by liberal japonicus (image information here)
Hartmut mentioned Horst Wessel in connection with Charlie Kirk. First a little background on Horst Wessel and a Forward article about why people are connecting the two. This academic paper is worth a read, though I am getting sensitive to the criticism that being too academic is problematic.
During the years of the ‘period of struggle’ in Weimar Germany, Goebbels was to give new meaning to the Nazis’ irrational world view with his use of myths which served to cloak a brutal reality. The most effective of these myths grew out of the conditions of the political civil war waged by the paramilitary forces of Weimar Germany’s most radical parties – the Nazis and the communists. I The blood myth – which featured the death of a noble warrior, his resurrection, and ultimately his spiritual return to the fighting columns of Brown Shirts – was the most compelling theme of all, and it found its apotheosis in the saga of Horst Wessel.
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For Goebbels, it was insufficient to intone chants over the bodies of countless SA men. He was convinced that generalities do not move the masses; only easily identifiable symbols would serve such a purpose. The agony and death of Horst Wessel, killed by communists in the winter of 1930, was exactly the theme that the Gauleiter needed to offer his propaganda the unifying symbol it lacked.
I did say precursors, so I’m also thinking Lei Feng. The New Yorker had this article, which is unfortunately behind a paywall. Lei Feng might be a better parallel, in that Kirk isn’t being invoked as Horst Wessel was, a warrior, but the way that Kirk’s Christian faith has been waved like a bloody shirt (though it has been noted that Kirk’s embrace of Christianity seemed to represent an attempt “to distance themselves publically from Neo-Nazism“)
Here’s a Chinese military link lauding Lei Feng.
“Lei Feng is a role model of the times, and the spirit of Lei Feng is eternal. To achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, we need more role models of our times”, President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, said in an important instruction on further carrying out the activities of learning from Lei Feng, a late ordinary soldier and a household icon in China celebrated for selflessly helping others. The year 2023 marks the 60th year since revolutionaries of the older generation, including Mao Zedong, wrote inscriptions for comrade Lei Feng. Over the six decades, on the land of China, people listen to his stories, read his diary, learning from Lei Feng has become a broad ideological consensus and action consciousness. Time goes by, Lei Feng is always in our hearts; with the change of times, the spirit of Lei Feng is timeless.
In fact, in Chinese, you can say 活雷锋 (huó Léi Fēng) the way we would say a Good Samaritan. I await with bated breath the Right complimenting people as ‘he’s a really Charlie Kirk’. God help us.
That’s certainly what the Republicans are doing: deifying Charlie because that’s how they legitimize themselves and delegitimize everyone else.
I’ve been thinking about Ezra Klein and his horrible fascist-enabling article about Kirk “doing politics the right way.” Apparently, Ezra thinks that having public discussions where a hater gets to air the hateful crap is doing politics the right way.
I’m more in agreement with this guy who says in the article that he doesn’t debate fascists. Why not? Because they are wrong, so there’s nothing to discuss.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-problem-with-debating-fascists-from-a-guy-who-s-debated-just-about-everyone/ar-AA1MOhSE?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=68cc404ce9b94b64b1660870857945a1&ei=21
Medhi Hasan engages in lots of debates, not to change the mind of the person he’s talking to, but to reach the people who are watching and listening.
We need to move the Overton Window so that discourse that promotes stochastic violence is not debated or discussed as if there was legitimacy to it. Just called out for what it is and rejected.
On the Horst Wessel side of it, though, much of the religious right is referring to Kirk as “a warrior for God” and “a soldier of Christ.” The Christian side of the culture wars is heavily influenced by the “spiritual warfare” types. They literally believe that they are engaged in spiritual combat against demons who have jurisdiction over geographical areas. It’s very animist – I’m wondering if it isn’t to Christianity what Shinto is to Buddhism. As such, I expect more hagiography, and more militant hagiography, as they seek to meld temporal military service with spiritual military service in their political theology. It’s a very small narrative step from the valorization of the fallen soldier as political martyr and extending it to all of the Left Behind mythology and fantasies of one big, final End Times battle for the soul of humanity. Kirk is ideally situated for this project.
Was Jesus, the Christ, a nationalist?
The Roman governor of the Roman province of Judea allegedly crucified Jesus of Nazareth for calling himself (or being called by others, perhaps) “King of the Jews”. So, yes?
