Why did the poet shoot Fico?

How an assassination attempt revealed the sickness of our political culture

May 18, 2024

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The poet as sullen killer

We may like to think of poets as gentle souls, and victims of the persecution of power. But they can be killers; as sadly we all can be. Byron was mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Then, to prove it, he fought as a foreign fighter in Greece, and died there. Stalin wrote some of the best verse in the Georgian language. Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb leader who was convicted of war crimes for the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, was a poet and a psychiatrist. Not singing, engineering nor healing the soul are vocations free of violence.

Lesser poets kill too, and so can all of us. An army trains a simple soul to shoot straight without remorse. Metaphor too can make monsters of us all. Homicide outside war is rare (though less rare in mad societies like the USA that have more guns than people), but never disappears. Yet violent aggressive thoughts are surprisingly common; we can all be killers in our minds, but most of us learn to quieten the hateful voices.

The 71-year-old Juraj Cintula was a poet and writer, at least in his later life. He was born in 1953 in Soviet Czechoslovakia in the town, Leva, now Levice, where he committed his assassination attempt. According to reports, he moved in 1980 to Vilnius and lived with a famous Soviet singer, Raisa Vasilyeva. For the next forty years we know next to nothing, although we might suppose that Cintula struggled to write, and lived in the shadow of his former lover. He likely endured economic and personal hardship, as most citizens in the hard-drinking, post-Soviet states did during the 1990s. At 71 he was not enjoying a comfortable retirement, but working as a part-time security guard and letting off steam in political protests.

He wrote three collections of poetry: "No rebel", "Diptych" and "Axes". In 2010, he published a novel, and, in 2015, a book about gypsies. In 2015, at the age of 62, Cintula joined the Association of Slovak Writers. He even founded a literary club DÚHA (Rainbow). But the rage to order the sea boiled within him. In 2019 the local paper reviewed his poems and described them as "full of restlessness and rebellion."1

“It’s not for nothing that the writer Juraj Cintula calls himself just such a rebel. He has a restless soul, like many of us. It boils within him, and although he would prefer to shout out loud, he puts his feelings into the lines, forming coherent poems.”

Thanks to a Russian news source we even have a machine translation of one poem.

In my dream they beat me hard.
In a dream.
People judged me because I cause floods and storms of wrath from the rulers.
That I live differently from others.
In a dream.
I served seven years in prison. And life imprisonment.
In a dream.
I was hanged and beheaded.
(Juraj Cintula)

Cintula did not merely suffer from fantasies of violence. He was a victim of violence. In 2016, while guarding the shopping centre in Levice, Cintula was attacked by a person allegedly under the influence of drugs. It has a profound impact on him.

The future assassin at that time, however, abjured violence in response. He founded a small Anti-Violence movement, reflecting a Slovak political tradition, and petitioned its government “against violence of all types, from war to domestic physical or psychological violence against women, children, the elderly, men, animals, violence in streets." He even posted on YouTube a manifesto of his movement:

“The Anti-Violence Movement is a new political party whose goal is to prevent the spread of violence in society, prevent war in Europe and the spread of hatred.”

You can sense in his words, however, the festering grievance, which would create, eight years later, a new persona for the anti-violence activist: a lone wolf assassin who fired five shots at his Prime Minister. For reasons we simply do not yet know, Cintula succumbed to the violent voices within; perhaps in a fit of obsession or mental illness, or perhaps under pressure from cultural and social influences. But ignorance of the facts of Cintula’s tragedy is no barrier to modern political culture declaring with grandiose certainty the meaning of this act of despair.

The Virtual Reality Blame Game

A gun went off that was not in the script, and the media - mainstream, regime, social and alternative - scrambled to incorporate the idiosyncratic and random tragedy into their preferred template narratives.

British and American media, including the BBC, Sky News and CNN, all attributed the assassination attempt to the choice democratically elected leader of Slovakia to demur from sending arms to Ukraine. He was clearly pro-Putin, and so they said, in these appalling words, Fico deserved it. The obscure poet and his torments were merely the sword of justice.

Others blamed general social conditions in Slovakia and an alleged drift to authoritarianism and polarisation. Fico’s ‘populism’ and anti-Western positions, in this view, created the climate in which political violence grew. The uniqueness of the act disappeared in an ocean of vague clichés.

