Is Luigi Mangione Morally Superior to Most Soldiers ?
The Alleged Mad Man May be a Freedom Fighter, while the armed authorities arrayed against him seem to be a hybrid of German Shepherds and Humans
By
David Gottfried
Alvin Bragg, the fat and slow-witted attorney whose prosecution of Trump arguably helped Trump win the 2024 election, 1 is trying to pretend that his fat is really muscle by charging Luigi Mangione with first degree murder and “terroristic” acts.
Luigi Mangione killed a CEO because of the manifold miscarriages of justice meted out by insurance companies every single day. Very simply, they make billions of dollars depriving people of health care and abbreviating our life expectancies. Killing is cruel, but the insurance companies kill thousands.
Mangione did not look kindly upon killing, and that’s why he used a gun and not a bomb to commit his revolutionary deed. Indeed, he explicitly said, in the notebook found on his person, that a gun would be better than a bomb because it would preserve the lives of the innocent. So much for Bragg’s assertion that Luigi is trying to terrify us.
Contrast, if you will, Mangione’s decision to kill with the way nations and soldiers kill people.
Mangione’s Killing versus State-Sanctioned killing
While Mangione used a gun, because he did not want innocent people to be killed, nations don’t give a damn about killing innocent people. I suppose video footage of burning human flesh makes the wicked and stodgy old farts who rule the world feel strong and proud.
And so the Western Allies flattened Dresden even though that city was bereft of military targets. Nazi Germany butchered millions of Jews, ethnic Russians and others with the hydrogen cyanide of the camps, systematic starvation, mutilations, and sickening medical experiments. America made millions of Vietnamese civilians refugees by napalming thousands of villages even though Vietnam never attacked America, was much smaller than America and 10,000 miles away from California. States love to murder, often murder for no purpose, and they murder with super sadistic glee. If Luigi Mangione is found guilty of any charges, then Defense Secretary Robert Mc Namara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and several other presidents and high officials warranted death by slow torture.
Mangione killed for a purpose; Most soldiers have no idea why they are fighting the enemy they have been ordered to kill.
The aforementioned fat boy, Mr. Bragg, argued that Mangione was especially malicious and sordid because he had definitely planned the killing and was completely purposeful in what he did.
This did not make Mangione more sinful; rather, his intent to kill without any possibility of personal gain puts him on a higher moral plain than the ordinary, boring cipher of a man who kills because his superior officer told him to kill. (“Freedom fighters” do not reside only within the faded pages of old radical magazines, and Luigi Mangione may merit that storied and glowing characterization.) He killed because he believed in something and wanted to defend that thing from attack, i.e., he believed that people should get good health care, and he sought to destroy the opponents of good health care, the parsimonious adjunct to the undertaker, the insurance company, the harbinger of a miserable and expedited demise.
He, in short, killed with his brain fully alive.
By contrast, most soldiers, whether they be Russian soldiers or American soldiers or Chinese soldiers, are like German shepherd dogs masquerading as human beings. They fight because they have been ordered to fight, no more. Their desire to follow orders scrupulously and completely dominates their intentions and, like dutiful slaves, they don’t ask themselves if the random annihilation of civilian lives is wrong.
Also, most soldiers know nothing of the purported foreign policy disputes between warring states. Indeed, a few decades ago, a study showed that 40 percent of American high school Juniors did not know what century our civil war was fought in. (They go to high school to study football and cheerleading) Given the average American’s paltry knowledge of history and world affairs, he cannot even begin to make an informed decision to fight. (Actually, many Americans who think they are bright know next to nothing about history. I remember that on the 50th Anniversary of December 7, 1941, one of my doctors said to me that it was terrible that the Chinese had attacked us at Pearl Harbor. When I corrected him, noting that the Japanese were the aggressors, not the Chinese, he said, “Chinese, Japanese, same thing.”)
You can give the brainless Americans 20-dollar bars of soap from Park Avenue, and after they have showered you can dry them off with 100-dollar bath towels from Bloomingdales, but they will still be the unwashed and unlettered rabble that Lord Salisbury (No, I do not think that his maid invented Salisbury Steak) bemoaned more than one hundred years ago. They kill for no other reason than social pressure, and the social pressure to kill is no more complex than the social pressure to wear crew socks instead of ankle socks.
