Political Violence

Reflections from the 1920s and 1930s

What to make of the assassination attempt?

I am sharing a few thoughts about where we are, based on assassinations during the interwar period, the 1920s and 1930s.  It is distant enough that perhaps we can attend to the examples without too much emotion, and yet close enough to be useful.

We learn that violence that starts on one corner of the far right often ricochets.  We find that the important threshold is the enabling of the violence.  And we realize is what we do afterwards that counts the most.

None of this makes the outcome of a horrid act completely predictable.  But it does help us to see how some things that will predictably be said might be unhelpful and untrue. 

Some of Donald Trump’s supporters, including one right-radical senator and one right-radical congressman, were quick to blame the Democrats.  (This is also, of course, Moscow’s line).

Their reasoning might seem intuitive, and clearly did seem intuitive to many people. If a radical-right politician such as Donald Trump is the victim of an assassination attempt, should we not presume that the perpetrator is on the radical left?

No, we should not.

That sort of presumption, based on us-and-them thinking, is dangerous.  It begins a chain of thinking that can lead to more violence.  We are the victims, and they are the aggressors.  We have been hurt, so it must have been them.  No one thinking this way ever asks about the violence on one’s own side. 

And this way of thinking is also very often erroneous.  The history of the far right tells a different story, one in which violence often refracts within and around a political movement that endorses it.

This afternoon I passed by the Austrian parliament, where the chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was assassinated ninety years ago.  Dollfuss had introduced political violence into the political system, and was very much ruling from the far right.  And he died by political violence nonetheless, by the hand of people who found him not radical enough.

In March 1933, Dollfuss dissolved the Austrian parliament, bringing electoral democracy to an end.  He transformed his political party (and a few other groups, and a right-wing paramilitary) into a new Fatherland Front.  The Fatherland Front government crushed the Left with armed force.  Dollfuss began to build a regime on the model of Italian fascism, defined in Christian nationalist terms.  That was not enough for the most extreme elements of the Austrian right. In July 1934 a group of Nazis dressed as policemen made their way into the parliament, shot Dollfuss, and let him bleed to death.

Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany a few weeks earlier than Dollfuss in Austria.  He too crushed the Left, grouping socialists and communists as “Marxists” and placing them in concentration camps.  He represented the extreme right in German politics.  On the streets, Hitler’s cause was pushed forward by the violent SA (Sturmabteilung), led by Ernst Röhm. Hitler’s rise to the office of chancellor was enabled by conservatives and militarists.  They believed, wrongly, that Hitler’s violent rhetoric would serve their interests.  In the “Night of the Long Knives,” Hitler had Röhm and many of his men assassinated, along with others who had helped bring him to power.

A drastic case of right-wing murderousness in the interwar period was among the various elements of the Romanian far right.  The twists and turns here would take too long to describe. In brief: the fascists who themselves glorified violence were attacked by others on the far right.

To be sure, not all would-be assassins of the period were on the right.  A German carpenter tried to kill Hitler.  A marble worker threw a bomb at Mussolini’s car. 

And the general point about how violence, once authorized, can turn in an unexpected direction, also applies to the far left of the 1920s and 1930s.  A number of Josef Stalin’s fellow Bolsheviks, who endorsed and applied political violence to come to power between 1917 and 1922, were then killed in the name of that revolution in the 1930s. 

That, if anything, just confirms the general point.  We might be tempted to think that violence against one side must come from the other side.  But the bloody genie, once unleashed, often stays close to home.  Those who have made violence normal are especially vulnerable, because they will always have colleagues or followers who think they have not gone far enough.

Of course, not all right-wing assassins killed their fellow right-wingers.  Eligiusz Niewiadomski murdered the centrist Polish president in December 1922.  Niewiadomski seems to have been an unstable personality, whose dreadful beliefs were brought towards action by the media around him. 

As far as we can tell right now, the man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump was a registered Republican gun enthusiast.  As more details emerge, the image will clarify.  Assassins are individuals, and their motivations can sometimes be surprising or turn out to be obscure and debatable.

At this point, it is just worth noting that it would not be surprising if the man who tried to assassinate Trump was, like Trump, a right-wing radical.  That would be typical of the United States, where most terrorist acts come from the far right.  It would also be historically normal.  Trump, like extreme-right-wing politicians in the past, has legitimated violence. 

Nothing in recent American political life resembles Trump’s call for “Second-Amendment people” to kill Hillary Clinton, his mockery of Paul Pelosi after an attempted murder, his belittling of Gretchen Whitmer after a kidnapping attempt, the stochastic violence he directs against critics to intimidate them and against his fellow Republicans to keep them in line, the brutal language of his rallies since 2016, his vocal admiration for leaders known to be mass killers, and his violent attempt to overthrow constitutional rule in January 2021.

What matters more than the action, though, is the reaction.  We should all condemn political violence.  We should all proclaim that this next election will be settled by the number of votes, rather than by threats, coups, beatings, or murders.  The media should not spread messages of hatred and baseless conspiratorial thinking.

And we should all be aware of the temptations of martyrdom.

Whatever actually happens in an act of political violence, there will be someone, somewhere, who claims that victimhood means innocence, and that innocence justifies more violence by hands that remain ever blameless.  This sort of logic is already all over the internet.  That move was made in all the fascist cases.  When the German Nazis took over Austria in 1938, they raised a monument to their martyrs.  The Romanian fascists killed to avenge theirs. 

Trump is of similar mind: he refers to the convicted criminals who stormed the White House as “martyrs” and makes them part of his rallies.  He constantly refers to himself as a victim.

One can only hope that he does not escalate such rhetoric, or direct blame where it does not belong.  Doing so won’t help him win an election, but it will make further violence more likely.