16 June 2016
Assassination in Britain first?
For the first time in 26 years, since the troubles with the Irish, a member of the British Parliament has been assassinated. Jo Cox of the Labour party was shot and stabbed at what they call a "constituent surgery" by a man who reportedly yelled "Britain First!" during the attack. This connects the murder tentatively with the country's contentious campaign over the "Brexit," a referendum on the U.K.'s withdrawal from the European Union, and with the refugee question, as Cox was an advocate of intervention in Syria and the settlement of Syrian war victims in Britain. Awful as any such story is on its own terms, I couldn't help wondering about it happening in Britain. After all, the way many Americans think about Donald Trump's constituents -- angry, intolerant, tribalistic, imminently violent -- you might have expected something like this to have happened here. It has not. In fact, the last time a U.S. congressman was murdered was at Jonestown, back in 1978, while the shooter who wounded Rep. Giffords during the Tucson amoklauf was just about a pure nut with an ideology entirely his own. This is one of the reasons why I can't take the panic over Trump too seriously. His supporters may be morons, but not murderously so. Assassination has fallen far out of fashion in the U.S. Not event the Islamists try it, as far as we can tell. In one respect that's no great reflection on us, since you can just as easily say that killing one person, no matter how powerful, just doesn't do it for the killers among us anymore. But it remains a valid observation that, despite the seemingly bottomless hate expressed for politicians across the American spectrum, we've gone a fairly long time without an obviously politically motivated attack on American politicians. For all that the Trump movement seems new and scary, they haven't changed that stat, and for all that Americans as a whole are supposed to shoot first and think later, here's an assassination in Britain, presumably one of the more civilized countries, and most of us across the Atlantic are still asking, "What was that guy angry about?"
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5 comments:
I'll be more interested in seeing what the effect will be on the rest of the politicians over there. It would take a few more assassinations to see if my theory is correct - that politicians will change their stance on issues when their own lives are personally at risk due to their policies.
Looks unlikely so far. Initial response seems to be backlash against pro-Brexit parties insofar as they allegedly created climate of "hate" to motivate the killer. Your theory would have a better chance in a non-partisan environment where self-interested pols aren't under pressure from peers not to "give in," etc.
The EU is a valiant attempt at promoting a good idea and failing completely. For one, they did NOT build it from the bottom up, they forced it from the top down. And those in charge obviously have their own self-interest prioritized over the EU's collective interests. Too eager to import cheap foreign labor to force competition with their own people and its blowing up in their faces. Things will get far uglier over there before they get better. Britain would probably be well-served to jump that sinking ship.
Not to mention the austerity they inflict on the people of countries whose governments screwed up their economies. Yet while the EU has plenty of faults from a leftist perspective, I get the impression that the Brexit has been stigmatized as a far-right thing. It must seem like an evolutionary step backward to some observers, but for all I know as an outside observer a step backward may be necessary in order to do a necessary step forward right. Meanwhile, Jo Cox's killer is being described as some sort of neo or crypto-Nazi. I thought they believed in a united Europe!
I've only watched a few videos regarding the Brexit movement. From this very limited perspective, it seems as though the pro-EU people seem more interested in how their own lives are affected, while the pro-exit people seem more concerned (or so they claim) with keeping Britain British.
That is to say, the couple of pro-stay videos I watched are from Brits currently not even living or working in Britain, but are complaining that if Britain exits, they'll have to go and get visas to the various places they do research or have business interests, as opposed to currently, where no visa is necessary for EU members, within EU states. Whereas the pro-exit people were more-or-less complaining about 1) the tax that is imposed on EU states to support the EU and 2) the number of immigrants and refugees flooding into Britain because of the EU's policies.
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