As social media fills with memes of Hilary Clinton and Melania Trump holding riffles and ‘How Do You Miss’ trends on Twitter (X), Craig Young reminds us how dangerous political violence is for democracy and progress.
On July 13, in Butler, Pennsylvania, US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was the subject of an attempted assassination. This is reprehensible and political violence has no place in liberal democratic societies like New Zealand and the United States. While that revulsion is a moral premise, it doesn’t mean that assassinations of public figures are unknown.
Australia and New Zealand have had no such events, mercifully enough. But in the US, Abraham Lincoln (d. 1865) was killed at the theatre by John Wilkes Booth, a Southern United States sympathiser shortly after the end of the US Civil War. Charles Guiteau, a possibly insane and impoverished religious fanatic, killed President James Garfield in 1881. In 1901, William McKinley was shot and killed by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist.
The sixties were an acute period of political unrest in the United States. In 1963, John F Kennedy was shot in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. Just five years later, Kennedy’s brother Robert was shot dead during his presidential campaign. African-American religious leaders Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were killed that same year. Since then, the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1980 has been the only other time someone has come close to killing a major US public figure.
The United Kingdom has only ever had one Prime Minister assassinated – Spencer Perceval (d.1812). However, during Northern Ireland’s Troubles, four Conservative MPs were killed by the IRA and its offshoot, the Irish National Liberation Army, who also attempted to take Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s life. In 2021, David Arness, another Conservative MP, was stabbed by a Somali-born Islamist, and, Jo Cox, a British Labour MP, was stabbed to death by a neofascist in 2016.
And, yes, gay political figures have also been assassinated. One of the most iconic examples was Harvey Milk (1930-1978), an out-gay San Francisco city supervisor who was instrumental in passing a pioneering anti-discrimination ordinance in that city shortly before he and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were murdered by conservative Catholic Dan White. When the courts found White guilty of voluntary manslaughter, an angry San Francisco LGBTQI+ community rioted in response. In 1985, shortly after his release, White committed suicide.
Marielle Franco also occupied a city council position in her native Brazil – on Rio Janiero’s Municipal Council. She was an out-gay socialist, feminist and human rights activist, who was an outspoken critic of police brutality and illegal extra-judicial killing. She fought against violence against women and for LGBTQI+ rights and reproductive rights. In March 2018, she and her staff were killed in a Rio de Janeiro drive-by shooting. The assassins were later found to be connected to right-wing militia groups and linked to former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. As with Harvey Milk in San Francisco forty years beforehand, she was mourned across her city of birth and throughout Brazil.
As time has gone on, assassination has fallen out of favour in developed nations, except in the United States, where gun ownership is disastrously unregulated. In Africa, South Asia and South America, it is more common. But should we be complacent? Until the Christchurch mosque massacres on March 15, 2019, we may have thought we were similarly immune from acts of mass terrorism. One can only hope that New Zealand never loses our current state of innocence when it comes to the similarly cold-blooded use of homicidal violence against political figures.
