The first text that introduced me to crimethinc was this: https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too.
Having seen one too many posts around the leftist comms on the subject, I made my own small meme about it. A bit more violent than what the article suggests but I think that makes it just that much more effective.
After all what would the life described here be other than suffering:
The worst punishment anyone could inflict on those who govern and police us today would be to compel them to live in a society in which everything they’ve done is regarded as embarrassing—for them to have to sit in assemblies in which no one listens to them, to go on living among us without any special privileges in full awareness of the harm they have done.
Except that will never happen. It’s unrealistic. There will still be people who will support them and their policies and will try to defend them and would still vote for them if they represented themselves again. It’s best to just kill them.
How is killing them better than just throwing them out of the community or spending the effort to educate their supporters? Also would you personally pull the trigger, potentially more than once, maybe a few hundred times? And where would you draw the line on who to kill? How high has simeone to score in the anati anarchist scale to score to get a death sentence? And who get to decide who should die? How would you organize this in an anarchist way? Like I struggle to see how this is actually the best way when I try to think it through.
For some people, I’d pull the trigger, no doubt.
If you were face to face with Hitler. Wouldn’t you pull the trigger? We’re living in a time now where that type of character is back. There are some leaders who are responsible for hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths because of their policies and actions. The suffering they’ve caused is incalculable.
And there are others who just hoard an insane amount of wealth that they won by exploiting people and causing misery. Not only is it incredibly grotesque, but they literally have the power to save the world with all that wealth and not only do they choose not to, but they actively try to make it even worse by enabling the aforementioned leaders, destroying the environment, and continuing to needlessly exploit people. They get no sympathy from me.
Of course I would have killed Hitler if I could. But I would have done so when he was actively doing harm, being the leader of genocidal movement / state etc.
I wouldnt pull the trigget when we already removed similar people from power, redistributed all their wealth, destroyed the institutions that they used to stay in power etc. I would have better things to do in that situation.
Also I think there is a difference between building some kind of system to choose, detain and kill those people on bigger scale and just doing some revenge before, during or shortly after a social revolution. I wouldn’t stop anyone from doing it, its just not something I would support as solution to a problem.
It’s not asking for sympathy. It’s asking to understand that killing them won’t fix anything. We are up against ideas. You kill Hitler, someone takes his place. The world isn’t being run by great men who we can’t do without. It’s run by people. Shuffling the names around won’t really achieve anything, you need to destroy the thing that is giving them the power. The Ideas inside peoples heads that they need to be governed. As I put very succinctly in another comment. If we can destroy those ideas we don’t need to kill anyone as they would be powerless and if we can’t killing them won’t change anything. In fact it will just allow whoever comes after to use their death as a way to drum up support for wiping you out.
If you want vengeance then lets enact it on this plane of existence, where we know what is happening to them. If you want things to change killing individuals is simply not productive.