On Luigi Mangione

The Luigi Mangione thinkpieces have begun and most of them sound so lamentable and out of touch to anybody who has followed his story without immediately pursing their lips, uttering ten Hail Marys and shielding their children’s eyes, as to be practically laughable. For the Evening Standard, Mangione stands for a divided America; a thinkpiece in the Independent considers the online comments “less helpful than salacious”; France’s traditionally leftwing paper Libé published an op-ed calling for an end to the hero worship of Mangione. 

On Instagram, the comments under this article immediately went hog-wild: “How legitimate is it for bourgeois newspapers to take part in this debate when they spend their time legitimising social violence?”; “Lol, Luigi rid us of a deadweight. While income gaps keep widening, you should expect us to revolt against those who benefit from the system”; “Good evening - no.”

You can’t understand the phenomenon of Luigi Mangione if you aren’t online; indeed, the more terminally online you are, the more comprehensible he seems as a figure, the closer he appears. Getting your news online via a complex amalgam of links and videos, infographics, articles, first-person accounts, dubious sources, hearsay, rumour and memes is the first step. A second and perhaps more important step would be: have you ever been horny and/or leftwing online? (More on this in a minute.) A third step, I think, relates to having a sense of humour that isn’t constantly policing itself for supposed manners, which is aware that those “manners” instead stand for a craven and unquestioning obeisance to a completely bankrupt world order. This is the language that so many of the bien-pensant commentariat now consider degraded beyond belief, scarcely pausing to consider the degradation of so much else all around us, the rank inequality, the political systems that are failing us, the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the plundering of our planet for profit even at the eleventh hour. 

Luigi Mangione as a figure has a different tenor to him if you’ve ever been on a march for Gaza, or indeed if you’ve been on several over the course of the last 14 months, with no positive outcome for your actions, but instead the progressive worsening of matters in Palestine, the killing that doesn’t let up; and now here comes everything that you and everyone who kept their eyes open and had a scrap of decency knew would happen, that is the start of the annexation of this land, as Gazans now have nowhere to turn to. We marched and we chanted, we held actions, we wrote to our MPs, and in the US and the UK this did less than nothing. The United Kingdom’s administrator, Keir Starmer, tells the world that we stand with Israel. I wonder he can say the filthy words, that they don’t haunt him at night with their depravity. 

Hundreds have been killed!, we said. Can’t we get you to care? Can you not call it by its name? Will you abide by the law? 

Now they say to us: someone has been killed! Can’t you find it in you to care? Can you call it by its name? Do you respect the law? 

Perhaps if you’ve never felt consumed by your feelings of impotence in the face of political bullying; if you have never imagined to yourself how you would act if you met Suella Braverman tomorrow, indeed if you don’t consider her to have forsaken a social responsibility that was hers and thereby incited violence - then, yes, somebody who was driven to such an extreme being met with something other than rank condemnation can be a surprise or a shock. 

Perhaps you don’t belong to any minority at all, nobody you know has ever suffered, your mental health is peachy-creamy and you’re fucking loaded, and all you care about is your collection of terra cotta. Perhaps it annoys you when people go on strike, because this impedes your life. You get to work late, then, don’t you? The A1 was completely blocked. The thought of anybody having a principle is tiring to you, it’s ugly, it’s puerile; oh, give it a rest, you say, rolling your eyes, at Christmas, when your nephew tells you off for misgendering the postman. 

And now I’ll get some of this uninformed, clucking posturing thrown back at me, especially if this piece gets shared a little: he’s defending murder! He doesn’t believe in the rule of law! Bloody lefties - they want respect but then they go and praise killers! 

I’m trying to explain what the person means; how he may have attained this degree of limelight; why some people’s first instinct, in the sanctum of their own homes, as non-politicians, was not to ‘condemn’ this young man. 

“Do you condemn Hamas?” they said, as we tried to say that the numbers of murdered were possibly up in the hundreds of thousands. “Come on then, I’d like to hear it, do you condemn Hamas? Well look at that - he won’t even condemn Hamas.”

Where does it get us, people who aren’t politicians, to observe these imposed acts of propriety at every juncture? Do I condemn activists covering art in paint? Do I condemn trans people calling J.K. Rowling a cunt? Do I condemn my 10-year-old for chanting ‘From the river to the sea’ when someone handed him a megaphone this time last year? If I condemn all these things, will you listen to anything I have to say about the environment, children in desperate need of puberty blockers, or the latest bombing of a refugee camp? I think I know the answer. 

Adam Shatz wrote in the LRB - I’m paraphrasing from memory - that nothing could justify the attacks of 7th October, but that many things can and do explain them. But people don’t want to hear the explanations; they want simple answers, to very hard questions. Shatz wrote also of the violence of Algerian insurrections against the French; who would now deny Algeria its hard-won independence? Or perhaps when the French overturned their monarchy in 1789, this revolution was polite and bloodless? I’ll google it in a minute. 

Perhaps during the course of my googling I’ll discover that people of the time were shocked at the killing of Louis XVI; that the populace, made of sophisticates quite unlike the rabble you get now, didn’t jeer at the multimillionaire who sat on a gold throne while they ate dirt, as he died. 

Luigi Mangione killed somebody, and the person he killed is someone I’d never heard of in my life, who worked in the business of fucking over the wider population for the profits of his company and his own personal benefit, abetting an evil system that takes advantage of human fallibility instead of looking out for others. People are killed everyday - women, children. Prisoners. The homeless. Murders that don’t even get reported, because it’s the norm.

It’s these people - people who have learned to subsume their frustration into the bleakest humour, people who have never known a vote go their way for their whole adult life, people who earn the same pay as 20 years ago while the average house price has nearly doubled in the same time - who now dare to joke that they’d like Luigi Mangione to give them chronic back pain, if you see what they mean. 

You don’t know any of this if you aren’t online, because you get your news from Krishnan Guru-Murthy or Rachel Maddow; maybe you see a rather outré joke or two on Have I Got News For You or The Daily Show and think, hmm, they went a bit far this time. What you don’t see is the violence of the spew out there, the endlessly dispiriting brutality of a system set up to destroy the weak and prey on the vulnerable, which silences dissent, quashes progressive ideas and pits us against one another until we die. 

Luigi Mangione is a lost boy; what he stands for, only time will tell - perhaps it will be found that, ultimately, he only ever stood for his own set of beliefs, filched here and there online, from Jordan Peterson and god knows who else. In the meantime, he’s a phenomenon that you can’t understand; he has come to mean something that escapes you, to thousands of people who heard the news and discovered with relief, with glee actually and why not!, that they didn’t have to bow and scrape, to dig deep inside themselves for words of sorrow at this one more act of violence, in a world where violence is the Esperanto that could.  

Also: the guy’s HOT, haven’t you noticed?