killed in 1881, Berkman tried to kill the American industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1882, Empress Elizabeth of Austria was stabbed to death in 1898, Umberto of Italy was killed in 1900, U.S. President William McKinley was killed in 1901 and the passing of many more notables made the grisly guillotine of the French Revolution seem very much alive.
Of course, most of us have been advised that violence does not make any sense. I beg to differ. Sometimes, violence is an eminently reasonable route to a redress of grievances.
Our government tells us that Violence Does not Solve Anything. If they really believed that, they would disband the armed forces, and all police forces.
I think I really first understood that our Republic of Laws was a Web of Lies when I was ten years old, in 1968, and I heard President Lyndon Johnson tell us, in his sugary and sickeningly Southern voice (He sounded like an angry bull pretending to be Gomer Pyle) that violence did not solve anything. If that was the case, why was he killing 1000 innocent villagers in South Vietnam per week (This does not even include the hundreds of thousands killed by our bombing of North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia)
Violence has achieved many good things:
How did we destroy the Third Reich ? Did we chant Hare Krishna and meditate about Peace ? (I love George Harrison’s music, but his ideas were often meritless. Unfortunately, because we deify celebrities, we listen to their pompous pontifications as if they were gems of advice from the Delphic Oracle) Did we write Petitions to Hitler urging him to play nice. Of course not, we shot them and bombed them and sent the Nazis on a fast train to Hell.
How did Israel become a State ? Did Zionists send Jewish youth groups to the United Nations to perform Jewish dances and sing “Hava Nigeela.” Did Zionists vote for political parties who supported the Zionists. Actually, in Great Britain, Jews voted overwhelmingly for Labor in 1945, and Labor had professed unswerving support for Zionism, but as soon as Labor got into power it renounced its Zionist convictions. Israel became a state because Jews armed themselves and fought.
How did we end the Vietnam War ? In the early days, opposition to the War, in the United States, was meek and mild and consisted, for most part, of well-reasoned and thoughtful essays and speeches and conversations. As it was bereft of real fire power, it was impotent. However, when it flashed with violent rage, Washington realized that the continued prosecution of the war was not feasible, and America got out.
War and violence, for all their ghastly horror, are two of the most effective agents of social and political change.
Plainly, the government wants us to be non-violent not because it is in our interest; they want us to be non-violent so they will have a monopoly on power and we can be relegated to impotent forms of political action, such as writing letters and essays, that almost no one reads, and supporting candidates who no matter how good they might be at the outset are sooner or later bought off and dominated by fetid fat cats.
Of course, one may argue that if both the government and the citizenry are empowered with weaponry, the result will be hellish, violent anarchy. I cannot deny that. It won’t be a pretty sight. However, anarchy and violence are infinitely better than a smoothly running fascistic system in which people are processed and used, lack agency and autonomy, and have not a single shred of human pride.
Non-Violence Does Not Seem to Work Anymore
Sometimes, nonviolent political action has accomplished good things, such as when FDR got elected, and he gave us the New Deal and later defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan.
However, I am beginning to think that progressive change is impossible. In 2016, I thought Bernie Sanders signaled robust, progressive change. Bernie Sanders made income and wealth inequality his central political issue. However, Bernie Sanders was soon forced to buy into the identity politics obsession of the Democratic Party which holds that virtue is synonymous with membership in an oppressed racial or sexual class. Indeed, years ago, at a forum at NYU, I heard Abbie Hoffman hold forth on what was wrong with the Left. In his unforgettable response, he said that no one will be allowed to hold a leadership position unless that person is a left-handed, black, Jewish lesbian. And although the Spring primaries of 2016 featured the sunburst that was Sanders, the sorrowful autumn consigned us to the penury and poverty of a Trump presidency. And if we had any doubts about America’s emotional decline, her degeneration into the realm of the fascistic was incontestable when she re-elected a man who had tried to invalidate the 2020 election.
Of course, other problems have contrived to slaughter our Democratic traditions: A) The Foxification of the News and the media’s concomitant transformation into something akin to Mussolini’s personal PR machine, B) social media which has a devilish ability to enable the most hideous and hellish ideas and memes to “go viral,” and C) a fascistic reaction to the progressive changes of the post war era in much the same way that French rightists became particularly loud and lethal because of their ire at the election of a Jew, Leon Blum, in 1936, https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/the-stench-of-vichy-in-the-regime.
The Satisfaction the Aggrieved Will Feel Even if Violence Does Not Bring About any Change at All
Being deprived of medical care, because of a miserly and malignant system of insurance, hurts. But some things hurt even more: The feeling that your tormentors have not only hurt you but are savoring your suffering.
I think the American poor feel that they are being laughed at and scorned. Even our political opposition realizes this. (I am reading J.D. Vance’s well received memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and without explicitly saying so, he says that the poor whites of his background believed that rich people were mocking them; I am still trying to figure out how the man with the keen sensibilities of that manuscript can find common cause with Donald Trump)
I knew for a fact that the rich were laughing at the poor in the aftermath of the 2004 election, when Bush beat John Kerry (Kerry was the nauseating, mousey epitome of the pre–Bernie Sanders Democrat). I was reading an article which quoted Grover Norquist, a long-time enthusiast of rancid Republican bullshit, as saying that he believed that now he will be able to get along with Democrats because the 2004 defeat made Democrats a new breed of domesticated farm animals, spayed, castrated and infinitely malleable and mushy.
At least, with this assassination, the rich may finally stop laughing. Maybe, just maybe, they will start to fear for their lives.
Another commenter below puts this in somewhat more offensive terms (hence, perhaps, their handle). I'm here from a comment you up on my own piece, and I note your "self-defence" position. If someone wants to kill you, you will kill them.
But, did Mangioni have a self-defence defence to raise? Can you self-defend someone else? Was Robin Hood a dangerous vigilante? The Mennonites set an example that I suspect is rarely followed, backed by the story of Dirk Willems, a 16th century Dutchman: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/on-conscientious-objection.
In terms of conscientious objection, the question is whether a pacifist would raise a firearm against anyone, even if he is the enemy. You can't test for that. You can't imagine what you would do. You'd need to be in the situation, and to see what you do do. And that could be traumatic. One can advocate for what one believes the morals tell you to do, and for whether the law provides an adequate response. But actually predicting what you yourself would do - if you know with certainty, well done.
On Vietnam, I'd not heard this thing about oil before - if it's so, it will undoubtedly have been a factor: countries that pose no direct material benefit are those in which the CIA engineers a coup; with oil wells, the US sends its own military in.
It was not our resisitance, in whichever form, that brought an end to the Vietnam War: it was the discovery that there was NO offshore oil along the coast of Vietnam, and thus the war was not PROFITABLE! Then the politicians used our resistance as an alibi to divest themselves of an adventure which no longer brought in any money.