Mildly Infuriating

First of all, thank you. Your response was well-mannered and thoughtful, which puts it several multitudes above the usual riffraff on this platform who encounter criticism of a belief they hold and immediately start foaming at the mouth.

Let me be perfectly clear about what I am arguing against: the wholesale slaughter of an entire group of people.

That is not revolution. That is not justice. That is not liberation. It is simply another form of barbarism, dressed up in whatever ideological language makes the person committing it feel righteous.

Human history is littered with the corpses of people who were convinced that this time the mass killing was justified because their victims were the right people to hate. It has never ended well. One hatred does not magically become virtuous because you attach a political theory to it.

There is already more than enough hatred in this world.

And no, I am not opposed to violence in every conceivable circumstance. There are political leaders in the Middle East and Russia whom I would have very little sympathy for if they were violently removed from power. There are people who commit such extraordinary acts of cruelty that I have no moral objection to the idea that they should face the ultimate consequence.

I can even understand the moral argument behind what Luigi Mangione did, regardless of where someone ultimately draws the legal or ethical line.

But there is an enormous difference between saying some individuals have forfeited their moral claim to our sympathy and saying an entire class of human beings deserves to die.

That distinction matters.

I understand why people are angry. I understand the plight of people being crushed by the economic and political systems we have constructed. I understand the desire to smash a system that appears fundamentally indifferent to the people trapped beneath it.

And I am not even particularly enthusiastic about capitalism. I see its failures. I see its contradictions. I see the suffering it can produce and the ways in which wealth and power concentrate themselves.

But here's where I draw the fucking line:

"Kill the capitalists."

No.

Because the moment your solution to oppression becomes finding another category of human beings to exterminate, you haven't transcended the system you despise. You've simply inherited its worst characteristics.

You have become the thing you claim to be fighting.

And that's the part nobody seems to want to hear.

If your revolution requires you to dehumanize an entire population before you can justify killing them, then congratulations—you haven't built a better ideology. You've just found a new excuse for the oldest human vice imaginable.

We have to be better.

Someone has to be willing to say the quiet part out loud: killing people because they belong to the wrong class does not make us morally superior to the people we condemn for doing the same thing to someone else.

You don't get moral absolution simply because your victims are different from theirs.

If the only thing separating your politics from the atrocities of the past is that you have chosen a different group of people to hate, then you haven't learned a damn thing from history.

You've just changed the uniforms.

You're an idiot.