MAGAts are generally ignorant of the content, let alone the history, of their “faith”. Or maybe not. Maybe “Christian Nationalist” is not an oxymoron but the modern-day culmination of the Jesus cult. Forget that whatever Jesus of Nazareth thought of “nationalism”, American “patriotism” never crossed his mind. Ignore what namby-pamby Christians have to say about welcoming the stranger or caring for the poor, it’s what the multimillionaire pastors of megachurches have to say that counts. Or what “martyrs” like Charlie Kirk have to say, for that matter.
The Gospel According to Saint Charles of Kirk got a curious sort of publicity boost by dint of his death. On the one hand, his “martyrdom” is purported to require veneration of his dedication to spreading his gospel. On the other hand, quoting it verbatim is blasphemy, according to the MAGAt Inquisition.
The MAGAts are determined to canonize Saint Charlie, but to forbid quoting him. Come to think of it, they don’t like libruls quoting Jesus of Nazareth either.
–TP
Well, they used to canonize Reagan, although the real St.Ronnie (as vile as many of his policies were) would be hunted out of the party these days as a RINO. It was and still is blasphemous to tell that he raised taxes (12 times iirc) when he realized that his initial tax cuts would have led straight to national bankruptcy.
real St.Ronnie (as vile as many of his policies were) would be hunted out of the party these days as a RINO
Or, given half a chance, purge most of the “Christian nationalists” (and pretty much all of the Trumpys) from the party. The left has demonized Reagan so long** that it’s easy to lose track of the fact that he actually cared about this country. And not just some delusional image of what it actually never was. Also, when some piece of ideology turned out to work in the real world, he would accept that reality and change. Something the current Republican Party is either unwilling or flat unable to do.
** Mind, I had little use for him. Not as President. Not when he was Governor here.
It would be that very sense of realism that would make him persona non grata in the current GOP.
Imo that also killed the reelection of the elder Bush (pragmatists don’t get canonized, in particular if they blaspheme against the party saint).
I don’t think that the MAGA movement has an ideology or philosophy. I think they are they kind of people who are susceptible to manipulation by leaders who present as strong defenders and appeal to their need to invest faith in a savior. It doesn’t matter that the savior is saving them from an imaginary threat. in this case fear that nonwhite people might participate in American life on the same basis as the MAGAs.
Thanks for the observations and comments. After I posted this, LGM posted about another person I should have suggested as a precursor, Alexey Stakhanov. When lining them up, Horst Wessel, because he was shot by a communist, is probably the closest parallel, whereas Lei Feng supposedly died when a telephone pole hit him while he was guiding a truck, (which I take to be part of an electrification project for China along the lines of ‘serve the people’), while Stakhanov lived to the age of 71. Nous’ point about the ‘soldier of Christ’ aspect of Wessel and Kirk has me wonder why these conservative types are so damn violent. You can’t really imagine their role models dying while helping out others, or living to an old age. This plugs in to my idée fixe, which is that the problem with Western society is the hard nougat filling of individuality.
I was very disappointed that Ezra Klein succumbed to both-sideism in that article, especially since he just had taken a firm stance on Gaza (together with Phillipe Sands). But this recent book review in tge TLS made it clearer for me where he’s coming from. It’s just good old fashioned status quo affirming ‘centrism’.
https://app.the-tls.co.uk/212578/content.html
(I would love to be a centrist since I’m conflict averse by nature, it’s just that the Overton window has shifted so far to the right.)
GftNC was thinking of putting a gift link to the Klein piece. I haven’t read it, usually, those articles are read by Klein as a YouTube video, but I haven’t seen this one, and I am thinking that he knows he’s going to get clobbered. As I think he should. Ta Nehisi Coates only mentions Klein at the beginning of this piece, but the whole thing is basically a reply to Klein.
Ta Nehisi writes the plain truth. Kirk was unabashedly a white Christian nationalist. For me, all his various bigotries flow from there.
No one who isn’t an immediate threat to others deserves to be shot. At the same time, it doesn’t make Kirk a good person simply because someone killed him.
