Yagami Tetsuya assassinated Abe Shinzo, former PM of Japan, while he was drumming up support for a candidate from his party. The motive was his mother draining the family savings account to donate to a Christian cult known as the Unification Church, aka Moonies. He actually wanted to kill the Moonie leadership but deemed it unrealistic, so he went after Abe who had ties to the cult. After the assassination, it came out that a lot of Japanese leadership had ties to the cult and there was a bit of a witch-hunt.
Guy's mother joined a cult and ended up donating the family's entire savings, leaving them in poverty. He's supper pissed about the conditions they live in and eventually assassinates the former PM who was apparently involved with said cult somehow. Now it seems the government is earnestly considering the conditions which created such despair in the man.
I'm just working off memory, but that's the basics of it I think.
Over what time scale? Incremental change is also change, and don't require violence. You might not have noticed the beneficial change because it's happened over so long and society has been managed through the change.
The other side to that question is - how frequently does violence achieve beneficial change? As opposed to violence which doesn't effect change at all, or changes things for the worse?
Ok. Small and incremental changes. Our government has slowly gotten more corrupt and become more of an oligarchy over the past 60 years. Our government stopped doing what was best for most Americans a long time ago. The blackwater scandal during the Nixon Era would barely be a blip today. Insurance companies have gotten Healthcare to sky rocket. No one can afford a house because corporations have been allowed to buy them all up. Minimum wage has fallen way behind, there's no ceiling for how many hundreds of millions the wealthy can make each year and still pay a lower tax rate than someone making $70k. People are in more debt than ever and fewer people are starting families because you can't afford it. Our two party system bullies out any third party so political shifts never change. Gerrymandering is outrageous in many states in order to suppress voters. Anything that is generally passed that would benefit most Americans has its legs cut out from underneath it with stipulations or other earmarked junk. Corporations breaking laws get a slap on the wrist. I mean hell, Bayer knowingly infected hundreds of people with HIV back when it was a death sentence because they didn't want to take the loss on discarding their tainted product. We have at least one Supreme Court Justice who has been caught dead to rights accepting gifts, and not a thing happens to him.
There were many assassinations and atrocities (including gunning down over 800 unarmed indians) that happened for 50 years leading up to that. Also, after ww2 the British feared that the ton of Indian National Army POWs released from Japan were gearing up to violently resist the British on a large scale. The British didn't just give up because Ghandi was nice and all the non violent protests. They gave up after years of violence, then a break from the violence, and then the threat of going back to violence against the former POWs and the support they were getting.
Ghandi and his followers were very influential and peaceful, but thats far from the only thing that forced out the brits.
It’s unfortunate but in a lot of cases it’s the only thing that will work. Peaceful protest can help when protesting against a group that could be viewed as rational, if not, most people won’t just lie down if the conditions they are protesting don’t improve, and more drastic action becomes one of the few options left.
People here agitating for political violence are acting like this legislation is something like police reform or oil production rates when it's actually just a relatively small thing which won't negatively affect anyone in power and is generally considered popular.
He'd probably have got it into the public dialog with a good pop song too.
Honestly the reason this is interesting news is because it's so uncommon, normally governments and the public shift away from whatever violent radicals support because they don't want to be associated or don't want to appear weak.
The title of the post could've also been written "sometimes, murder is good". I don't think that's anything to defend just because sometimes violence has resulted in a better situation later.
The thing that makes gallows humour gallows humour and not violence is the humour part. There is a huge difference between joking about guillotines and actually using them
Because the political violence mentioned in the title is murder. The title is "murder works and is good sometimes actually". And the 'sometimes' mentioned here is when a man held a grudge against the Unification Church, couldn't find a chance to kill high ranking members of the church and then decided to kill the former PM because he had connections to it and was easy enough to find.
First Pride "Parade" was a riot(Stonewall Riots) and the US Government finally caved on the Civil Right Movement because they realized they wouldn't be able to control it anymore. Governments are based on their monopoly on violence. If something threatens that, they can either put down the opposition or remove the reason the opposition has for being violent. It's a lesson the Right always knows and the Left keeps forgetting.
After a wiki binge I can try to answer: it seems that the "Unification Church" is a religious movement popular in Japan and Korea and pressures members into massive donation as well as bringing new members to the church.
The assassin was acting in revenge for his mother's donations to this church ruining their family. Shinzo Abe, the assassinated president, was a high profile member.
So the bill basically sets up a bunch of rules on how donations can be solicited and offers a right of refund if there's anything dodgy about the way the money was donated, or if the victim was deemed to be "brainwashed" into it.
Hol' up. Abe wasn't a member of the church. However, his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, (founder of the LDP, fascist, and Class A war criminal) allowed The Unification Church to prey on vulnerable Japanese people. The Nippon Kaigi, the shadowy fascist organization that decides who leads the LDP, has allowed the church to fundraise in Japan for three generations.
Tetsuya Yamagami started out as your run of the mill right winger until he learned of the links between Abe and the Moonies. He wanted to take revenge on Moon's widow, Hak Ja Han Moon, but he couldn't travel out of the country because of the pandemic. So he targeted the next best thing.
Wouldn't you know it? All that harmony disrupting shit that Japan just ignored couldn't be ignore any longer.
On top of that, there's some scandal about LDP slush funds now. Fascists gonna fascist I suppose.
Behind the Bastards had a good couple episodes about the moonies. They were everywhere at one point, even making it into meetings at the white house (in the 80s IIRC).
The assassination of Shinzo Abe. Former prime minister of Japan.
In short, and I'm working on memory, the assassin killed Abe because Abe was very friendly with a religous cult. Said cult had brainwashed the assassins mother and made her penniless.