Indelible Stain

 Just twenty-four hours before the attempted assassination at the White House Press Correspondents' dinner on Saturday, the U.S. military killed two more unarmed and defenseless people in a strike on a civilian vessel in the Pacific. 

Since just the start of April, Trump's administration has carried out at least six such extrajudicial killings, bringing the total number of people he has murdered in these strikes—without charge or trial—to above 180. 

Just days ago, meanwhile, his Justice Department made headlines by trying to reintroduce the firing squad to federal death penalty cases as an approved method of execution. 

Trump seems to relish shooting and bombing people, in short. He has killing on the brain.

Some might look at these facts, then, and say that the violence we witnessed this weekend was just chickens coming home to roost. And eye for an eye.

That appears to be how the would-be assassin saw it. While there's much (as they always say) that we still don't know about his motives, he seems to have been urged to act in part by his disgust with Trump's extrajudicial killings. 

Reporting from Ken Klippenstein depicts the suspect as something other than the "anti-Christian" bigot the administration rushed to portray him as.

Quite to the contrary, he appears to have been an active member of his college's Christian Fellowship. And his "manifesto" (according to Klippenstein) engages with the question of political violence through the lens of Christian moral philosophy. 

Klippenstein quotes it as follows: 

Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.

Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. [...]

Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.

I appreciate the would-be assassin's moral indignation over the administration's extrajudicial killings. But let us pause for a moment and ask ourselves: what exactly is it we object to in this administration's actions? 

Surely, the reason we object to the administration's strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean is that they are killing people without due process, legal authority, or any finding of guilt. 

And what is an assassination—of the kind the suspect tried to carry out—other than a killing without due process or legal authority? What is it this man allegedly tried to do—if not another extrajudicial killing? 

The manifesto reportedly goes on (according to Klippenstein): 

Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

Indeed. One should not comply with illegal orders and unconstitutional laws. We owe them no obedience in carrying out their acts of injustice. 

But if their offense was to violate the law—how can that entitle us to violate the law in response? 

There is a logical contradiction here that the alleged shooter's manifesto does not see around. 

He ought to have gone to Anatole France's Fra Giovanni for his Christian moral counsel instead. As France's character puts it (in lines I was just quoting a few days ago, in a post that now feels eerily prescient): 

"[Y]ou have shed the blood of the unjust judge and the brutal soldier, and lo! you are become like the soldier and the judge yourself. Like them you bear on your hands the indelible stain." (Allinson trans.)

To kill without charge or trial, to take life without the authority of the law or the democratic process—that is precisely the evil Trump is committing. 

So, to commit the same evil in response—by trying to assassinate the top leadership of the government—is no answer. 

And how about the death penalty? My objection to it—including Trump's addition of the firing squad to the federal methods of execution—is not that the people on death row are always innocent.

It's that all life has value, no matter how seemingly fallen and lost. 

But if I object to Trump's executions for that reason—I must also logically object to the attempted execution of Trump on the same grounds. 

His life too has value—even though he has made himself at this point into a tyrant and a mass murderer. 

This is the true problem with revenge. It undermines its own basis. It destroys our own moral standing to object to what the other side has done. 

It makes us indistinguishable from the brutal soldier and unjust judge we denounce. 

"Never strike the wicked," as Fra Giovanni goes on, "for fear we make ourselves like them."

This was also the ethic of Shelley—who penned, in his "Masque of Anarchy," perhaps the first sustained defense of nonviolence in print. 

Then it is to feel revenge

Fiercely thirsting to exchange

Blood for blood -- and wrong for wrong --

Do not thus when ye are strong—he urged the people of England. 

In "Peter Bell the Third," Shelley returned to the same theme—urging the poor and oppressed not to take "Cobbett's snuff, revenge; that weed[.]"

In a footnote to the poem, he argued that Cobbett—with his call for violent direct action against the powers that be—was a kind of close cousin to the reactionaries and conservatives of his day. 

"It is curious to observe how often extremes meet," Shelley wrote. "Cobbett is, however, more mischievous [...] because he pollutes a holy and now unconquerable cause with the principles of legitimate murder."

In the case of this weekend's violence, we are certainly once again seeing extremes meet. A man rightly objects to Trump's assassinations of civilians in the Pacific and Caribbean. 

But then—in order to avenge it, he tries to become an assassin himself. 

He thereby "pollutes a holy and now unquotable cause with the principles of legitimate murder." 

That is the problem with an "eye for an eye." 

And our cause is indeed unconquerable at this point. That's the other great tragedy of this incident. Trump is already defeated and he knows it. He knows he will lose the midterms and will never we able to run for another term. 

We are on the eve of victory—victory through just means, through democratic means, through nonviolent means. 

We have no need for bombs and guns. Those are Trump's weapons. Those are the weapons of a despot who knows he cannot win through persuasion and consensus. 

Our weapons are different: the hearts and minds of the American public. The ballot, not the bullet.