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Tag: politics

Assassination And A History Of Violence

“There is no place in America for this kind of violence.”

The words of President Biden yesterday following an attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump ring hollow to those whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence in the US in recent decades.

One only has to say the words “Sandy Hook” to understand how gun culture and gun violence leave a dark stain on an American society determined to cling to its guns no matter how many school children have to pay the price.

Indeed the conspiracies around that one event – Sandy Hook – are enough to sicken even the most questioning of individuals. It is something that it’s taken twelve years for political broadcaster and commentator Alex Jones to be held fully to account for peddling lies that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged and that the parents of the murdered children were, in reality, actors helping create a fake event, the aim of which was to extend further gun control throughout the United States.

There has always been a place for violence in American politics. Their relatively short history is dotted with assassinations and assassination attempts at both the highest levels of politics and the lowest. Here’s a look at some of the more notable ones over the last 200 years.

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The Sleep of Reason

The Sleep of Reason by Jon Rosling holocaust book coverLast year I published my first book, THE SLEEP OF REASON: Modernisation, Intention and Nazi Race Policy, an addition to the mass of existing Holocaust literature. jon rosling

Admittedly the title is not one to leap off of the shelves at Waterstones and it’s more of a thought piece and academic text than coffee table fare as it looks at the development of racial policy in Nazi Germany after the National Socialists took power 1933.

Clearly something for niche historians and students of the Holocaust and the period generally.

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9/11

This tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the US on 9/11 fills everyone who witnessed them with a sense of grim remembrance, from constant replays on television news and accounts of individual memories of the events on that day.

I can remember very clearly where I was tha 9/11. It was the first day of the new term at the school I was working at, which had started late because of delayed building work at the school over the summer.

The day was given over to prepping the classrooms and buildings before pupils came back on the 12th and I had gone out to a hardware shop nearby to buy some last minute things for the classsroom. I can recall quite distinctly looking through the shelves while another customer was telling one of the shop assistants what had happened in New York.

Having been to New York, having been to the top of the south tower in 1995, I had a particular fondness for the place – sleek, minimalist design, but somehow projecting an enormous and somewhat Freudian sense of power and wealth and might.

So to watch it destroyed by hijacked planes, tumbling to dust in 10 seconds, brought an emotional response as one who had lived and worked in New York, among New Yorkers. My wife and I had stood at the bottom of the north tower when we visited New Yok in October 1998.

Now, 9/11 2001 it was no more.

There is so much horror in that day – the hijackings, the crashes, the destruction of the WTC and part of the Pentagon, the bravery of those on Flight 93 and their deaths, the jumpers from the towers – it’s hard even now to take it in.

Today is a day for remembrance, remembering who were lost on 9/11 – and in the wars since – and remembering a slightly more innocent time.

Let’s hold on to the hope that sometime in the future we can find that innocence once again.

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