It is too soon to reckon the consequences in America and the world after last week’s events. Except for the obvious conclusion that the boundaries in which normal political events and discourse are bordered have been stretched ever further, writes Tony Leon.
George Bernard Shaw’s mordant line that “assassination is the extreme form of censorship” got a murderous American update last week on the campus of Utah Valley University.
Charlie Kirk, the young mega-MAGA influencer and partisan speech warrior for conservative causes, was killed by a single bullet. His death set aflame a further round of rancorous division, name-calling and blame-placing in what has become, in these times, the disUnited States of America.
If the very term “assassination” denotes political murder, Kirk fits the definition. His very successful youth organisation, Turning Point USA (TUSA), took the fight of the right to the liberal-left and was credited by Donald Trump himself with powering his election win last year. Kirk’s outreach and outspoken advocacy helped close the gap traditionally enjoyed by Democrats among young voters, especially men who responded “hugely” to Kirk’s antidotes to male alienation.
Many commentators noted, in the aftermath of last week’s event, that assassinations and the creed of political violence are a distinguishing and disfiguring feature of the US political landscape. Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert F Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King all fell to an assassin’s bullet. The same fate in the same period felled civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the more radical Malcolm X.
Since America emerged from the violent 1960s tempered but intact, there is, as Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland wrote after last week’s event, “some consolation, the knowledge that the country has been through this before and survived”.
Though America and the world today bear little resemblance to the 1960s.
When Robert Kennedy was assassinated shortly after he won the Democratic California presidential primary in June 1968, novelist John Updike wrote that it was as though “God might have withdrawn His blessing from America”. Quite what the late writer would make of this latest bloody page in the history of this most credal nation – especially since Kirk was a fervent Christian – can be imagined.
However, most of the most famous victims of American assassins were either leading political office bearers or, in the case of King, the leader of the national civil rights movement.
‘We don’t know what follows next’
Regarding Kirk, conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson noted: “The United States crossed the Rubicon with the assassination of the most gifted political organiser, media figure and activist under 40 in the nation. America can be a violent society, but we do not usually murder major media figures. Now we do. And no one knows what follows next.”
Many who suffered under the lash of Kirk’s incendiary rhetoric might disagree with such affirmation. However, in respect of the reach of Kirk, who was cited for example as “the most trusted figure” on the TikTok platform among users under 30 who voted Trump in 2024 and who had far greater influence in the White House than most elected officials, there can be little doubt.
Indeed, among other distinguishing features of the latest episode of America’s long dance with political death is the vast change of both the media landscape and the response of top leadership to violent tragedy.
In the 1960s when the Kennedys and King were murdered, most Americans received the news, in fact all news, via just three national television channels and through massively read national and local newspapers. Most were centrist and mainstream and promoted a civic consensus based on liberal democratic principles.
Since then, and in part due to a pushback against stifling orthodoxy coupled with massive technological changes, the promotion and portals of news have been atomised and disrupted. There is no “mainstream consensus” today in the US, or anywhere else in the democratic world. They have been replaced by social media echo chambers led by keyboard warriors.
When Robert Kennedy was assassinated back in 1968, the US president was Lyndon Johnson, who, although forced out of running for re-election, loathed Kennedy in a mutual detestation that was common cause in Washington and beyond.
Yet in the aftermath of Kennedy’s death, his nemesis, Johnson, heaped praise on him and said: “We do not know the reasons that inspired the attack on Senator Kennedy… Tonight this Nation faces once again the consequences of lawlessness, hatred, and unreason in its midst… My fellow citizens, we cannot sanction the appeal to violence, no matter what its cause… A great nation can guarantee freedom for its people and the hope of progressive change only under the rule of law. So let us, for God’s sake, resolve to live under the law.”
A call to account
Last week, the current president, Donald Trump, echoed Johnson only in his praise of the felled victim. The rest of his remarks were not boilerplate presidential unity-in-mourning rhetoric, but rather a call to account for the “radical left political violence”. When asked on his favourite TV channel, Fox News, about bringing the country together he told them he “couldn’t care less”.
Trump amplifiers went further: Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace said of Kirk’s murder, “Democrats own this, 100 per cent.” And Laura Loomer, a conspiracist but major figure in Trumpworld, offered “This is a war.”
It is too soon to reckon the consequences in America and the world after last week’s events. Except for the obvious conclusion that the boundaries in which normal political events and discourse are bordered have been stretched ever further.
It seems ironic to offer any thoughts on violent death from faraway South Africa. Our murder rate, of 27 000 annual victims, is one of the highest in the world, and seven times greater than the United States: here we kill 45 people per 100 000, whereas in gun-obsessed America the rate, by comparison, is six per 100 000.
Yet assassinations of top political figures in SA is exceedingly rare. Of course, in the lower reaches of municipal councils, KwaZulu-Natal is a veritable killing field with hundreds of councillors and officials murdered in a recent decade, and hundreds more during the ANC-Inkatha civil war in the province in the 1980s and 1990s, and others at the hands of the security forces.
But of high-profile assassinations, only the murder of Prime Minister Dr Hendrik Verwoerd (1966), black consciousness leader Steve Biko (1977) and SA Communist Party and uMkhonto we Sizwe leader Chris Hani (1993) profoundly impacted the course of the country.
Though, in the case of the assassination of Verwoerd, it is arguable that his grizzly denouement in Parliament at the hands of a killer judged criminally insane delayed rather than accelerated change in the country.
Biko’s murder, though, had the immediate effect of radicalising and intensifying the internal struggle against apartheid and ramping up state repression and galvanising the external sanctions campaign against Pretoria, key factors in eventually forcing the pace of change.
It was Hani’s murder, on Easter Saturday in 1993, which truly turned the wheel of recent history.
It allowed the ANC immediately after the constitutional talks resumed in Kempton Park to force the NP government to concede the date of the election (27 April 1994) long before the most contested items of the negotiations had been settled.
And this, in turn, was due to one factor and one standout leader who could use the unfathomable violence of the Hani shooting to accelerate both change and unity.
In the immediate aftermath of Hani’s murder, the country reached a boiling point. As Patti Waldemeir accurately recounted in her book Anatomy of a Miracle:
“South Africa held its breath, terrified of the explosion of anger that might follow. For Hani’s assassin was a member of the white right wing, a Polish immigrant Janusz Waluz, who had conspired with a senior official of the white right Conservative Party. Visions of a race war loomed large in the national imagination.”
As an engaged eyewitness to those turbulent times, I can attest to her depiction. As well as the role played by the leader who defused the potential explosion. Even though at the time, Nelson Mandela was still one year away from being the president of South Africa.
Yet it was Mandela, and not the de jure president (FW de Klerk), who, in a national television address, did not use the terrible event to advance a partisan interest, but to defuse a potential “race war”.
He told his audience (at the time when the SABC had the sole TV news monopoly):
“A white man full of prejudice and hate came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster.”
Then Mandela immediately pivoted to the person who provided the police with the assailants’ number plate which led to the arrest of the killers. “But a white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, the assassin.”
It could be argued that Mandela was – for any nation – a once in a lifetime offer as his masterful defusing that evening proved.
However, the violent act of killing Hani also ensured that South Africa’s centrist forces – not its centrifugal extremities – held.
As Waldmeir recounted: “Within minutes of the murder, ANC officials announced that negotiations would not be called off. The days when progress was held hostage to violence were firmly at an end.”
There is a universal lesson there from the southern tip of Africa of more than three decades ago. Though recent events in the US and elsewhere suggest it will not be heeded.
