It is a boring truism in socialist - socialist, revolutionary left, not socdem or any other such spicy liberals - circles that Propaganda of the Deed is a failure, discredited the anarchist movement, is inherently reactionary as "individualist adventurism", etc. It is also true, but not typically directly acknowledged, that the foremost examples of this, such as Alexander Berkman's attack on Henry Frick, were failures.

We should by rights mark July 8th, 2022, the date of Yamagami Tetsuya's assassination of Abe Shinzo, as the death of liberal "nonviolence".

It is, of course, true that nonviolence has never been effective in the way the liberal establishment would convince us; after all, if it were, why would the capitalist state maintain an armed and militarized police force? Why multiple national and transnational military forces? Why would peaceful protests be met with physical violence? In addition, it has never been the case that "nonviolent resistance" is needed to develop or maintain public support; if that were true, support for Black liberation during the George Floyd uprising in 2020 would not have peaked at the height of the movement's militancy, and support for burning down police stations would not have exceeded support for both presidential candidates!

Abe's assassination, however, was different in kind. No equivocation was possible, there was no argument to be had about "property destruction" vs. "violence", nor any possibility of blaming "outside agitators" (because, of course, Black people can't take militant action without being led by white people!). It was the most straightforward political assassination that has been seen in the "developed world" in decades.

And it was resoundingly successful! Far from benefiting from "sympathy", the slow slide the Liberal Democratic Party had been on under Abe and then Kishida turned into a collapse, with their 2024 electoral performance in the House of Representatives the worst the party had seen since 2009, the ruling coalition losing their majority in October's election and - as of December 2024, at least - their decline showing no signs of stopping. The Unification Church - the primary target of Yamagami's ire - fared no better, with the Japanese government going on a years-long campaign to root out Moonie influence and even threatening to dissolve the Church by a nearly-unprecedented invocation of Article 81 of the Religious Corporations Act.

By any reasonable metric, Yamagami's assassination of Abe was far more successful in terms of both immediate and (at least) medium-term political change than any "peaceful protest" in living memory. We can also look again to, and compare with, the George Floyd uprising in 2020, when militancy was gaining rapid attention and promises of reform from the political establishment, which immediately dried up as soon as said militancy was abandoned in favor of stepping back on to the electoral treadmill.

And this brings us to Luigi Mangione's assassination of Brian Thompson. Thompson was a monster, and there's no doubt of that; United Healthcare was never beloved, but under Thompson's leadership became the biggest denier of medical claims in the US. He personally made roughly $30 million dollars as UHC's CEO, while the company's profits increased to $16 billion a year by 2023, up four gigabucks from the already-massive $12 billion profit posted in 2021. Now, strangely enough, while it's easy to find all these numbers about how much money UHC made, it is extremely hard to find data around the number of people who have died or been seriously harmed by UHC's policies (ranging from routine denials to applications of known-to-be-broken algorithms to automatically deny claims!), but some conservative estimates say that ten thousand people have died directly due to those policies, which puts those deaths squarely on Thompson's shoulders.

By comparison, just under three thousand people died in the September 11th attacks. If Thompson had killed ten thousand Americans with guns or bombs or improvised weapons, the US government would have happily burned the world down to bring him to whatever they decided was "justice", just as they did with Osama bin Laden. Since he did it at the stroke of a pen, though, instead he's venerated and the capitalist state has deployed its entire media apparatus to convince us that he was anything other than a world-historical villain, and the police nationally were mobilized to run down Luigi Mangione in a way that made it completely clear even to the most servile right-wingers just exactly who the police "serve and protect". Any murderer whose victim wasn't a large capitalist piece of shit like Thompson has about a fifty-fifty chance of being caught (higher if their victims are white, of course!), and that's assuming those murders weren't, again, done at the stroke of a pen as a balance-sheet item, in which case no one will ever be held accountable.

All this being said, reaction to Thompson's death has been... unsympathetic. That is to say, Luigi Mangione is a national hero and even right-wing filth like Ben Shapiro have been struggling to shepherd their fascist foot-soldiers into believing that characters like Thompson or the other capitalist scumbags who sign Shapiro's paycheques are anyone's friends. This has led to people repeating extremely stupid comments like "it's not right vs. left, it's the 99% vs the 1%!" as if that were not the entire underpinning of socialist politics. This shows on one hand how effective capitalist propaganda has been such that people don't even grasp the nature of the division between left and right, but on the other opens up significant opportunities as people grapple with trying to understand the basic nature of political economy in the 21st century, and why the "center-left and center-right" that hold power - fascists all - seem so unified in their defense of these capitalist fucking vermin.

And so, propaganda of the deed is back baby! But of course, it never left, did it? It turns out that people whose politics are based around either gaining or maintaining state legitimacy - joining the capitalists instead of opposing them - are more than willing to lie about how the only effective action is playing the house's game, by the house's rules.

But the house always wins. Maybe we should burn down the casino instead.