Ukrainian sources claimed Cintula was pro-Russian and ultra-nationalist, a claim eagerly repeated in Western media. A photograph emerged of the broken poet standing by a neo-Nazi flag of an anti-migrant Slovak political fringe group, which, it was claimed was “connected to Russian ultra-nationalist groups”. Later reports suggest the photograph was doctored, and the Russian connection made from nothing. After all many “Russian ultra-nationalist groups” have moved to Ukraine over the last fifteen years, where the Kiev regime’s Banderist iconography makes them feel more at home.

The reporters who pumped out the photograph and pro-Russian slur came from the VSquare Group, which it turns out was supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, a well-known CIA front, expert in ‘promoting democracy’ and undermining regimes that do not serve American interests, like Fico’s Slovakia.

The problem for the pro-Russia, anti-democracy narrative of the assassination attempt was that Cintula was a member and supporter of the left-liberal political party Progressive Slovakia. The party embarrassingly suspended his activities in the party after the event. Cintula himself, looking disoriented and confused, in some footage after his arrest, said he acted because he disagreed with the government’s policies.

Indeed, there were blurry videos posted of Cintula at a recent demonstration urging Fico to send weapons to Ukraine. Indeed, the Slovak Interior Minister has made a statement that “the suspect closely followed domestic and international events, and protested against several government policies, including the closure of the Special Prosecutor’s Office, and the suspension of military aid to Ukraine.”

For one section of the media universe, Cintula’s progressive politics was the cause of the violence. The poet’s tragic obsessions, his frustrations, his disappointments, his vicarious rebellion through protest mattered not at all. He was just a poster child of what they do not like. He became another pawn to push around preferred conspiracy theories. The weirdest of these was by Brett Weinstein who linked this tragedy through a chain of coincidence to the World Health Organisation and its pandemic treaty.

The tragedy of the Fico assassination has revealed once again the sickness at the heart of political news culture. It is a sickness that affects all media, whether regime media, mainstream public or commercial media, or independent, alternative or wacko media. It affects them all because it derives from our own tendency to treat politics as a fictive world in which we act out our own fantasies. Few of us ever really act in the real world of government and politics. For most of us, it is just a show which we usually treat as a harmless catharsis for the aggression within. We do not have to bear with the consequences or clean up after the show. But we should surely see after the last ten years, that unless we practise some detachment from the stories of the news, modern politics is a virtual reality show that can drive any one of us mad.

Fixated Threat and Responsible Care

Is there a cure for this madness?

I cannot be certain; but I believe that one writer, and former President of Czechoslovakia, identified the cure long ago, when Juraj Cintula was a young restless man. Vaclav Havel became the President of Czechoslovakia in late 1989, and would preside over the splitting of this state, first formed in 1919, into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Before he became a politician, however, he was a dissident writer who had no access to social media and was indeed imprisoned for his thoughts. In 1984 he wrote an essay, “Politics and Conscience” in which, I think, he outlined the response we can all take to steer clear from the infection of the virtual reality state.

“I favour ‘anti-political politics’, that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the useful, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favour politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans, It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in daily life. Still, I know no better alternative.”
Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth (1986), p. 155

Nor do I know a better alternative than “human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans”. In addition, there have been a few times in my life when I have practised this kind of responsible care. Indeed, I once established responsible care for the exact kind of suffering human that Juraj Cintula became: people who are fixated and threaten because they are driven by an idiosyncratic mix of grievance, resentment, mental illness, insistent ideas, and enduring suffering to act violently against their better nature.

In 2017 I established a Fixated Threat Assessment Centre. This Centre combines mental health and policing interventions to identify people like Cintula, and help them before they act on their violent, grievance-fuelled fantasies. I learned a lot about the history of mass killings, homicides, terror attacks and assassinations by people with that idiosyncratic mix that has ruined the life of Cintula and nearly taken the life of Robert Fico. Looking back on my career, so full of its own disappointments and grievances, this institution of “human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans” is one of its prouder moments.

I can write about it more next week if people are interested. Leave a comment if you are curious.

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