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Professional voter Owen Jones condemns embassy attack as a “worse than self-defeating” act of “senseless violence” committed by “an incredibly selfish man”—who was “seeking martyrdom” and “egged on by edgy types in the West”—because he didn’t kill Putin instead
i mean his post is not wrong, just a very anti-adventurist position.
Nah I'm going to push back on that, killing unarmed civilians actively contributing to genocide is not "immoral." This is the same argument for like why the Rebels shouldn't have blown up the Death Star, because they killed thousands upon thousands of "innocent civilians" doing plumbing or electrical maintenance or cooking on the Planet Exploding Death Ray Genocide Machine. Obviously "morality" here isn't relevant one way or another, these kinds of violent acts are the natural consequence of genocide, but there comes a point when unarmed civilians are no longer "innocent."
Maybe using star wars as a point of reference isn’t the best idea. It’s not some peak revolutionary strategy or something. And if I were to indulge in this comparison, killing a couple of functionaries is hardly destroying the most powerful military installation in the galaxy.
How could the process of Western resistance to the genocide be conducted that wouldn't lead to this kind of situation, though? Like, when you zoom out, whatever Western resistance exists (and let's just charitably assume that the resistance amounts to anything), is it not going to inevitably involve the conditions that lead to this kind of adventurism?
I guess the question isn't really "how do we resist in a way that minimizes adventurism because adventurism is bad" but "how do we get people that want to do adventurism to do more productive acts of resistance" so if that's how we approach the problem, what could've been done differently to channel this shooter's rage into something more productive than a random act of violence?
I'm not saying his entire post is wrong. I agree that often the liquidation of low level functionaries of something isn't akin to an actual revolutionary strategy and often backfires, that's not what I'm arguing. I'm strictly pushing back on his statement that killing unarmed civilians is always immoral. Something can be both moral and still stupid/ineffective in the long run.