this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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Can someone link to this story. What am I missing?
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.
Calling the Moonies Christian is... Debatable.
The founder got excommunicated by the Presbyterians.
Really good Behind the Bastards episodes on them btw.
The way you used italics, I gotta ask, is excommunication coming from the Presbyterians unusual compared to other Christian groups?
I was raised protestant, but not presbyterian. Still, I haven't heard a lot of excommunication coming from any protestant group. That is mostly a Catholic thing I think, with some of that happening with maybe Puritans (I'm not that familiar with all of them) back around Salem Witch Trial days.
Protestants excommunicate each other all the time. Only some denominations practice open communion. Many Baptist churches are worse than the Catholics about it. The different denominations are often not in communion with each other for some stupid reason. They do it in different ways, mind you, with a focus on elder councils or something.
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.
I mean, killing a member of the government will definitely get the government's attention.
Have there ever been any big moves or changes in the world without violence involved?
without violence involved?
No. There is always violence. Ghandi, Martin Luther King, the suffragettes, and Rosa Parks just received it instead of delivering it.
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?
Terrorism, for instance?
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.
So yeah. There's have been small changes.
Oh right so you're talking about change just in America then?
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The title of this post is disturbing.
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.
it's actually just a relatively small thing which won't negatively affect anyone in power and is generally considered popular.
It's only popular because of the publicity gained by assassinating the country's longest serving Prime Minister though. I don't think a pop song would have hit the mark.
It absolutely has affected people in power, as there were more than just him linked to the UC church (which his association with was the reason he was the chosen target) and they were removed from their positions. Thise still in power have cut ties.
It is indeed an uncommon response though.
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Y'all up in here bitchin like you weren't just giggling bout that guillotining billionaires meme
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
Yeah, the difference is actually getting results.
I'm glad you know what I saw and how I reacted and that it's inconsistent. Great job!
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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.
This is not okay, and very far from "good".
The fact you're being down voted is scary, round here really seem desperate for chaos. The details of this case really aren't anything to be celebrated
Seriously, I never would've guessed that my most unpopular opinion on lemmy would be "murdering people vaguely connected to your problem because you're angry is bad".
This wasn't an ideological act or whatever, the assassin's mother was brainwashed and financially ruined her family, he was angry because of that (so because the church caused his mother to ruin the family, it's a personal grudge against the church because it affected him), wanted to kill the head of the church, but couldn't, so 20 years later he settled for Abe since he was accessible and supported the church (as the party did before him).
The assassin could've exposed and drew attention to the church and their connections in various ways, instead he shot an old man at the end of his career. I am all for exposing corruption and malpractices, for taking away influence and power from those who have too much, but arbitrary killing is disgusting. Shall we applaud every broken and desperate murderer if the target they could get their hands on was bad enough by some criteria of the day? I hope this is people just trying to be edgy.
I agree. Any dissent to this post being downvoted is kind of a bad thing for humanity. Murder is never something to celebrate. At best it could be "damn that was an evil thing but at least the dictator is dead". But the readiness to accept it as actual good is so alarming
Violence works even when the other side is not open to compromise.
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.
I dont get it. Can someone explain what this bill is about?
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).
What is the context for this, why do they need refunds?
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.