[EDIT] Inb4 more people try to suggest that I’m mourning the loss of this scumbag capitalist fuck: No, I’m not sad he’s dead. No, I don’t think corporate murder is acceptable and no, I would not ever rat to police if I knew the shooter and yes, I believe the punishment fits the crimes he’s committed against untold thousands of people. THAT SAID…
I’m not down with vigilante murder or anything because it seems like the slipperiest of slopes toward chaos, but what other option is there in a situation where someone seeks to make an impact in this way? You can’t just beat up evil CEOs and let them go back to work. It would be naïve to expect them to change their ways when faced with consequences for their actions and then promptly let go. It just seems like the chances that it emboldens their penchant for exploitative behaviour and disdain for people in need are too high.
We’re just born into and strapped to this capitalist ride and expected to sit quiet and make these leeches their billions. How else can this cancerous greed possibly be dealt with? Is vigilante murder the only effective option? Honest questions. I’m terribly conflicted and I’m genuinely curious what more reasonable and intelligent minds than mine think about this because I can’t think of an alternative to murder in this case.
Ideally, we wouldn’t have to resort to vigilante killings to level the playing field but I 100% understand that we don’t live in a society where the rich will ever give a fuck about the rest of us or would ever sacrifice their power over us in the name of goodwill.
Ok, but frame some of those same problems in the context of the times and their peer countries. Did France’s rights or republic keep pace, lag, or were they actually ahead despite the turmoil? There were many places with awful monarchs that were effectively dictators. Maybe they were stable dictatorships…and it took global conflict to unseat many of them.
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France was a revolution of a monarchy in a continent of monarchies, who in turn demanded they choose a king, and that was after they were tired of Robespierre’s culty shenanigans.
France refused because they didn’t want to be dictated to by the international community (who again were still feudal lords). Napoleon developed the Napoleonic Code, establishing bunches of civil rights and rule of law, before inventing the Levée en masse (popular conscription) and proceeding to make Europe his personal bitch†
They tried a bit of the constitutional monarchy thing with the Bourbon restoration, but again Charles X went Heritage Foundation on the French and started rolling back rights eventually resulting in the July Revolution of 1830 (more guillotines, more piles of heads).
It wouldn’t be the last.
Note in Russia / USSR, the moment the Red Army won and Lenin started going Communist, Wilson pushed Europe to embargo the union, to never give it a chance. The Red Scare started at the beginning, and was entirely about its threat to King Capitalism. Of course, we’d see the true colors of Capitalism a couple decades later with the Great Depression, and Hoover was glad to let people live in cardboard boxes and piles of paint cans while dying of malnutrition surviving on flour paste. Compared to that, Lenin’s arrangement started looking really good, and FDR’s New Deal, a stopgap to give capitalism one more chance really pissed off the industrialists, who began their plot to propagandize the United States into a fascist pro-capitalism bulwark. That was a pivotal moment in the white Christian nationalism movement that is taking over in 2025.
But I’m pretty sure the far right is going to be happy enough to shoot first.
Going back to France again, it’s much like Nazi-occupied Paris, in which the German Wermacht soldiers were such Karens, and the garrison was so brutal that the French couldn’t help themselves but take action. It started with cutting phone lines, defacing propaganda and slashing tires, but eventually La Résistance organized into a formidable fighting force.
We know ICE is eager to crack heads, typically immigrants and their families, but in Trump’s first term they went after anyone who was Latin enough or simply brown enough. If local law enforcement behaves as the nationwide police unions have been pushing them to, we’re likely to see civil unrest rise up in many states, and then we’ll be one sympathetic dead victim away from riots and Molotov Cocktails.
/🤓
† These days, mostly thanks to WWII, the French are known as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but historians like to keep in mind that everyone gets their turn in the barrel, and everyone gets their turn on top of the hill.