> A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire.

Which often leads to this point, as in Lord of War:

> Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.

another book (that i have admittedly been dragging my feet on finishing) that covers this idea is 'The Wretched of the Earth' by Frantz Fanon. i have never personally been directly exposed to the ill effects of state-imposed violence to the degree that others have. it's eye-opening to more-seriously consider the positions of those who have.

> pacifist

That pacifism was very much required though. The whole projection of India as this "mystic peaceful place full of peace-loving meditating sadhus that the Beatles and Steve jobs were so enamored by" was instrumental for the way we got independent with minimal balkanization[1], our ability to stay non-aligned in the cold war (which btw, is the original definition of a third world country!) and maintain strategic autonomy throughout the following decades - which we exercise quite well today. Of course, it was nothing but a political image, and we built nukes behind the scenes (by order of the very same politician nehru), but gandhis pacifist outlook and the heavy marketing of this in western countries (see Nehru's rallies in USA at the time), as well as in soviet Russia, was very necessary. People like to say we shouldn't have been socialist back then, but the Soviet help that arose out of that was really useful. In geopolitics there are no morals, so it is also completely OK that we took a U-turn from all that a while later. The only interest is self-interest.

My point is, a lot of these political positions are simply projections cast in order to achieve a certain goal, meaning to look at it from a moral standpoint is useless.

This is true for any political position held in any country anywhere in the world at any point in history.

[1] If you think the partitions were bad... the rest of india would have had a much worse fate had foreign interests gotten involved. Think: other cold war battlefields of the late 20th century. The number of secessionist states at the time in india...the cia and the kgb would have had a field day.

Are you saying he was a violent person or that was just the image pushed by the opposition?

In Savannah, Georgia, there stand historic cannon with an inscription in French (translated here): The final argument of kings.

> Anyone who says violence is _never_ the answer is frankly, naive to history and power

Violence is sometimes the answer. Domestic assassinations almost never are. Kirk is about to become a martyr.

Depending on how you turn the lens, the Civil War is an excellent example of violence not being the answer.

The Confederacy tried to replace their Constitutional government and the policies instituted by the leaders elected by the people with a violence-enforced new state inside the territory of their existing one and got (justifiably) multi-generationally brutalized for their trouble. The town I grew up in and moved away from was still raising funds to rebuild some of the places that were burned to the ground in the war. That was fundraising in the 1980s.

Every time someone points to the 1776 war as a success story I feel compelled to point out that half the descendants of that war's victors tried a very similar thing in 1861 to absolutely ruinous result.

(On this topic: Fort Sumter is an interesting story. While it was never taken during the war, it basically became a target-practice and weapons field-test location for the Union navy: every time they had a new technique or a new cannon they wanted to try out, they'd try it on the fort. By the end of the war, the fort was "standing" only in the sense that the bulk of its above-ground works had been blasted flat and were shoved together into an earthworks bunker; the Confederates were basically sheltering in a hole that a lobbed shell could fall into at any time.

And while the fort and its northways sister kept Union ships out of the harbor, it didn't stop them from firing past the fort into Charleston itself, since "war crimes" and "civilian populations" weren't really a concept yet.

People very much went into that war thinking there wouldn't be consequences for ordinary folk. They were very much wrong.)

Charlie Kirk said repeatedly said it was okay to have a society where people routinely get shot and killed. Pointing that out right now highlights just how wrong it is.

Charlie Kirk shouldn't have been shot. The way to have prevented that would have been gun control.

No, pointing out someone being odious does not equate to saying they deserve it.

This incident additionally is darkly ironic because of his thoughts on gun violence: https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-gun-deaths-worth-...

To make it clear - I am pretty much politically diametrically opposed to Charlie Kirk, but I don't think he should have been shot.

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Is there evidence that the motive of this act was some clear "leftist" position?

The second amendment fundamentalists are decidedly thawing. I expect at least some of them are thinking, “we need to ban guns from those people” for some value of “those people.”

The response to the last high-profile public shooting was, if you’ll recall, noise in the DoJ about taking gun rights away from transgender people. So some kinds of gun control are apparently on the table.

Because it's talking past each other. Very few people are literally asking for divine intervention, they're conveying wishes for a good outcome

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Its not reasonable at all. I wouldn't downvote it, but its devoid of facts and is loaded with false premises.

I'm tempted to call it rage-bait, but I choose to assume the poster meant no harm.

Yea it was, and as multiple other people in this thread then followed up with links on, turns out I was correct.