by Andrea Zhok
When it turns out that the majority (73%, according to the latest poll) of the civilised, cultured, democratic Israeli population supports a kind of “final solution” towards the Palestinians, one can’t help but ask: how is this possible? How can anyone, in the face of clear, ongoing acts of domination and violence against innocent people (children, the elderly, civilians), continue to calmly defend such actions?
The answer is, in fact, simple: in the case of the Israeli population, we are dealing with a group that has been educated to internalise a vision of itself as victims of history — as fragile and oppressed people who therefore have an implicit right to “pre-emptive self-defence” in every direction.
Essentially, since “we” are owed something by history and by humanity, we are allowed to do what others are not. Our status as exemplary victims places us in an unassailable position of moral superiority, which makes decision-making much easier: I don’t need to weigh up rights and wrongs, because everything I do falls — by definition — under a form of “preventive self-defence.” All I need to do is assume that the other person could be a threat to me, from any angle, and I am legitimised by my role as a victim to use any kind of suppressive action.
A perfectly analogous dynamic can be seen in the “progressive” justifications pouring in these past couple of days regarding the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Online, there are plenty of public debates featuring Kirk. In all those I’ve seen, what you witness is a genuine discussion, with reasoned and articulated arguments. Not bullying, not verbal violence, no censorship — rather, a willingness to face uncomfortable confrontation, as happens when you’re speaking in front of a large group of university students who disagree with you. Whether or not the writer agrees with Kirk’s reasoning is obviously irrelevant. No debate of this quality has been available for decades, at least in the context of Italian television, where talk shows are rigged arenas dominated by editing, bullying, verbal aggression, and cheap quips instead of arguments.
After that, you’ll find an endless stream of supposed quotations online in which Kirk’s positions appear as performative attacks potentially qualifying as “hate speech.” Now, given how strict U.S. legislation is on this matter, it seems reasonable to assume that a large portion of those alleged quotes are simply fake. In some cases, this has already come to light (there’s a rather pathetic online exchange in which Stephen King first attributes some appalling positions to Kirk on the stoning of gay people, only to later retract everything and apologise for not having checked his sources).
As is well known, every legal system draws a line between argument and performative speech. If I give a theoretical talk on suicide, that’s one thing; if I advise a fragile acquaintance to kill themselves, that’s another — the latter is a crime, as the word is being used as an action, as a push to commit harm (in this case, suicide).
What often comes through in Kirk’s campus arguments is the deep frustration of a student audience that is — unfortunately — simply less sharp and less knowledgeable than their opponent. Students who are used to echoing each other’s generalisations and clichés find themselves, for once, facing a real debate — and they realise how little they actually know, and how much less they understand.
The frustration is understandable.
But frustration alone doesn’t explain the flood of gleeful, smug, satisfied, entertained reactions to the murder of a conservative intellectual who willingly engaged in public debate on campuses that lean progressive.
To that frustration, we have to add the mental mechanism of victimhood described earlier. For a significant portion of progressives, it’s a deeply ingrained cultural belief that they are speaking from the standpoint of the oppressed — even existentially threatened. (They picture themselves as dispossessed proletarians even if they’re Bezos’ kids. They imagine themselves as oppressed sexual minorities even while being frequent consumers of sex work.) The constant invocation of the “fascism” of their opponents serves to conjure up an image where violence is not only justified but necessary — a form of self-defence against others’ violent oppression. Understandably, you don’t debate philosophy with SS officers because they’d throw you on an armoured truck — so in that case, violence is justified.
The problem, of course, is that a bridge of rhetorical hyperbole leads many of today’s progressives to project that historical past onto present situations that have absolutely nothing to do with it. If someone argues in favour of sexual binarism, they are not sending anyone to a gas chamber. If someone says abortion is wrong, they are not pointing a rifle at you.
What may seem like common sense is not perceived as such by a large part of the progressive population, where movements like cancel culture thrive. Cancel culture is, in fact, the attempt to erase from existence — retroactively — anything that threatens or destabilises my current beliefs. Since the reasons supporting those now existential convictions are shaky, and since I subconsciously know they’re shaky, I feel existentially threatened by the mere existence of someone expressing opposing views.
Once this mechanism is triggered, I — the fragile progressive, by definition either oppressed or on the side of the oppressed — appear to myself as a victim, either actual or potential. A victim of others’ ideas that, if allowed to exist, could endanger my fragile existence, my very wavering identity.
And so, no more hesitation: anything can be done to those labelled “fascist,” “denialist,” etc., because any response to them is simply a form of pre-emptive self-defence.
Needless to say, such a polarising mechanism, incapable of allowing space for argumentative mediation, gradually creates an atmosphere of civil war — an all-out fight of everyone against everyone. It’s entirely foreseeable that events like Kirk’s assassination will not open up more room for debate and freedom of speech, but rather lead to new forms of aggressive, obtuse stigmatisation — equal and opposite, and far removed from what Kirk himself practised.
Just as a rational conservative can be executed for being a “fascist threat,” so too a left-wing “Marxist” may be framed as a potential public danger (a scenario that has already played out many times in the U.S.).
And when arguments vanish and all that’s left is conflict, with no room for mediation, the outcomes are always catastrophic — no matter who ends up winning.
