…in the United States and yet lands only in Europe,” as Tom Wolfe first said. I would offer a corollary: political violence is always descending from the right, yet when it lands, it nearly always comes from the left. Thus, for example, liberals love to talk about hate, but somehow they never mention the great political hater of our time, Bernie Bro James Hodgkinson, who took a rifle to a Republican baseball team and who grievously wounded and very nearly killed the House Majority Whip, Steve Scalise.
I am reminded of this theme by this appalling headline from Germany: German far-right leader severely injured after being beaten in “assassination attempt.”
Frank Magnitz, chairman of Germany’s AfD party, was left with a gaping wound in his head after he was reportedly knocked unconscious by three attackers on Monday.
Gruesome images posited on the AfD Bremen Facebook page show the politician lying on a hospital bed with blood pouring from a large wound on his head.
The party has described the assault as a “politically-motivated attempted assassination”.
Magnitz was beaten around the head with a piece of wood and was knocked out cold by the three men, the AfD said.
The photos are indeed grim. Magnitz would have been murdered, apparently, except that a formidable bystander appeared and chased off the three men who attacked him. He may yet die.
I don’t know much about Frank Magnitz. He and his party are conventionally described as “far right,” which in Europe usually translates as “not uncritically enthusiastic about mass Islamic immigration.” AfD is Germany’s third-largest party with 94 seats in the Bundestag, so it obviously isn’t a fringe group. Its principal issue, I think, is skepticism of the European Union, a skepticism that I share.
In any event, bashing in the heads of one’s political opponents is generally frowned upon. By us conservatives, anyway. Not, of course, by Antifa, the Democratic Party’s shock troops. And not by Democratic Party politicians, few of whom, to my knowledge, have denounced Antifa, and some of whom (like Deputy DNC Chairman Keith Ellison) have endorsed Antifa’s political violence.
In Europe as in America, political violence is conventionally feared from the right, but in fact comes overwhelmingly from the Left.
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