Emma Goldman on The Psychology of Political Violence
Read: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-psychology-of-political-violence
In the event of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I am prompted to review Emma Goldman and her relationship to political violence. A famous Russian anarchist agitator, Goldman would be expected to have a positive view of political violence, and she did. She supported her partner Alexander Berkman’s attempted assassination of businessman Henry Frick, and probably learned a thing or two from the aftermath of that event. In her essay “The Psychology of Political Violence,” she laments the lies often fabricated by the media and supporters of the state. She herself and her work have been framed as the supposed cause of assassinations, and many assassins of politicians in her time were propagandized by the media and framed as anarchists even when they had nothing to do with anarchism. Goldman recognized the innate conflict that is central to the act of political violence: to her, it is a necessary act of revolt against the powers that be, but are oftentimes turned on its head to work as weapons wielded by the state in attacking anarchism and other revolutionary ideologies. In my earlier essay about terrorism, I noted how political violence can be depoliticized by the state in an attempt to divert attention away from the political cause of the perpetrator. However, the opposite can be true too: violent acts against political figures that have little to do with furthering an actual political cause can be attributed to something like anarchism in order to discredit the ideology in the eyes of the masses. Thus is the complex nature of political violence and its relation to the state. In the case of Kirk, the details about the assassin and his motives have not been publicized yet, but Donald Trump have already publicly announced his sympathies and his decision to lower all American flags to half mast until Sunday evening.
“So long as tyranny exists, in whatever form, man’s deepest aspiration must resist it as inevitably as man must breathe.” - Emma Goldman
