The Left's effort to blame Jared Lee Loughner's attempted murder of Representative Giffords on conservative political rhetoric opposing President Obama's socialist policies is simply an effort to hide the Left's historic and continuing sponsorship and justification of political violence. Since the French Revolution, through the entire history and contemporary state of Marxism, the Left has justified political violence, including terror and murder, to achieve their revolutionary objectives. Their justification has been based on several principles of political ideology.
1. Violence cannot be defined by simple dichotomy between violence and non-violence. Violence exists in a continuum. Violence is, essentially, any coercion that prevents a person from freely expressing their subjectivity. It is violence when Christianity indoctrinates children that sex is sinful and should be suppressed except for reproduction. It is violence when the state requires all males to serve in the military, regardless of their desires whether to do so. It is violence when courts prevent labor unions from forming. It is violence when police force parades to follow certain routes through cities. It is violence when a culture deprives women of ambition to have scientific careers. It is also violence when someone kills someone else; but murder is not violence absolutely distinguished from other forms of coercive suppression of subjectivity. In fact, revolutionaries argue, societies are held together by violence. Laws are expressions of violence. As a result, societies can be fundamentally changed only by violence.
2. Violence is justified by the utopia which revolution will establish. What justifies violence against the existing state? The ideals of the revolutionary state which would replace it. As all laws and courts of the existing state are purposed to maintain the existence of the state, and they do so through violence, they can only be destroyed by violence. But it is not anarchistic violence or aimless violence, it is violence in the name of the future utopia, directed toward destroy persons and institutions crucial to the maintenance of the state. Because in the utopia, all persons will freely express their subjectivity, violence in the name of the revolutionary utopia is humanistic. It will free persons of the near future to express their subjective humanity completely.
As these principles are rejected by non-revolutionaries and by those persons not of the Left, as a matter of practical political politics and revolutionary tactics, these principles must be hidden from the bourgeoisie, the establishment, the man, etc. If the establishment knew of the principles, it would redouble its opposition to revolutionaries and, perhaps, set back the revolution. How to hide the principles, that violence is justified and desirable in the name of the revolution, until the historic moment arrives in which use of the principles can be successful? Ah, simple: blame others.
For more, see my essay, Humanism and Terrorism.
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