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GOP influencer Charlie Kirk gets shot in the neck during one of his trademark campus debate events. America is holding its breath while the FBI is conducting a full manhunt for the killer(s). Depending on the identity and motive of the assassin the there are different expected consequences:
- The super-woke or trans lone wolf: Mentally unstable people with an axe to grind often know that plotting together with others is too risky and simply come up with a plan of their own. Even some trans people have militarized and developed the typical mental gymnastics of a terrorist to justify the act. Many kinds of policies are regarded as “life-or-death” nowadays, including hormones and surgery for children self-identifying as trans.
- The traditional leftist operative who favors “direct action” over talking: The GOP was struggling during the Bush years to get young people as voters. The average FOX News viewer was almost at retirement age. During the Obama administrations the GOP was gaining ground and finally with the Trump campaign new influencers were getting a lot of traction. The talking strategy of the left started to fail. Picking Kirk as a target may have been a strategic choice to cause intimidation without hitting someone from the government.
- A muslim or pro-Ukraine killer: Kirk supported Israel over Gaza and echoed Russian talking points against Ukraine.
- The professional destabilizer: This sort of killer is either a professional working for private customers or foreign governments, or he has been coached by professionals who remain in the dark and keep minimal ties that can be traced. The ultimate motive is destabilization of the target population, expecting retaliatory attacks.
Soviet intelligence killing Ohnesorg and Dutschke
The left-wing West Berlin student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by West Berlin police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras in 1967 during a demonstration against the visit of the Shah of Persia. This caused a significant radicalization in Germany across all political camps, which played into Moscow’s hands. In 2009, Stasi files revealed that Kurras was a secret SED member and an unofficial employee of the GDR’s spy service, the Ministry for State Security. It has not been proven whether Kurras intentionally committed murder on behalf of the Stasi.
A photographer from the GDR propaganda newspaper “Wahrheit” (Truth) took the famous photo of the dead Ohnesorg. Alfred Mentschel, a medical assistant with communist connections, also happened to be at the scene and treated the man. A doctor in the hospital removed a piece of the skull. The Stasi obtained a copy of the court records in record time and had the opportunity to exert influence.
Kurras had declared in writing to the Stasi that he considered the Eastern path to be the right policy. Although he lacked the typical Marxist-Leninist training, he consumed books from the East.
A similar case was that of Rudi Dutschke. The Left, which often viewed him with hostility because of his criticism of the USSR, uses him as a martyr today.
Originally a GDR citizen, he chose to flee to the West and lived as a college student until the age of 33, but his career as a professional lecturer or author never materialized. Instead, he wanted to promote socialist revolutions worldwide, using force if necessary, yet he disliked the USSR. Ultimately, this meant that he had extremely influential enemies on the left, right, and center.
The assassination attempt in 1968 was carried out by the right-winger Josef Bachmann. The left-wingers held the BILD newspaper partly responsible, even though the conservative press as a whole hadn’t engaged in any particular agitation. Bachmann’s group, however, was said to have contacts with the Stasi.
Moscow deeply despised all left-wing movements that did not accept Moscow’s leadership. Assassination attempts on prominent dissidents like Trotsky in exile were planned long in advance.
An informant in the leftist student group SDS reported to the East Berlin Ministry for State Security at the time that Dutschke represented “a completely anarchist position”; informant Dietrich Staritz reported in December 1966 that Dutschke spoke exclusively of “shitty socialism” in the GDR. The Eastern Bloc was in a panic about democratization movements at the time. From the perspective of the Stasi or the KGB, an assassination would have made doubly sense: They would have gotten rid of a prominent socialist critic of the Eastern Bloc and simultaneously created a martyr with a huge stir to destabilize West Germany.
For Dutschke, the “October Putsch” or the “Bolshevik seizure of power” was already a relapse into “general state slavery.” Stalin’s attempt to increase the Soviet Union’s productivity through brutal, forced industrialization had only produced a new imperialism. The DKP (German Communist Party) then attacked Dutschke.
Was Dutschke thus signing his death warrant? After surviving Bachmann’s shots, he suspected the Stasi was behind the operation. Dutschke’s son explained:
But it’s interesting that the Stasi files on my father aren’t particularly extensive and document more private stories. Today, I see that there are more files on Karl-Heinz Kurras, who shot Ohnesorg, than on Rudi Dutschke. And I still believe that not all of the files on Dutschke have surfaced yet.
He was able to live until 1979, but even in the years before his death, he feared the agents from the Eastern Bloc. The Hamburg The Institute for Social Research published a letter from his estate in 2009. In the letter, dated February 25, 1975, he wrote to his wife Gretchen of his 99.9 percent conviction “that if I die, then at the current stage it is more likely to be carried out by the Soviet Union’s secret service than by the Western one.”
The motive:
“Quite simply, and without arrogance, I am unfortunately the only real theoretical and political challenge. If the book (“Attempt to Stand Lenin on His Feet”) was already a dangerous blow, my concretization of the critique of ‘despotic’ communism from the standpoint of ‘democratic’ communism is even more dangerous. My thesis would be wrong if the democratic direction prevailed. Then I would not be a challenge, but a link in the unified anti-capitalist struggle. But that is not the case.”
Did he really drown in his bathtub in 1979 from the after-effects of the previous assassination attempt, or did the Stasi off him?
Dutschke also had had contact with the Moscow terror campaign. In 1967, he visited the publisher and terror coordinator Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan. In addition to revolutionary movements in various Latin American countries, the publisher was also interested in the student revolts in Germany. He partially financed the famous Vietnam Congress in Berlin. He spoke with Dutschke about future actions, organization, and contacts. Gretchen Dutschke describes a family visit Feltrinelli made to Berlin, during which he delivered sticks of dynamite. After the assassination attempt on Dutschke, Feltrinelli offered him financial support and a stay in Carinthia to recover.
Dutschke didn’t even actively participate in violence against property, although he helped prepare bomb attacks on a radio mast belonging to the American Forces Network and a ship carrying supplies for the US Army in Vietnam. Both attacks were never carried out.
As a terrorist, he was useless to the Stasi and the SED. At the same time, he surrounded himself with SED dissidents such as Havemann and Bahro. In February 1974, he even moderated a panel discussion on Solzhenitsyn and the Left, in which he advocated for human rights in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.
His untimely end came in his own bathtub.
