Another Russian legislator fell from a hotel balcony.
He had criticized the Ukraine war.
He was in trouble. He had written, then deleted, a WhatsApp message about Russian bombing in Ukraine:
“It’s extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror.”
That was a mistake. Pavel Antov was a member of Putin's political party in the Russian legislature. He was chair of the committee on agriculture and ecology. He was a wealthy meat magnate.
It was the second death in two days. One of Antov's travel companions to India, Vladimir Bidenov, was found dead at the same hotel two days prior. Local police speculated that Bidenov had a stroke and Antov died by suicide, depressed over the unexpected death of his friend. Yeah, maybe.
These hard-to-explain deaths of Putin critics and potential rivals are taking place almost once a week, which goes beyond weird. I listed these in a post on December 21, "A series of accidental deaths." Now there are two more. People in the Russian political class don't think they are accidents. They think they are assassinations. People who criticize Putin have heart attacks and fall from heights.
I consider what we are seeing in Russia a warning for the United States. No, American politicians and business leaders aren't mysteriously falling out of high windows, not yet. But we are experiencing a gradual change in our political environment. Political violence is getting normalized. It is being excused, minimized, and contextualized into a framework where violence is necessary and just. Mainstream leaders are voicing it or tolerating it being voiced. Some of this is Trump and his brand as the bad boy rule-breaker. In a crooked and violent world it takes a crooked and violent leader. But it isn't just Trump. It is widespread within the GOP.
Meanwhile, people on the populist right routinely make references to "2nd Amendment remedies." This isn't fighting British redcoats. It is taking arms against American military and law enforcement. Militia groups plot to kidnap a Michigan governor. The response is what one gets from a crowd at a ball game. Kill the ump! Cheer the home team!
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| CNN |
Trump goes to Michigan, criticizes Governor Whitmer, and leads Michigan crowds chanting "Lock her up." Lock her up, not the kidnap plotters.
The political left made its own moral and political mistakes. The George Floyd murder gave the left a chance to make a good, careful point about racial violence in America. Instead, too often, Democratic leaders made a careless point. Left leaders did not adequately distinguish between peaceful protest and street violence. Biden said the right things, but Biden cannot command public attention as a spokesperson. Democratic mayors and governors acted torn. Democrats failed to read the room. The public will tolerate peaceful protest. It fears violence and disorder. Democrats couldn't bear to criticize their own presumed allies who said that violence was the inevitable response to injustice. Street violence nearly cost Democrats the presidency in 2020 and it remains a drag on the party still.
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| Election night, California, 1968 |
12 comments:
According to one of the pundits commenting on this blog, the murder of Putin’s critics is no different than the crackpot conspiracy theory attributing 50 murders to the Clintons. It sounds like Putin is catching up fast. This illustrates how easily supposedly intelligent people can deceive themselves into believing whatever they want, regardless of the facts.
Violence sucks. The GOP has been instrumental in making guns designed to quickly kill as many people as possible available to all and is complicit in a violent attempt to overthrow the government. Ergo, the GOP sucks.
It’s true that violence is perpetrated by people of various political persuasions but according to the Anti-Defamation League, right-wing extremists were responsible for 75% of extremist-related murders in the last ten years.
I acknowledge Peter’s wider point. Polarization on both sides is taking us towards bad and potentially violent possibilities.
But I have to take issue with this:
Kyle Rittenhouse becomes a GOP poster boy for self-help and vigilante justice.
Kyle Rittenhouse wanted to defend local businesses from one of 2020’s “mostly peaceful” destructive protests. He was in no way an aggressor.
Rittenhouse shot three guys who were attacking him. One of the attackers even pulled a gun on him. Rittenhouse’s actions were unequivocally self-defense. The jury spent days considering all the evidence, and that’s what they found.
Many on the left criticized Rittenhouse in hot takes based on inaccurate summaries of the situation, primarily because Rittenhouse defender himself with a weapon they hate: the dreaded “assault rifle”.
The Rittenhouse case demonstrates how polarization can destroy accurate understanding in favor of political advantage. We need more dispassionate looking at the facts and less immediate emotional reactions.
What needs to happen is a black man promoting violence while walking around with a machine gun. Maybe suggest Trump should be executed along with Tucker Carlson . Wonder how the GOP crowd would react to that? I often think the best way to limit guns is to have minorities take them up in a highly visible fashion. Walk around Walmart with a 357 in a holster with a tshirt that says hang Donald Trump.
I guess that is falling into their behavior, but I can’t help feeling satisfaction in suggesting it.
Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager, bought an assault rifle illegally and took it across state lines to a BLM protest, which he opposed. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, that’s right – he killed somebody. It’s easy to see why he became such a hero to the far-white.
The comment by Michael Trigoboff helps document my point. We are now normalizing political violence.
