If you missed Part One, concerning criminal vigilantism, check the
archive to the right, as well as the post immediately below this one. Without further ado, I give you a discussion
on political vigilantism.
Almost any act of political violence, largely separated into three
varieties (sabotage, assassination, and terrorism), is also an act of political
vigilantism, provided that it is committed by a non-state actor. While an inclusive list of non-state actors
is much longer, the non-state actors which are likely to commit political
violence, and therefore political vigilantism, include private individuals,
activist groups, and terrorist groups.
These acts of vigilantism have an even lower rate of public approval as
criminal vigilantism, for political vigilantism is practically by definition
much more extreme. While still tailored
to bringing individuals to justice through extralegal means, vigilantism of the
political variety often has the stated end goal of death, whereas criminal
vigilantism seeks to merely assist the police in apprehending the perpetrator
of criminal activities.
Sabotage as political vigilantism is the mildest form, since in nearly
every case the focus is on destroying and damaging property, not persons. While sabotage is often used by governments
in an attempt to slow the pace of arms or industrial acceleration of its
enemies, as seen today by the American government’s use of computer viruses to
slow Iran’s progress towards a nuclear bomb, this of course cannot be
considered as vigilantism, as it is an action of a state against another state
which is largely permitted by international norms. Sabotage is often employed as a form of
vigilantism by the ecological and environmental movements. This can take the form of freeing animals
from testing facilities and slaughter-house farms, damaging machines used in
deforestation, vandalizing housing projects in ecologically rich areas, as well
as a myriad of other incarnations.
Assassination, similarly to sabotage, must be differentiated between
actions undertaken by states and by vigilantistic groups or individuals. The attempted assassinations of Cuban
revolutionary leader Fidel Castro were conducted by the C.I.A., making them
state sanctioned actions, whereas the assassination of President John Kennedy
was carried out by a political vigilante named Lee Harvey Oswald in response to
Kennedy’s policies against the Soviet Union.
Assassination by vigilantes against government officials has a long history,
from the murder of Julius Caesar by his political opponents, to the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth for crimes against the
South, the murder of many Czarist officials at the hands of socialist
revolutionaries in early twentieth century Russia, and the assassination of a
Pakistani governmental official over his anti-blasphemy position.
Terrorism, especially in
contemporary society, hardly needs an introduction. Often aimed at innocents, the goal of
terrorism is usually to inflict indiscriminate killing until the targeted
society or government changes their policies on certain issues. While today terrorism, unfortunately, has
become almost inseparable from the Islamic religion, terrorism is not confined
by any one ideology. Indeed, before the
September 11th attacks, the most deadly terrorist attack on American
soil was the Oklahoma City bombing, an action carried out by Timothy McVeigh as
a response to the perceived injustices carried out by the U.S. federal
government in the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents.
While the rationale behind criminal vigilantism is fairly well understood
by most of society, even if the majority of people disagree with it, political
vigilantism does not enjoy the same level of understanding. This is because, in the viewpoint of many
people, the private use of violence is almost always forbidden, especially
violence to the degree exhibited by assassination and terrorism. The proponents of such acts of vigilantism,
however, do believe that their actions are justifiable. They often believe that the targets of their
actions are not innocent and have chosen to become combatants in a
conflict. While this explanation is
slightly more palatable with regards to assassination, where the target is
often a government official who, having enacted or having carried out a policy
has opened him or herself to retribution, most people have difficulty accepting
such rationalization of terrorism. While
it was not the topic at hand, nor a topic largely understood at the time, the
great American thinker Henry David Thoreau offers up an assessment, which could
very well be used to justify terrorism, in his famous essay Civil Disobedience. While explaining his reasoning for not paying
the poll tax, Thoreau explains that those who fund a government engaged in
unjust actions, at the time referring to the Mexican-American War and the
continued practice of slavery, are themselves culpable to a degree for these
actions. It does not take much of an
intellectual leap to connect such reasoning to a rationalization for the
holding the private workers in the World Trade Center on September 11th
responsible for the perceived wrongs which drove the al-Qaeda trained
terrorists to commit the acts of terror.
