Recently, two Israeli embassy workers were assassinated by a man who shouted "Free Palestine!" I have seen all manner of ignorance following this, and almost none of it feels at all informed by any knowledge of history whatsoever.

So, without making any judgement on that incident yet, let us return to one of the last major left-wing political assassinations in the U.S. - the assassination of President McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in August 1901. What were the contemporary reactions? What were the consequences? How does this violence look in hindsight?

The short story is this - Czolgosz was a young, alienated man working class man who had been politically radicalized after losing his job and witnessing mass repression of worker strikes.

Inspired in part by an anarchist assassination of King Umberto I, Czolgosz decided to murder McKinley as a symbol of the oppressive system. He succeeded and was executed for his crime.

Now, what were some of the consequences of this? - Leon himself, a potential asset to the anarchist movement, was executed - Czolgosz was widely condemned by anarchist contemporaries (the most sympathetic take was given by Goldman here, but even she didn't endorse it) - several prominent anarchist activists, including Emma Goldman, were baselessly arrested - a wave of anti-anarchist laws were passed, later invoked during the first Red Scare to crush dissent (Goldman was deported in this period) - the government greatly expanded its existing surveillance of anarchists and organized labor, consolidating it into the BOI (predecessor to the FBI, which would later go on to surveil and help murder civil rights activists) - the next President, Teddy Roosevelt, said "When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance" - Roosevelt was a significantly more progressive President with respect to labor than his predecessors, however it's not really clear how much this is related to McKinley's assassination, if at all

All of that to say - Czolgosz's vigilante act of violence harmed the cause of anarchism for generations, directly contributed to the formation of the FBI, and did little to change the system of oppression he opposed. Today, we have a much worse set of people in power than the Republicans of 1901.

There have been instances where political violence was more effective at advancing a cause (this is a comment on history, not an endorsement of violence), but in those instances, that violence is almost always organized as part of a collective movement (like the ANC or PAIGC, for example).

The history of these lone, vigilante acts of violence show that they justify state repression and rarely do anything positive for the actor's cause. And that needs to be reiterated over and over again, with historical examples, for people who feel strongly about these recent killings any kind of way.