By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, October 17, 2021
In the eventful years between 1822 and 1922, nearly
1 million British subjects died in war, but not a single member of Parliament
died in a political assassination. After the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson
by Irish republicans in 1922, there passed more than a half century before the
next assassination of an MP: the murder of Airey Neave, also by Irish
republicans, in 1979. Those were bloody years, too — nearly a half-million
British dead in World War II, more than 1,000 dead in Korea, 1,200 in
Indonesia, hundreds in Palestine and Malaya, and more in other, smaller
conflicts.
With the stabbing murder of Conservative MP David Amess
at Belfairs Methodist Church on Friday, two MPs have been assassinated in five
years. In 2016, it was Labour MP Jo Cox, shot and then stabbed by a man
shouting “Britain first!” — a
slogan with a familiar shape, and also the name of a rightist political
organization in the United Kingdom.
Cox’s assassin was a friendless misfit who spent his days
on the Internet reading about mass shootings, and was an avid collector of Nazi
memorabilia and newspaper clippings chronicling the crimes of Anders Behring
Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist. (Breivik, who now prefers to be called
Fjotolf Hansen, killed eight people in Oslo with a bomb before gunning down 69
victims at a summer camp. He now spends his time complaining about the
“inhumane” conditions in his Norwegian prison.) The BBC reports that the Amess
assassination is being investigated as Islamic terrorism and has identified the
killer as Ali Harbi Ali, a British man of Somali background.
Amess was something unusual in Parliament: a pro-life
Catholic, also noted for his interest in animal-welfare issues and his vocal
criticism of English anti-Semitism.
American progressives may be scandalized to hear it, but
you can do a great deal of damage without easy access to firearms. The Evening
Standard now has a standing header: “London
Stabbings.” Norway has been shocked this week by a terrorist massacre —
the alleged perpetrator was a radicalized Muslim convert — in Kongsberg,
carried out with a bow and arrows. But Americans should know better: Far more
of us are murdered each year by means of fists and blunt objects than by
so-called assault rifles. While we argue about the right to keep and bear arms,
we apparently cannot be entrusted with the right to keep and bear hands.
But, aren’t these the best of times? In our time, far
fewer people are dying in wars than at any other time in human history. Before
the Industrial Revolution, the murder rate in Europe was something like 30 times what it is today, maybe more. Most
other forms of violence, both official and private, have declined dramatically,
too. So have deaths from famine and many preventable diseases and chronic
conditions.
If this is peace, why does it hurt so much?
Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations
begins his new book, The Age of Unpeace, with a provocative simile:
Great power politics has become
like a loveless marriage where the couple can’t stand each other’s company but
are unable to get divorced. And as with an unhappy couple, it is the things
that we shared during the good times that become the means to harm during the
bad ones. In a collapsing marriage, vindictive partners will use the children,
the dog, and the holiday home to hurt each other. In geopolitics, it is trade,
finance, the movement of people, pandemics, climate change, and above all the
internet that are being weaponized.
In a sense, the macro and the micro imitate and
recapitulate each other. MP David Amess was assassinated in a church while
conducting what the British call a “constituent surgery,” something like a
professor’s “office hours” but for an elected leader. Political assassins and
mass killers (who may or may not have a political agenda) weaponize the public
space, turning the locus of shared community into the locus of fear and
domination. Terrorists operate in the same way. So do the neo-Maoist bullies
chasing around Senator Kyrsten Sinema. So do the imbeciles chanting “Fu** Joe Biden!” at sporting events. On
the personal level as on the global level, to be alive in our time is to be
connected — like it or not. One of the things to which we are connected is a
vast technological apparatus that amplifies the reach, range, voice, and power
of individuals and small groups of people, from philanthropists to mass
murderers.
Leonard and his colleagues at the ECFR are engaged in
trying to work out how nation-states (and multinational confederations such as
the European Union) go about existing in that connected world, achieving
genuine peace or, short of that, keeping the casualties of unpeace to a
minimum. But because foreign policy is generally a hostage of domestic politics
(this is especially true in the United States), those macro considerations are
very much bound up with events and personalities at the micro level. The weaponization
of immigrants and refugees that Leonard writes about is part of a single
complex phenomenon that includes everyone from Anders Behring Breivik to Steve
Bannon, who is on his way to criminal charges for refusing to comply with
subpoenas in Congress’s investigation of the events of January 6. The forces
that warp the minds and souls of figures such as Breivik — and, it may turn
out, the assassin of David Amess — also warp the minds and souls of nations.
They can flip elections, too.
Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman
and full-time Donald Trump sycophant, describes himself as a right-wing
“Leninist.” About that much, if not much else, he is telling the truth. Lenin
understood terror to be good in and of itself. When the Russian revolutionaries
proposed to outlaw capital punishment, he overruled them. “How can you make a
revolution without executions?” he demanded. Lenin had other ideas: “We shall
return to terror and to economic terror.” Like the Bannon-aligned
nationalist-populists who sneer at conservative concern for procedure and the
rule of law, Lenin proclaimed that his program was “unrestricted power based on
force, not law.”
So, the voters in David Amess’s constituency have their
say, but, then, so does his assassin, who acts with “unrestricted power based
on force, not law.”
There is a certain superficial attraction to that for a
certain kind of person. In practice, it is only violence and tyranny. But there
is an alternative.
Call it the Washington Consensus, globalist
neoliberalism, capitalism, or whatever you like — the system of interlocking
institutions and protocols that developed in the years after World War II and
flourished at the end of the Cold War did not produce a utopia. It was never
meant to. And it is having a hard time standing up to the Age of Unpeace. But
it does provide the basic tools for decent, fruitful relations between and
within nations: a rules-based international order, the rule of law at home,
protection of civil liberties, a light hand on enterprise and trade, freedom of
speech and a free press, regular legal procedure in both criminal and civil
matters, democratic accountability. The catch is that these tools have to be
cherished to thrive and to function, insulated by local and national norms and
by mature political cultures. And what hope do we have of that in a time in
which self-professed conservatives, of all people, heap scorn and ridicule on
our most vital norms, relishing in the violence done to them?
A nation that holds its best blessings in contempt will
not continue to enjoy them for very long. If you want to know what the
alternative to peace is, have a look at Belfairs Methodist Church and the
blood on its floors. If you want to have a free world, then you need men and
women who know both how to be free and why.
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