The Abe assassination reminds us that individuals make history WaPo

Truly today's crown jewel of dipshittery. If you looked at the headline and immediately thought "Oh god, this is gonna fucking suck", then you're correct, but unfortunately, it sucks even more than you're thinking it will.

The assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe on July 8 shocked his country and the world. Beyond its obvious repugnance in moral terms, Abe’s murder challenges us to consider what implications his sudden loss might have for the political future, in Japan and globally.

As such, it tests competing views of history and what does, or does not, determine the course of public events.

According to a widely held perspective, the removal of even a major figure such as Abe, who was the longest-serving head of government in postwar Japan and still influential despite resigning due to ill health in late 2020, lacks ultimate consequence. What determined the past, and will determine the future, are broad, impersonal, social forces — religion, ideology, demography, economic development.

Yet a contrary intuition — that individual leadership matters — persists. Assassinations perversely tend to confirm it. By plucking leaders violently from atop society, these killings divide history between one period when life was unimaginable without these prominent personages and another, full of what-ifs, defined by their absence.

Surely the power to make such an impact is part of what tempts assassins. And we must admit the painful extent to which they do, in fact, shape our world, albeit through subtraction: We are experiencing history minus Abraham Lincoln, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Huey Long, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, Yitzhak Rabin and Anwar Sadat.

I feel fairly confident that WW1 would have happened even if Franz Ferdinand wasn't killed. At a different time, perhaps, but BROAD HISTORICAL FORCES were aligned that way. To quote Matt Christman, it was overdetermined. Also, mentioning Martin Luther King as a victim of assassination given WHO ASSASSINATED HIM is threatening to give me an aneurysm. I'm not even gonna fucking think about the JFK or RFK mention because my brain might explode.

For that matter, we live in a world shaped by assassinations that failed, perhaps the most fateful of which was the attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life by coup-minded officers and diplomats 78 years ago this July 20.

Like, obviously I wish Hitler WAS assassinated, but I don't think it would have made a really significant difference to WW2 or the Holocaust. I agree that there's something to be said about "great men", who were put in place through broad historical trends, leaving their own little unique personal stamp on history, but it would have been a tremendous tragedy of about the same order of magnitude if Hitler's second or third in command took power after he was asssassinated.

Postwar Japan, a restored but aging economic power facing the rise of its ancient rival — China — might have tried to jump-start its productive capability and reassert itself in global affairs, including militarily, no matter who served as prime minister between 2012 and 2020.

Even within the constraints of a culture that prizes consensus and collective action, however, Abe pursued those objectives in his own particular way, casting Japanese reassertion as both a legitimate national interest and a contribution to the democratic world’s security. He won over Japanese voters and U.S. presidents as different as Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

Those extremely different people. Donald Trump is a self-obsessed golf-playing moron who only cares about himself and will throw people to the wolves the second it becomes beneficial to him, unlike Obama - the man who was also all those things and is, what, on his 13th fucking autobiography by now?

Japan’s surviving political leadership now seems motivated to build a monument to Abe in the form of amendments, long sought by him, that will change the country’s pacifist postwar constitution clearly to authorize military self-defense.

"Individuals make history, not broad historical trends, which explains why, after Abe was assassinated... checks notes... Japan continued on its broad historical trend towards increasing fascism [with the absence of a strong working class left-wing movement to oppose it]." What the fuck are you talking about???

Though the contexts are totally different, the process could resemble President Lyndon B. Johnson’s pursuit of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a tribute to his slain predecessor, John F. Kennedy. Another precedent: Congress passed civil service reform in 1883, in response to the assassination two years earlier of President James Garfield by Charles Guiteau, a frustrated federal job seeker.

These examples only illustrate that assassination can have paradoxical side-effects — they do not redeem it. Political murder is inherently destabilizing to any political system and especially antithetical to democracy. Nothing could be more contrary to popular rule than the violent decapitation of a government, party or social movement by one self-appointed executioner.

I'm going insane looking at that last sentence. Oh my fucking god. All I can do is stare blankly at it and try and maintain a hold on my consciousness.

This is why the United States is wise to invest in Secret Service protection and other measures to keep public officials safe. The impact of a major assassination on the already feverishly divided U.S. body politic today would be too awful to consider. Alas, it is also all too imaginable, as shown by the recent arrest of an armed man who, according to law enforcement, had second thoughts about killing Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and surrendered to police outside the justice’s house.

This man is not going to valhalla.

If we are honest about it, the need to field a small army of official bodyguards constitutes a deeply troubling, though tacit, admission of insufficient domestic tranquility in the United States.

Happier and, in an important sense, more democratic, is the country where weapons possession is appropriately limited, the public’s attitudes are temperate — and politicians, judges and candidates feel free to walk the streets with minimal or no security.

The United States came closer to that ideal before Nov. 22, 1963, than it has since. Sweden lost a great deal of innocence in 1986, when a gunman killed former prime minister Olof Palme as he left a movie theater with his family, having previously given his security detail the night off.

As of July 8, Japan, too, was the kind of place where public officials often felt safe mingling with the voters they proposed to represent.

Now it faces the grim task of striking a new, sustainable balance, bearing in mind always that, in a democracy, no individual has the right to change history through violence — and all individuals must feel safe to try to change it peacefully.

This guy was put on this earth to drive me insane, and he's succeeding.