Paris Demetriades
As reckless and ruthless as the cold-blooded killing of Charlie Kirk was in the decayed and polarized America of Donald Trump, a democracy sliding daily deeper into darkness, the reactions both within and beyond the United States are equally disturbing and erratic. After all, the U.S. has long been a country that exports, with remarkable efficiency, any cultural condition it experiences, positive or negative, and has always influenced events and public discourse on the eastern side of the Atlantic, including in our own country.
"The Left killed him," was the immediate claim the day after his murder, even before any shred of investigative evidence had emerged, by Aphrodite Latinopoulou, the new high priestess of the far-right in the motherland. "The Left murdered him because when they lack arguments, bullets do the talking. That is the Left. For those who haven’t realized yet, we are in an undeclared war," she added in a melodramatic, demagogic, and arbitrary tone; an attitude perfectly in tune with the anti-woke, Trumpian spirit of our deranged era. Will Aphrodite Latinopoulou become the Greek Giorgia Meloni? Not at all unlikely now that the far-right is so trendy.
On Cypriot soil, the political party that wasted no time commenting was the misanthropic ELAM. According to the tearful condolence statement issued by the Cypriot far-right party, the murder of their like-minded counterpart in the U.S. constitutes a "threat to democracy and freedom of speech." Charlie, it adds, defended with his words "the homeland, faith, and family, values that his murderers hate and have never been able to defeat with arguments." His murder, ELAM concludes, "is the most striking example of the paranoid subculture seeking global dominance. An era where patriotic and rational voices are silenced by any means, even murder."
The fact that Charlie, in addition to being a proponent of the “proper traditional” family and “traditional values,” was also a poster boy for intolerance and a rhetoric of hatred toward anything different from what he himself, in his limited understanding, perceived as right and proper, is a mere footnote for parties like Latinopoulou’s “Voice of Reason” and ELAM, whose rise and popularity epitomize the political, democratic, and institutional bankruptcy of our times.
Equally trivial seems to them the fact that the ELAM statement, like Latinopoulou’s, was issued before the murder had been clarified and thus before any evidence existed that it was indeed an act perpetrated by his political opponents. Not to mention the vastly different interpretation and meaning of the term “Left” in America compared with Greece and Cyprus.
What, unfortunately, the Kirk case seems to underscore is how the decay and collapse of democratic values are steadily bringing both sides of the Atlantic closer together. Gun ownership, the very cause that the 31-year-old Kirk championed, and which, tragically ironic, would ultimately claim his own life, may primarily concern the U.S., but the metaphorical shooting and killing of opposing viewpoints are happening in Europe as well.
One need only look at some of the beliefs and theories Kirk himself espoused and compare them with opinions that are beginning to gain popularity in Europe. As examples, two of his views stand out: Charlie Kirk insisted that the perfect law would punish any man who has sex with another man with… death, while… the death of children in schools, he stated shamelessly, was a justified sacrifice to… protect the murderers’ right to own military-grade weapons.
We have entered an especially bleak era, and the murder of Charlie Kirk is nothing more than yet another emblematic incident of it.
