I was going to summarize an article on the history of right-wing violence. I actually spent quite a lot of time on it, but I decided that I don’t want to include all of the information. As bad as things are now, they have been worse in the recent past. I believe the right will find new ways in it to torture people.
All I really wanted to do was show the Left how closely the administration is following the right-wing playbook on taking power. People on the Left suffer when the Right accuses us of assassinations, or of celebrating when someone on the right dies. But there’s no need to take it personally. They don’t really think we are responsible. They just want to get people riled up. They may be responsible for the deaths themselves.
How Do We Know if Violence is From the Right?
Movements can be identified as right wing when they accept human inequalities and when they act as if violence is a legitimate way to defend hierarchies. Right-wing violence is violence that supports right-wing goals.
Right-wing violence generally has two targets: the primary target is an ‘inferior community’; the secondary target is the government.
Why Does Right-wing Violence Happen?
Right-wing violence goes hand-in-hand with democratic mass politics. The problem from the Right’s point of view is that public opinion becomes more important when the public can vote. And mass communication influences public opinion with information about the government and the candidates. So, wherever there are mass publics there will be radical movements around the edges trying to drag public opinion in their direction.
The United States
In the American north, industrialists have always been able to hire private bodies to keep workers in line. Organizations like the Pinkertons and the National Guard have acted like their private militia. The system in the Deep South has been even more brutal. After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan terrorized the black population until they had built a new caste system. This system lasted for another hundred years.
World War I
After World War I there were waves of violence across Europe. Elites used both high and low roads to take power. The violence was either elitist or mass-action. High roads involved coups, assassination, and strategies of tension. A strategy of tension is an attempt to ride chaos to power.
The low route to power is the conquest of the streets or mass mobilization. Bombing (or shooting) attacks might continue under this strategy.
Conclusion
There’s more. Much more. And believe it or not, it only gets worse from here. The main point is that we are in the world of rightist tactics. Lies and accusations of the Left are not meant to be true or accurate. They are meant to stir people up.