@PolAm
....in interessant opinion piece today in the quite left leaning german paper "Die Zeit" about that:
(I can only post a part / paywall etc.)
archive.is/20250911163649/zeit.de/zeit-magazin/leben/2025-09/attentat-charlie-kirk-reaktionen-us-demokraten-anteilnahme#selection-1781.0-1803.229
....As ugly as these comments are, as much as they cross boundaries and deliberately escalate, perhaps some of the violent reactions-the search for culprits, the frenzied accusations, the lashing out-are partly explainable just hours after a person's murder. Nevertheless, the left would have reason to react with outrage to this madness, loudly and accusatorily. As it often does.
But most of it remains unanswered. No outrage at Trump, no outcry over the escalation of the right. Instead: grief. The dominant theme is not that Trump is adding fuel to the fire, even though, as president, he has a duty to calm the country. The dominant theme is loss. The shock. And the conviction that even in a deeply polarized society, a political opponent must not be dehumanized.
Anyone who listens to the left during these hours realizes that they are not only mourning Charlie Kirk. They are mourning something bigger, something that includes themselves. This attack wasn't just directed at a right-wing activist. It seems like an attack on freedom of speech, on democracy itself. And the reactions also reflect despair, the suspicion that something important to everyone could be lost.
What happened on the campus in Utah, where Kirk, like everywhere else in the country, was debating with students who think differently, was a paradigm that belongs to the heart of every democracy: A person stands in a public space, in the open air, in front of others, and speaks. From the agora in ancient Athens to Hyde Park in London to the election campaign in provincial Germany: politics thrives on the public word. If that word is no longer safe, if speaking itself becomes dangerous, then not only does political culture collapse. Who, asks conservative commentator Ben Shapiro in his podcast, will even dare to go to a political rally after the attempted assassinations of Trump and the murder of Charlie Kirk?
And yet perhaps there is consolation in the realization that the vast majority, across all camps, believe what Charlie Kirk also believed: that political debate is conducted with words. Not with weapons.
It really seems its only a few radical nutters who mock and celebrate....the far majority is silent, definitely not happy...
