The deaths of Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger are reoccurring celebrations for left social media among many other of the capitalist elite. The jokes about public toilets, the celebration of their dying, I’d partaken it in it myself once. You’d almost forget they lived full lives with zero consequences and died in a way most of their victims only could dream of.
It’s a coping mechanism and one that indicates a larger issue within would-be radicals.
How many people spearheaded the cruel violence of capital and got to live out to the end of their days peacefully? How many of those do we celebrate that they passed of natural causes? If only I had such enemies, I could be certain to fear nothing in my whole life, that I could die well into my 90s because the people who want me dead will cheer then as if they’ve personally buried me.
It’s like when the current-fascists make a blunder like inviting a journalist into a signal group chat. What a bunch of fools, right? Ha ha, look at how unintelligent they are. Never-mind that they’re outsmarted liberals and progressives, never-mind that they’re accomplishing all of their goals, never-mind that they’re ramping their death machine up, never-mind that they’re getting everything they wanted, and you are getting nothing, nothing, but a fucking chuckle.
Will that comfort you when they have you standing over the grave they had you dig out for yourself?
Will that comfort you with three walls and a set of iron bars?
Will you think about the chuckles you used to share with the friend of yours that gets disappeared?
These coping mechanisms feel similarly in line when I see Thatcher and Kissinger are being dreamt of as being in hell or hoping karma will deal with them. It isn’t bad enough to fail in such a way that these intolerably cruel people are left to live a life they denied so many others, but hoping, just hoping that the same god or karmic wheel that allowed their victims to suffer as they had, might be just and righteous enough to do something once they’re buried, is another means of you washing your hands of doing anything.
We cannot trust god or karma or anything other than our own hands as getting any semblance of justice, anything else is merely a conjuration for you to do nothing, because otherwise the reality is we are found guilty of standing by, of being onlookers, of even being enablers. So-called good people will feel like good people whenever they make a smug joke within their appropriate circles and be validated for it, but the audacity to joke without taking a step further, you may as well not joke at all. What’s the point of a doormat that quips?
Let’s take it a step further too. Bless the would-be assassins who attempted, but make no mistake, being their cheerleader doesn’t absolve of you of your inaction. Its a condemnation of your inaction. You would not count yourself among the brave souls either? If I were ever in their shoes and I survived, I’d sooner condemn you than thank you for your support. Being a radical, being a militant, demands that you are not on the bleachers, that you are not on the sidelines, but that you are actively jumping into the field.
I think of that twitter fool “strategy of burning a walmart” and I’m reminded how cowards think one riot is theoretically or strategically comparable to thousands of nonviolent protests, never asking the question, of the thousands of nonviolent protests within a year had been anything other than a nonviolent protest, where would we be at?
If, of the 14,000ish protests in the US between Jan 2024 and March 2025, had been distributed to blockading four major west coast ports in the US over a period of a month, let’s count it as one demonstration a day per port, 4×31, or 124 demonstrations that actively shut down the west coast, we’d hit the economy for hundreds of millions at a minimum, grinding the machine to one of its biggest slowdowns in history.
If 4,616 of those demonstrations turned into riots that burned down a walmart, the retail chain would no longer exist.
We celebrate the peaceful deaths of warmongers, we chuckle that the successes of fascists aren’t neatly polished, and we find a thousand excuses to justify our inaction, whether its hope for a spiritual entity that does justice for us or some rhetoric to avoid admitting cowardice. These are coping mechanisms, not so much for the impending doom, but for the long, on-going, and habitual failures.