Comedians like Bill Hicks and George Carlin have bits where they complain about how the genuinely good pacifist types are always the ones that end up getting assassinated: MLK, Gandhi, Lennon etc. Jokes about why can't this shit happen to the real monsters or the corporate sellouts aside (and granted there are always a plethora of assassination attempts on people like this), this does seem to be somewhat of a disquieting trend.
There is something about being a pacifist that a pacifist probably realizes but doesn't really want to acknowledge. Choosing to stand up to violence and domination as a pacifist is unfortunately an act of declaring war, in this case on war and violence itself. When one defines oneself in opposition to another ideology, it necessary sets one against adherents of that ideology, so that declaring that everyone should get together and love one another becomes a challenge, and eventually an act of violence as perceived by those who identify with a culture of separation, domination and violent force. It is a really fucked up and unfair problem.
What was really interesting to me about the movie "Milk" was the character of the man who assassinated Harvey Milk: Dan White. As Harvey's character became this brighter and brighter star that was afforded more power and admiration, Dan became darker and more brooding and shamed and powerless. At one breaking point he screamed at Harvey something along the lines of he won't be made a fool of or something like that, I forget exactly what was said. I'm not entirely sure if this exchange really took place but the act seems pretty significant to me. Dan was this conservative figure (who might have been a closeted gay) who was allied with conservative forces and assented to conservative ideologies which happened to be pretty regressive and domineering, whereas Milk was the embodiment of this sort of progressive, loving force. You have this man that is probably very conflicted about who he is, but to abandon who he was would mean to necessarily destroy his self and start over, prostrating himself before the ideology of his rival. No matter how right this choice would be, it seems that it is something few people are capable of.
Almost as if Harvey's fire took all of the oxygen out of the room, the disgraced and deprived Dan had no choice but to commit an act of savagery and destroy him, as there were no logical tools or arguments left to reposition himself and regain what power would afford him his pride; his position had become morally indefensible. Trying to justify the behavior of a murderer is probably not a very desirable or popular endeavor, and that's really not what I'm trying to do here. I just find it interesting that people behave this way.
As it happens, organizations and even empires behave this way as well. It seems that the larger and more powerful something gets, the more necessary it becomes for this thing to identify with a distinct set of ideas, no matter the contradictory nature of its character, and then sharply opposing itself to any ideas that may be different. The same goes for the powerless in relation to power.
So you have the United States going in and picking fights with all these Communist and socialist regimes in places like North Korea, Vietnam and various countries in South America after WWII (and plenty of other places of course - we've had our crusty fingers just about everywhere) and now declaring a literally endless war on pretty much the entire Islamist population; it is our duty as good Christians of course, or good humanists as they spin it today.
The Communist threat was completely overblown, especially by the neoconservatives. So we went out and wasted all this time, effort, energy, and most importantly, lives going out where we didn't belong to put down these regimes that really had nothing to do with us. They were merely political entities that were attempting to position themselves as something apart from global empire, and we didn't like that very much. Many of these regimes ended up becoming state-capitalist endeavours anyway, but because they wished to stand and establish themselves with a different set of ideas at least cosmetically, so as to split nominally from the master empire, so to speak, they had to be destroyed. Then some of these regimes did want to attempt genuinely egalitarian societies. But no, these regimes were pure distilled evil and had to be destroyed. Freedom!
And so now global capitalist empire is all that stands; it spreads to every corner of the globe even as it begins its slow process of decline and disintegration. We see the beginnings of the early indicators of true revolution, when a new ideology coalesces among the powerless, themselves adopting values opposed to the master empire. It will be messy though. We have everything from these secular, humanist, pacifist ideologies struggling to assert themselves, to these regressive fundamentalist Islamist denominations that are really quite indistinguishable from fundamentalist Christian ones ironically enough. These are simply people identifying with a different set of ideas and symbols, if merely to set themselves apart from the master empire and take for themselves a little dignity, even if it means welcoming a hellfire missile.
It is unfortunate to say that still much of the world is ruled by violent, regressive forces. I'd dare say that positioning oneself as a pacifist today is actually a courageous act. For peace to be achieved at this point, it would be necessary for the peaceful themselves to absorb enough of the violent energies of the regressives without reverting to a lower logic of violence and force.
We seem to be attempting to establish this stabilizing executive system which is typified by logic and reason, but to do so requires fitting it atop this old lizard brain, and the mammalian brain too, both these coupled systems that are very much capable of love as well as hate and violence, and so the attempts thus far have resulted in the crumbling of the logical regulative systems and a regression to those elemental forces of violence- the rise of fascism would be the modern age's manifestation of such a tendency.
There is hope too. What is especially interesting about the assassination of a powerful pacifist figure by those forces of violence is the effects that come with the phenomenon of martyrdom. It is almost as if those devoted to the life and ideas of the slain figure double down on their ideas, pulling the fabric together in what amounts to, and yes I guess I'm going to say this, a sort of healing field of love which seeks to pull back together the social organizations that have been torn around the ensuing wound that is left behind from the loss of such a figure. Instead of violent retaliation and the ultimate collapse of pacifism into the violent ideology it is opposed to, we have a scabbing over of the new organism that is attempting to assert itself as something apart from violent empire.