Since lj mentions it, and we are not far from the end of the month and I still have 8 free gift articles left, this is the relevant Ezra Klein piece that Ta Nehisi Coates was addressing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assassination-fear-politics.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nU8.Vndl.HW2nTIeTvTs-&smid=url-share
And since Ezra Klein talks today about the reaction to that piece, here is his latest on that:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ben-shapiro.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nk8.DjGX.vndkpD-Jytfn&smid=url-share
That Shapiro conversation really captures the reasons why I think Klein is an unproductive voice. Shapiro claims over and over throughout the conversation that “the right” saw Obama in a particular way, and Klein spends all of his time trying to empathize with how they might have felt, rather than stating that Shapiro spent his entire career crafting the very narratives by which the right learned to see Obama in that way.
It’s the asymmetry of empathy that is just allowed to sit there and not be spoken of that makes me dismiss Klein. Shapiro can just passive voice away his own role as an ideological insurrectionist and sower of division and Klein cedes that ground in order to imagine himself a good and sensitive listener and participant in dialogue.
I mentioned that I hadn’t seen the video associated (if there is one) to the first Klein piece, though looking at it, it is probably too short to record. I have seen the link for the YouTube video of the Shapiro conversation (It’s here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAqG00FUOK8&t=1s ) but haven’t seen it, so I appreciate GftNC for putting it up here.
Some thoughts about the two. Klein says in the second that
Many appreciated the [previous] piece, particularly on the right. It saw their friend and ally more as he saw himself. There were many, closer to my own politics, who were infuriated by it.
It’s amazing that he doesn’t really analyze what his piece did, which was basically white/sanewashing Kirk, and take the divided response as supporting it. I’d also say that the fact that he brought Shapiro on is indicative that Klein doesn’t want to take a side and thinks that bringing Shapiro will let him play the centrist. He seems to edge up to understanding when he says Much of what I would describe as Kirk’s worst moments were standard-fare MAGA Republicanism. And the leader of that movement is the president of the United States. He is now in the White House, having won about half the country’s votes in the last election. But then he ends the paragraph with We are going to have to live here with one another, believing what we believe, disagreeing in the ways we disagree.
I don’t understand how, if one side doesn’t want us to live here, doesn’t want us to participate in society, doesn’t want us to exist, we can actually do this.
I accidentally skipped over a part to go to the dialogue where Klein notes that he had taped his coversation with Shapiro before Kirk’s death, so it was wrong for me to link the two.
I didn’t read your comment about bringing in Shapiro as being about the timing, but rather the positioning. I think both reflect Klein’s commitment to staying together and keeping up appearances for the sake of the kids.
Funnily enough, I only posted that last Klein/Shapiro piece for the preamble about the reaction to Klein’s last piece! I didn’t even read the Shapiro stuff – I barely knew of his existence until he was interviewed by Andrew Neil, one of our best known rightwing journalists (and ex-editor of the Sunday Times), fearsome and respected enough that BoJo refused to be interviewed by him the last time he ran, and saw Shapiro (obviously completely unaware of who Neil was and his background) responding to his proper questioning by calling him a leftwinger! Andrew Neil merely chuckled and moved on. But it was such an astonishing exhibition of ignorance and arrogance (Shapiro hadn’t even bothered to look up who was interviewing him), and such an example of the tendency of these people immediately and brainlessly to label anyone who disagrees with them “leftwing”, that I lost any interest in ever hearing anything else from him again. However, I suppose this phenomenon is now so widespread in the US that journalists can’t just decide to boycott any politician or commentator who displays it.
I never thought I’d paste a link to a facebook post, but here it is. A friend of mine shared it. The original poster is someone (I’m guessing an actual human) going by Cory Nichols. I haven’t a clue who that is.
https://www.facebook.com/share/1DC6bLNdGj/
The first 20% or so:
What the writer gets into later tracks with some of the things nous has said about what constitutes meaningful dialogue.
We don’t even need Godwin’s law anymore. The probability is 1 from the get-go now.
Whose fault is that?
Maybe we need a “Meta Godwin’s Law” regarding the probability that someone will invoke Godwin’s Law.
One more response to Ezra Klein’s response to the response that was given to his Charlie Kirk eulogy.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-can-we-live-together/
But I am stuck on one bit in particular, which Klein offered during his Shapiro interview in response to an outpouring of criticism for the whitewashing portrayal of Kirk in his op-ed. He contends that living with one another on the basis of “social shame and cultural pressure” cannot work and would not be worthwhile if it did: a nation where such things flourished would not be “a free country.”