An 18 year old goes into a riotous area, unasked by the landowners or the police, carrying an automatic firearm. Not surprisingly, he encounters people also holding firearms. It is a dangerous, but legal situation until the moment any of the armed people think the other person is starting to point their firearm toward them, at which point each of them have a legal kill opportunity. Had any of the three people Rittenhouse shot fired first and killed Rittenhouse, then that person could claim "self defense." Rittenhouse was there for a political purpose--opposing BLM associated violence. The people he shot were there for a political purpose of protesting unjust policing. I don't know that any of the four people were committing a criminal act at the moment they were shot, although all of them were on private property and may have been guilty of trespassing. Rittenhouse made no claim that the people he shot were endangering others or doing a felony at the moment he shot them. The act which justified being killed was the act of swinging a gun somewhere toward a person who, at that moment then had a justifiable fear of being killed. Whoever shot first was the winner. Kyle shot first.
Similarly, Kyle could have been in the Capitol area, being jostled by large men with a menacing demeanor, arguably an assault and battery, been in fear of his life and started shooting some of them. Some people near the shot people might have turned on Kyle to stop him and then Kyle would have had more justification to shoot and kill his way out of trouble. It is all self defense.
Trigoboff defends Rittenhouse. I called it "self-help vigilante justice." Had I been there personally, walking around with an AR15, looking to keep order, the moment I saw an 18 year old with an automatic rifle shooting people, I would have presumed I had a right and duty to stop a dangerous person Self defense.
I perceive that whole situation as bad. I consider Trigoboff's defense of Rittenhouse to be confirmation of my argument. The idea that we need more people--this time Black ones--walking around shooting people in places of trouble, thereby evening the score of both White and Black people shooting people who frighten them, is a step in the wrong direction. We need fewer Kyles, of any color, not more of them.
Peter Sage
I'm glad you feel that juries always get it right. That started with the State vs O.J. Simpson, right?
We are a country of laws until the law is no longer respected by the majority. Then, it is the brutal physical law that might make it right.
Sigh. Readers here are used to either low-wattage or wilfully inaccurate reading comprehension from the likes of poor Mike. Thanks to the primacy-and-recency effect of much MSM reportage, wherein corrections and retractions, when they are offered, get printed at the end of articles, compared with Page One, he is unaware (to be charitable) that the illegal-purchase and "state lines" Rittenhouse canards were dropped by prosecutors because never applicable. By-the-numbers cant based on desired partisan outcome is par for that course.
More troubling is the blanket claim from Mr. Sage in his comment reply, "Had any of the three people Rittenhouse shot fired first and killed Rittenhouse, then that person could claim 'self-defense'". From the scare quotes around "self-defense" (as if an ad hoc notion?) to what follows, excepting "I don't know", it's an error-soaked partisan pastiche of facts and law. If he's saying anyone can "claim" self-defense, okay. That doesn't place Rittenhouse's antagonists that night in the same legal and factual position as Rittenhouse.
If we are ever going to overcome political polarization in this country, it will have to be based on agreed-upon facts. Here are a few facts that no one who is informed can disagree with:
Kyle Rittenhouse did not buy the gun illegally. He did not actually buy the gun at all. His friend, who was over 18, bought it legally. His friend may be prosecuted for transferring the gun to Rittenhouse, but Rittenhouse did not do anything illegal.
Rittenhouse did not transport the gun across state lines. The gun was at his friend's house in Wisconsin.
Rittenhouse apparently never aimed his gun at anyone until he shot those three people in totally justified self-defense.
Rittenhouse was a wannabe medic. He was apparently not there intending to enforce law and order with his weapon.
Rittenhouse's weapon was semi-automatic, not automatic.
Rittenhouse's choice to be at that event carrying a very visible weapon was not the smartest choice. But that does not justify the over the top condemnation piled upon him by the mainstream media. I suspect a lot of that condemnation was caused by how much he happened to look like a right-wing militia member (which he wasn't), causing a massive jump to inaccurate conclusions by the anti-gun liberals who populate the mainstream media.
Sigh. Poor Mr. Dudgeon sounds like a lawyer. At 17, Kyle Rittenhouse was too young to legally purchase the firearm, so a friend bought it for him. In a plea deal, the friend pleaded no contest to a minor charge and was fined. As a result, the only consequence for the gratuitous death of the two men Rittenhouse killed – the value of their lives as determined by the courts – was the $2000 fine paid by his accomplice.
Or an angry, unhinged and entitled minority (not a majority) of the population. Except that isn't "making it right," it is rule by force, which only appeals to barbarians.
The fact is that two men would still be alive if it weren't for a teenager at a demonstration with an AR-15. So-called conservatives seem to be OK with that, which proves Mr. Sage's point. Q.E.D.
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