Charlie Kirk: Why the murder moves and touches us all

Hand on heart – would you have known who Charlie Kirk was? I admit: I don’t. Although I regularly deal with political developments in the United States and know the country quite well. And I say: 90 percent of Germans were like me.

It is all the more curious as we are now discussing Charlie Kirk. From a conservative side, he is mourned as if one who has been murdered. The CDU member of the Bundestag Caroline Bosbach called Kirk one in an Instagram post “Fighters for western values”who like no other “For free debate” would have stood. After massive criticism, she deleted the post again. The Junge Union posted a picture on Instagram with the words: “Freedom of expression cannot be shot. Quiet in peace, Charlie Kirk.”

However, Kirk is presented by some German left as an incarnation of evil, who at least indebt his death himself. The Jugendverband der Left in Hanover commented on an assassination with the words “Bloody and right -wing politics leads to bloody cartridges” (for which it was criticized by his own party leader Ines Schwerdtner). The left-wing youngsters in Hanau posted a photo of Kirk with his little daughter with the words “Red in light” (Rotten in hell).

The satirist Sebastian Hotz aka “El Hotzo”, who had already been criticized for a post after the attempt to assassinate Trump, posted the image of a chimpanzees on X with the words “Our Charly, Rip ”. The chimpanzee Charly was the protagonist of a German series from the nineties.

There are demands on social networks that Friedrich Merz should give a speech to the death of Charlie Kirk, but at least President of the Bundestag Julia Klöckner. In the European Parliament, an attempt failed to enforce a minute of commemoration for the US influencer. When Pope Francis died, there was no application for a minute’s commemorative minute.

Where does it come from that the death of Charlie Kirk touches everyone in one direction or the other?

On the one hand, it is due to real -time reporting and social networks in the age of digital public. Events in locations, which are far from far, can also deal with people for days or even for weeks and shake ourselves as if they had happened in their own family. This happens all the more when an event is emotionally charged or a universal value debate can be derived from it.

The murder of the employees and the employees of the French satire magazine “Charlie Hebdo” was such a case. Here, too, people took to the streets, wore stickers with the sentence “Je suis charlie” (I’m Charlie). When 49 people shot 49 people in a club for gays and lesbians on June 12, 2016, the shock was also great in Germany, there were several commemorative celebrations and grief statements. In the case of Charlie Kirk, a young family man was murdered by two young children while discussing with a group of students. You don’t have to know any background to see that as a terrible tragedy.

The other reason seems less honorable. Political forces use the murder of Charlie Kirk to drive her own agenda. From the right-wing conservative side, Kirk, who demonstrably expressed racist and homophobic, is stylized to a light figure against political opponents, who was relativized and relegated to the unchristian and unchristian.

On the left side, it is hidden that his success also emerged by the fact that on behalf of freedom of expression, he repeatedly stood up to discourse, especially with young people (instead of only betting against dissenters from a safe YouTube distance). The reports of young people (including People of Color) are also ignored who report how much Kirk and his movement helped them.

Kirk has become a projection surface in which all sides are excellently projecting their own motifs. This distracts wonderfully from the fact that instead you should better face the problems in your own country if you want to pursue good politics.

Does the name Walter Lübcke tell you something? The President of the Kassel was murdered by a right -wing extremist on the night of June 2, 2019. He was shot cold -blooded on the terrace of his house. The reason? Lübcke had campaigned for the integration of refugees. Among other things, at a citizens’ meeting, where he informed about a new refugee home, he had held against critics of a humanitarian refugee policy that they could leave this country if they did not fit such values. Right -wing extremists had recorded the statement on video and thus made a mood against Lübcke online.

The attack on Lübcke was the first murder of a German politician through a right -wing extremist in the history of the Federal Republic. But because many in the Union with the refugee policy of Angela Merkel and still do swords and to this day, they also struggled with Lübcke. In interviews, the Lübcke family complained that the husband and father himself had been let down by his own people when the threats against him increased.

If you are really about saving freedom of expression and a democratic discussion culture in this country, whether conservative or left, does not have to use the complex person of a Trump activist as a film. He could just remember Walter Lübcke. Over and over again.