What could Klein possibly mean by this? We are indeed going to have to live with each other, barring apocalyptic violence—but we already have been for quite some time, and doing so has not required revisionist history of the sort we are now witnessing about one Charles James Kirk in particular. The political ascendancy of right-wing fractions of the U.S. adult population is new. But their existence, of course, is not: they were not born in the summer of 2020, recent efforts to blame their intransigence and bigotry on whatever missteps may or may not have occurred during the George Floyd protests notwithstanding.
Worth a read and a bit of rumination.
Before ruminating, I will mention how odd I find it that Klein is lamenting the use of social pressure and shame in the aftermath of one person shooting another in the neck with a bolt-action rifle – that is, murdering another over political differences.
HSH: I have a problem with jumping right to Hitler as a primary means of criticism, especially after an actual assassination. It is a form of “he deserved it.”
The guy you link to celebrates the murder of Brian Thompson and notes he (the FB poster) “felon love” with Luigi Mangione. He thinks Charlie Kirk’s LIFE was a tragedy, not his death. All based on ideas. His comments about Kirk’s debate style are simply not representative of what I have seen. I saw some Charlie Kirk stuff from time-to-time before his assassination. There was a lot I didn’t agree with, and some of his interactions somewhat resemble what was described. I like long-form debate mostly, like the Monk Debates. Watch Kirk’s debates at the Oxford Union and Cambridge, or his conversation with Bill Maher. He isn’t riding herd on some poor college student there. He is exchanging ideas. I note that the Cambridge students he debated with mourned his death and admired his commitment to the exchange of ideas. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wdp2ypq5vo
I disagree with many ideas on the left, and despise some. That doesn’t keep me from condemning, say, the murder of Melissa Hortman and her husband. FULL STOP. The senate resolution honored her life and passed unanimously. The resolution honoring the life of Charlie Kirk, however, was opposed by 58 Democrats and 60 more either voted present or did not vote. Most said due to his ideas. Melissa Hortman had ideas too, ones that many on the right disagreed with or found repugnant, but the Republicans chose to honor her life and not temper their desire to send a unified message condemning her murder. I wish the Democrats would have done the same for Kirk.
Kirk’s death feels significant. I think that is in large part to the left’s (painting broadly here) reaction.
bc, maybe I’m misreading, but it looks like you brought up Hitler by talking about Godwin’s law. I found the ‘felon love’ facebook post, but why is that something that puts what he wrote off-limits rather than a joke that missed the target? I won’t go back to the archive, but unless you have never complained that liberals can’t be such snowflakes, well, physician, heal thyself.
I’m not sure how much we weigh the various eulogies and such. Is Trump’s proclamation and flying flags at half mast, along with the resolution in the house when none of these steps were done for Hortman indicative of something? Why did/does the right’s reaction to what seems to be much more like politically motivated violence not rise to being a “turning point”? Or is the phrase under trademark now?
BC – I disagree with many ideas on the left, and despise some. That doesn’t keep me from condemning, say, the murder of Melissa Hortman and her husband. FULL STOP. The senate resolution honored her life and passed unanimously. The resolution honoring the life of Charlie Kirk, however, was opposed by 58 Democrats and 60 more either voted present or did not vote. Most said due to his ideas. Melissa Hortman had ideas too, ones that many on the right disagreed with or found repugnant, but the Republicans chose to honor her life and not temper their desire to send a unified message condemning her murder. I wish the Democrats would have done the same for Kirk.
Here is the text of the Senate resolution: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-resolution/301/text
Here is the text of the House resolution: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolution/719/text
The former is a fair sight more neutrally worded and measured in tone than the latter. The author of the House resolution had to know that their characterization was going to be more nettlesome and create partisan friction where none need exist.
Imagine if Klobuchar, in her resolution, had said that Hortman was a devoted protector of women’s reproductive freedom…
I did some surfing about this and I see what bc is getting riled up about was the proclamation that nous linked to and what I was thinking about was what broke out over the prayer for Kirk
LATimes article
Here is AOC’s response to the Resolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR3D0MkqjQU
AOC’s response seems pretty good to me. I wonder what bc makes of it…