Charlie Kirk was a victim of his own beliefs. This is the stark irony of it

The footage of Charlie Kirk being shot in the neck in Utah is arguably the most shocking and stark footage of a political assassination taking place in real time in America since JFK’s assassination in Dallas in 1963.

‘Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,’ adherents of America’s totally outdated and arcane Second Amendment have tirelessly and exhaustively argued down through the years. The part conveniently missing from this reductive refrain in the context of Charlie Kirk is that ‘Yes, but people wouldn’t be able to kill people from 200 yards away if they did not have easy access to military-grade sniper rifles.’

Gun violence is a metric of America as a failed experiment in the cult of the individual. The mythos of the rugged man of action; the John Waynesque association of guns with strength and virility — with what it means to be a man or woman of worth and worthy of respect — is tantamount to a fascistic rendering of the human condition. Said mythos dictates that the willingness and capacity to inflict death on others is consonant with courage and heroism.

It is not.

Nothing like this occurs on the regular in Russia, China, Iran, Cuba — places around the world considered a threat to Western values. In truth, and in fact, they are countries and societies wherein the values of Western barbarism do not exist. This is the fine point of it.

On a personal note, way back in the early 1990s I lived in the US — in Los Angeles, to be exact — as an illegal migrant. This status did not prevent me from finding work as a security guard at a large open air shopping mall. I was 25 and some of the guys working alongside me carried guns. Looking back, not one of them should have been.

At a certain point the company wanted to put me through a firearms training course with a view to getting licensed to carry a gun myself.

‘No thank you,’ I said in response to the invitation.

‘Why not?’ the boss asked me.

‘Because I have no intention of ever shooting somebody for trying to steal a loaf of bread from a fucking supermarket.’

Charlie Kirk was a right wing, racist hate preacher and white supremacist. He gloried in the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. He brazenly and disgustingly argued that African-Americans were better off under slavery. He claimed that mass shootings were a price worth paying for the right to own and carry guns. He was, in sum, the morally bereft product of racism and reaction. The propagation of hate has become a lucrative business in the land of the free, and his was just one of many bulging bank accounts that have been built on the back and basis of it.

All that being said, his death should not be any cause for celebration. All life is sacred and no man is an island.

Taking a wider view, the civil war in that forsaken land never truly ended, it merely took on a different form and forms. Gang culture is a culture of defiance of the values of the rich in America, of which Charlie Kirk was part and parcel. Black and brown kids killing one another on the streets of Chicago are the fruits of American capitalism and its white supremacist character.

The language of violence is and has always been wholly incompatible with the reality of it. Charlie Kirk spoke the language and suffered the consequences. No matter, whoever pulled the trigger on him is no hero. They are instead the perpetuation of that which ails America, and by extension the entire world, given America’s litany of crimes against humanity that have been committed in every corner in the name of violence and its dominating propensities.

President Trump and his acolytes wasted no time in exploiting the murder of Charlie Kirk for political gain. Rather than seek to salve the pain and anger and the fear resulting from it, he chose ramp up his attacks on the ‘radical left’ as being responsible. Such a man is unfit to run a country club never mind a country. He is the slave plantation owner and overseer combined. For such as he, the US Confederacy will always remain the ‘lost cause’ in the grand scheme and grand wizard of things.

In the last analysis, Charlie Kirk was a victim of his own beliefs and worldview. He died a martyr in the cause of same. But you can bet your proverbial bottom dollar that he would much rather not be a martyr right now. He leaves behind a family, friends, and people who loved him, precisely as all victims of gun violence do. Whether in Gaza or Gary, Indiana, we all bleed and, per John F Kennedy, we all breathe the same air.

When, we are minded to ask, will we ever wake up to the trail of tears we have fashioned in the name of hegemony and hate? In the name of doom and domination?

America, to wind things up, is and has always been a land where heroes have perished and knaves have prospered. Among its vanquished heroes have been Sitting Bull, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, the San Patricios, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood and the Wobblies, Eugene Debs, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, MLK, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, SNCC, the Black Panther Party, Cesar Chavez, and so on.

The knaves are unworthy of being listed.

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Thanks for taking the time to read my work. If you enjoy my writing and would like to read more, please consider making a donation in order to help fund my efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of my book, ‘This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality’, from all major booksellers, and my novels, ‘Metrosexuals: An Edinburgh Tale’, and ‘Gaza: This Bleeding Land’ from same.

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