Did he want the Revolution?
Newspapers headline, “Luigi Mangione, the killer of Brian Thompson, caught.” The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot in the back of the head while walking the streets of the Big Apple.
What initially seemed like a mafia-style ambush turned out to be the ideal continuation of the bloodshed that, between the ’70s and ’80s, stained the United States from coast to coast, exploiting its own postal system.
There are those who conceived the Revolution, those who tried to realize it by winning the sympathies of the People, and then there are those who act. Luigi Nicholas Mangione, a 26-year-old Italian-American, falls into this latter category. His six-day escape was interrupted by the authorities at a McDonald’s, and the fake documents were not enough to exonerate him.
In his pocket, an autographed revision of “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the Manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski, Unabomber, a brilliant mathematician, his theories contributed to the developement of the numbers’ theory, and a part-time terrorist.
These two men, separated by time, forty years, to be exact, and social background, Kaczynski middle class; Mangione well-off, are united by their hatred of capitalism, although this hatred is expressed differently: Kaczynski feared the rise of the Machine, while Mangione was born with the Machine, studied it, and perhaps even understood it? The fact is that it was useful to him in achieving his goals, given that the gun he used was 3D printed.
The ideal for which Mangione “fought” resonates in America. Perhaps this is also why there have been demonstrations of solidarity towards him. The lack of a public health system makes Care something elitist, for aristocrats, the same ones the Founding Fathers fought against by leaving the oppressive Motherland and arriving in the lands of the New World, promoting, among others, some ideals that today we would consider almost socialist and that the McCarthy doctrine helped to demonize.
Is it right to take justice into one’s own hands? Obviously not, but it is a sign that something needs to change.
