Is Political Violence Ever Justified?
baby Hitler, punching Nazis, and Trump
When I heard about the attempted assassination of Trump this weekend, my mind immediately went to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was executed for conspiring to kill Hitler.
Bonhoeffer was a theological wunderkind on the rise when Hitler seized power in 1933. While most of the German church either capitulated to or actively collaborated with the Nazi party, Bonhoeffer saw early on the dangers in Hitler’s antisemitic rhetoric. He spoke out publicly and regularly against the Nazis. When he and other pastors were voted out of their churches for criticizing Hitler, they formed an alternative “Confessing Church” which reaffirmed that Christ, not Hitler, was the head of the church.
Throughout his short life, Bonhoeffer was given many opportunities to flee Germany (including an invitation to study nonviolence under Gandhi) but ultimately, Bonhoeffer kept returning to Germany, intent to collaborate with the resistance. He joined the Abwehr, a German intelligence organization that undermined Nazism from inside the government and was arrested after the failed 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler (the one that Tom Cruise movie was about.)
A common Christian understanding of Bonhoeffer’s work is that his early pacifism gave way to a more “realistic” view and that he was, indeed, guilty of conspiring to kill Hitler. This meshes well with the commonly held belief that if, given a time machine, the one thing any responsible person should do is go back in time and kill baby Hitler. The idea is that it’s ethically justified to kill one person to save many. The argument becomes even simpler when the one person you’d kill was a genocidal murderer. It’s like taking philosophy’s famous Trolley Problem and making it a no brainer, right?
Not so fast. What would the criteria be for deciding which leaders get killed? And who gets to decide? One of my favorite philosophical rules for deciding the ethics of a particular action is Kant’s Universalizability Principle (what a mouthful!) The idea is, if one person gets to do something, everyone gets to do it. When my son hits his brother, I sometimes ask him to imagine: okay, what if we made the rule that everyone in our family could hit each other whenever they felt like it? You can hit your brother if Mommy can hit Daddy and Daddy can hit the cat. Is that a family rule you’d like to have?
Of course not.
If we apply Universalizability Principle to political violence, we can quickly see that deciding it’s okay to assassinate Hitler could lead to violence against politicians who aren’t Hitler. And Bonhoeffer may have come to similar conclusions: new scholarship has cast doubt on the fact that Bonhoeffer actually pivoted from pacifism and towards assassination. He was officially charged with being a draft dodger and attempting to help 14 Jewish men and women escape Germany. While he was certainly aware of five plots to assassinate Hitler, there is no direct evidence he participated in these plots.
Moving from Hitler to our present political situation, I should make another distinction very clear: Trump is not Hitler. He may be temperamentally unsuited to the role of president, he may use dehumanizing language towards people of color, women, and his political opponents (a behavior he shares with Hitler), and he certainly seems to value his own ego above the preservation of our democracy, but even given all that, Trump is still not Hitler.
Is Trump a bad person? Yes, I believe so. Will I feel relief when he finally dies? Certainly. Still, this attack against Trump, which killed and wounded several others, is in no way morally justified.
Now there are a proliferation of memes joking about how people wish Trump had been assassinated, and conspiracy theories popping up on both the left and right. This is unsurprising, given our current heated political discourse and the usual internet stupidity. But more alarming is how, in the last several years, Leftist rhetoric has shifted from a near-universal embrace of nonviolent protest towards justifying violence, including many claiming it’s okay to throw coffee in the face of odious human Alex Jones, or that it’s okay to “punch a Nazi.” Our protests have become a real mess, sometimes devolving into violent confrontations and property destruction.
Wise leaders like Gandhi and MLK knew better. One overlooked success of the Civil Rights Movement was how extensively protestors trained so that they could resist retaliating while undergoing extreme violence themselves. (Check out the movie Selma for a glimpse at how this worked.)
Violence always begets further violence. Power won through violence is always temporary, because power obtained through coercion will always be wrested back.
A bullet can end a person’s life, but it will not snuff out the ideas that person stood for—for good or ill. Rather than spewing violent rhetoric, may we be people who win the hearts and minds of others through our goodness and our refusal to return violence.
Do you agree with Kant’s Universalizability Principle? And what are you doing for self-care during this stressful time? Feel free to share in the comments.
BONUS MATERIALS:
want more Kant? Here’s a 10-minute YouTube crash course. Very interesting, especially if you’re curious about non-religious ethics.
Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity feels very prescient right now
I will never not share this hilarious piece
Well done! You’re a brave soul to take on politics in this moment, but I like the U Principle … in fact, it sounds a lot like the golden rule.
Great article, Katharine. Violence begets violence. Demagogues like Trump shape movements, but they also ride the wave of peoples' worst instincts. If he had been killed last weekend, the MAGA movement would not suddenly dry up and blow away. Conspiracy theories would thrive, and people like JD Vance would rise up and try to grab the mantel. We are left with the long, hard work of shifting culture and creating communities where are values can be lived. I write this with more certainty than I feel. Sustaining love and justice always feels like gardening. So many things out of our control can go wrong.