A portrait of Luigi Mangione has been painted on a wall in London under a brick arch which might be very well interpreted as a halo. In December, a graffito appeared in the same city demanding his release. Mangione seems to be in the process of joining George Floyd some kind of radical Valhalla.
Mangione is accused of having shot Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, in the back while Thompson was walking at night to his hotel in Manhattan. I will not make the mistake of calling the alleged attack cowardly, as if murder ought to be an equal contest and the person to be murdered given a sporting chance of getting away with his life.
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In times of peace, it takes courage, in fact, to act as Mangione is alleged to have acted, but courage is not a freestanding virtue independent of the cause in which it exercised. It is perfectly possible, after all, to be courageous in the pursuit of evil, and many of us wouldn’t say boo to a goose even if to do so entailed a good deal less than the death penalty for us.
Continue reading the piece here at The Epoch Times (paywall)
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images
