The political murder of Charlie Kirk is a dramatic symptom of the hatred and violence that now pervades not only American society, but increasingly also European society.

This is an incident that must be condemned in the strongest terms, without hesitation and without extenuating circumstances.

I find shameful and barbaric the words of jubilation or justification read on social networks, which are a further manifestation of the same hatred that armed the killer’s hand.

To accept, even on a theoretical level, that political violence is an admissible tool, whoever its target, is to take a step beyond the abyss for any democratic society. It is the very negation of civil coexistence, the betrayal of every liberal and republican principle.

Having said that, I find the approval that some supposed ‘liberals’ have shown towards Kirk’s political ideas both surprising and disturbing, as if they were worthy of respect or even agreement.

This attitude is quite different from human condolences for his death or condemnation of murder. Anyone’s right to life and safety is not in question, but this cannot turn into a posthumous legitimisation of his ideological positions.

I wonder, with sincere perplexity, how a figure who supported anti-Jewish conspiracy theories about so-called ‘ethnic substitution’, who judged the passage of the Civil Rights Act (the law that ended racial segregation in the United States) to be a grave historical mistake which justified in no uncertain terms the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 in which a police officer was killed, and which argued with conviction that gay people corrupted children, can today be considered a benchmark or, even worse, a model for liberal culture.

These are violent, discriminatory and anti-democratic ideas, which have nothing to do with the values of freedom, equality and respect for the individual.

Every political murder, regardless of the political colour of the victim or the aggressor, must be condemned in the strongest terms.
However, we must not make the mistake of turning every victim into a martyr of liberal-democratic thinking, especially when that person has made the denial of democratic principles the core of their political battle.

Kirk’s ideas were, in fact, the other side of the same coin as the fundamentalists hostile to him: they too implied a fundamental rejection of democracy and they too bet on hatred and social division as a political engine.

This is why we must express the strongest condemnation of political murder per se, as well as the temptation to rehabilitate the ideas of those who suffer it just because they have been murdered.

The defence of democratic values is not achieved by attributing dignity to ideologies that have systematically denied them, but by forcefully asserting that political violence is always a failure and that democracy remains the only space in which the conflict of ideas can find citizenship without resulting in bloodshed.