And as our wonderful, manly soldiers cease to use their minds, they begin to live in their bodies and to act in their bodies. Like animals, their sensory perception completely eclipses their atrophied human mind, their eyes narrow and focus like an eagle’s, their ears are as acute as those of a rabid bat, and, getting off on the smell of gunpowder, their noses are as potent as a dog’s, smelling-out heroin and sinking its teach into a drug smuggler’s body.
(Sometimes soldiers do wonderful things. Soldiers defeated Hitler. And in the act of doing the most valorous and gallant deeds, they lose much of their humanity)
Insurance Companies are Practitioners of the Fiercest sort of Schadenfreude and commit Murder Compounded by Fraud
Schadenfreude is one of those ponderous, lugubrious German words that remind you that if you are going to make a movie about vampires, make sure half the cast has a German accent.
Schadenfreude means getting happiness or joy from hearing about or witnessing the pain of others. Of course, capitalism is closely related to Schadenfreude. When we are successful capitalists, we make money by taking wealth from others. (Of course, I realize that capitalists dispute this, and I concede that sometimes new wealth, that does not inflict poverty on someone else, is genuinely created, but I think the negative side of the ledger is a lot bigger).
When one makes money in the field of insurance, one makes money by lying and profiting from one’s lies to the point of committing murder:
One lies about the generosity of a certain policy of insurance, one makes money by selling that horrid policy of insurance, and then one serenely clips one’s coupon bonds before one skis in the Swiss Alps, and one enjoys this wealth because the policy one sold will not pay medical care for cancer, and this boosts one’s portfolio and happiness. This is not merely murder; this is murder compounded by Fraud, i.e., one lied (or committed fraud) to sell the policy of insurance, and the policy of insurance will withhold care for cancer.
After an insurance policy is gussied-up by a salesman, it is an evanescent and practically illusory thing, like a maiden in a transparent, silken nightgown so quick to slither out of your tenacious grasp.
Just as the State prohibits and nullifies contracts to buy crack, the state should consider banishing policies of insurance which, besides leaving people in the lurch when they are dying of cancer, are ridiculously costly, much, much more expensive than Medicare (which does not pay hundreds of thousands of people to determine why your claim should be deemed invalid) and seriously undermines our export trade.
Non-Violence is No Longer Working:
Of course, we would, ideally, effect change without violence. However, our political system seems more and more unable to reform itself. While the emotional upheavals of American politics connote hurricanes and tornadoes and constant flux and fight, legislative and political change is as ossified and sclerotic as the ruins of ancient Greece, reminding us of high ideals that have all the force of a wistful whisper.
Years ago, America and the West were able to achieve worthwhile goals.
For example, when France fell to Germany in May 1940, American and British doctors hypothesized that France fell, in part, because the French ate bread from refined white flower, that had been denuded of B vitamins, while Germans ate bread from unrefined flour that was richer in B Vitamins. The doctors reasoned that since the B vitamins were crucial to the nervous system, the French, lacking in B vitamins, suffered subclinical signs of Vitamin B deficiency disease which manifested itself in the almost masochistic politics of France and the myriad French failures after the Germans launched their western offensive.
In those days, government knew how to take care of a problem. By the end of 1942, all flour, bread and pasta, in the United Kingdom and the United States, were fortified with B vitamins. By contrast, we do not accomplish jack shit re gun control, tax reform, and health insurance. Both Clinton and Obama campaigned and won with the pledge that they would give more Americans more necessary health care, and both Clinton and Obama promulgated reforms that maintained the power of the insurance companies and their confiscation of an enormous share of medical spending. Clinton and Obama used government monies to help people buy insurance, and insurance companies continue to deny coverage without justification or excuse.
While Trump should have been sued, first and foremost, for his attempt to negate the 2020 election, stealing government documents and secreting them in Florida, and his scandalous and surreptitious dealings with Russia, some people sued Trump for peripheral matters. Bragg’s suit alleged that Trump made false assertions on various financial statements. Bragg did not show that any persons or entities, public or private, were in any way harmed by these false statements or lost a single red cent. But they were false, and Trump suffered criminal convictions. People reasoned: Liberals couldn’t get Trump for Russia or for trying to stage a coup, so they are going after him for making false financial statements that didn’t harm anyone. This ultimately helped Trump.