This leads to a sharp bipolarization of justification where one side
views an act as completely reasonable and permitted while the other side
fiercely rejects the action, with almost no grey area between the two. This leads to a breakdown in the ability to
understand the human aspects which drive individuals to commit acts of
political vigilantism. To once again
delve into the world of popular culture for an example to illustrate this
point, I turn to the magnificent Showtime drama Homeland. In the show,
Nicholas Brody is an American Marine who, after being captured and held by a
terrorist cell for eight years, is freed and returned to the United
States. However, while being held by the
cell, he was shown a degree of kindness by the cell’s leader, Abu Nazir, and
becomes an English teacher to Nazir’s young son, Issa. Over time, Brody begins to care deeply for
Issa, as though he were his own son.
However, Issa dies when his school is hit by an American drone
strike. Devastated by Issa’s death and
enraged by the American government’s denial that children died in the strike,
Brody agrees to become a sleeper agent until he can get close to the
vice-president, who had ordered the strike, and detonate a suicide vest.
This situation, while admittedly quite hypothetical, is still very
instructive. How do we assess Brody’s
motivation for his act of violent political vigilantism? While the common dismissal of terrorist
action, particularly those acts conducted by Islamic extremists which Abu Nazir
represents, is that the terrorists hate America and the freedoms we award our
citizens, this argument does not hold up to Brody’s case. He does love America and strongly supports in
the values that are essential to American life, believing that by killing the
vice-president he strengthens these rights and values. In his view, the vice-president and all those
connected with the drone bombings are war criminals who damage the legitimacy
of the United States government. By
killing them, even at the cost of his own life, he believes that the American
government will be relegitimized with the removal of such corrupt figures from
public office.
Those are Brody’s assessments, but what are ours? Can political vigilantism ever be the correct
method, even if it means killing people?
The question is discussed in the play Les Justes, translated to The Just
Assassins, by French writer Albert Camus.
Set in early twentieth century Russia, the play focuses on the members
of a terror cell in Moscow who are preparing to assassinate Grand Duke Sergie
Alexandrovich. A few of the members are unsure if they should kill the
Grand Duke and one member even drops out of the cell when he realizes that he
would be unable to carry out the deed.
When Yanek, a romantic idealist, successfully carries out the
assassination and is arrested, he receives a very insightful visit from the
Grand Duke’s wife. Up to this point in
the play, the only information about the Grand Duke we received essentially
made him a caricature of evil, with no humanizing qualities. The Duke’s wife, however, in her somber and
emotional questioning of Yanek reveals the many human aspects of the Duke,
which Yanek does not want to hear.
Such a practice could be used to attempt to dissuade Brody as well, for
the vice-president has a wife and son whom he loves. In popular culture, villains are often
portrayed as pure evil, reducing the need to have a tough discussion over what
means are to be permitted in the fight against them. Aside from biologically being a human, the
Joker has practically no human qualities meaning that largely we do not
question the means which Batman uses to stop him. In reality, however, there are almost no
instances of an individual being pure evil to the extent that political
violence would be justified against him or her.
Arguably the closest example to pure evil in human history is Adolf
Hitler, but even he loved and laughed just like you and me.
While I do not seek to condone political
vigilantism, I believe that we must be careful to demonize the practitioners of
it. We has humans are incredibly complex
beings and the illusion that we can ever really know what drives a person to do
practically anything is remarkably dangerous.
I do not like to ride buses and one could accuse me of a wide variety of
prejudices because of that fact. Perhaps
I am an ardent environmentalist who despises the lack of fuel efficiency many
buses possess; maybe I am a snob who fancies himself better than the people who
have to ride the bus; maybe I’m paranoid and think that everybody on the bus is
one second away from stabbing me and taking my wallet; maybe I’m a racist who
views the bus in a racial light. Any of
these could be true or none of them could be true. The fact of the matter, however, is that knowing
an isolated fact about somebody does not speak to the motivations and reasoning
they have for that fact, whether that fact is an opinion or an action which the
individual has carried out or intends to carry out.
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