United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, has his Reinhard Heydrich Moment

When I think of assassins escaping on bicycles my free associating inner being leaps to the name, Jan Kubis. Kubis was a key figure in the Czech resistance, a young, fit and utterly committed anti-Nazi, who hopscotched across national boundaries and joined the resistance in Poland, Algeria and France. After the fall of France, Kubis escaped to England where he received training as a paratrooper, and was flown in a British plane back to Czechoslovakia with a plan to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich.

Heydrich who had earned the designation, "the butcher of Prague," officially held the title of Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia. In Czechoslovakia Heydrich's eugenic fanaticism inspired round ups of suspected members of the resistance, mass incarceration of Czechs alleged to profess anti-German sentiments and arbitrary executions of hundreds of victims.

Heydrich had a hand in every facet of the racialized empire - as head of the SD, he carried out the infamous, "Night and Fog Decree." Heydrich ordered the deployment of the "Einsatzgruppen" - mobile killing units that carried out mass executions of Jews throughout eastern Europe, and massacred other groups and individuals who had no place in the racial state. Heydrich chaired the Wannssee Conference that parsed the plans and details to refine the Holocaust, and utilize industrial organization in the service of genocide. In the hierarchy of human evil, Heydrich is among the darkest monsters that history has produced.

But evil individuals, on rare occasions, fall to informal court judgements. In the case of Heydrich, his judgement day came unexpectedly on May, 27, 1942 when Jan Kubis and his partner, Josef Gabcik waited for Heydrich's Mercedes limousine to slow down at a hairpin turn. Gabcik's gun jammed in this moment of historical destiny and Kubis' threw his anti-tank grenade so wildly that it landed at the rear wheel of Heydrich's vehicle. But, the miss-thrown grenade exploded with enough force to drive shrapnel into Heydrich's body.

The wounded Heydrich emerged from his vehicle shooting at his assassins, but Kubis escaped on his bicycle. He would die heroically in a battle with Nazi forces three weeks later. Heydrich died of his wounds on June, 4, 1942. Kubis and Gabcik have been memorialized with stately monuments - both have streets within the Czech Republic named in their honor. The immediate aftermath of their heroism included massive Nazi retribution - 340 innocent villagers of Lidice were shot or sent to Chelmno to be gassed to death. Some 22 relatives of Kubis were arrested and murdered. But partisan resistance to Nazi brutality played a huge role in bringing Hitler's empire to an end. We do not attach caveats to the heroism and courage of Kubis and Gabcik, nor do we resort to cliches about violent acts having no place in a moral world. We suffer no confusing ambiguity around Heydrich's assassination, nor do we send thoughts and prayers to his memory.

It may be merely my own peculiarity that juxtaposed Reinhard Heydrich and a brand new target of a successful assassination - Brian Thompson. Thompson may not have had such an impressive title as The Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia, he was merely the CEO of United Healthcare (UHC). It requires an effortful feat of imagination to picture stuffed shirts seated in plush corporate offices as butchers of human flesh on a par with one of the worst Nazis of all time. Could it be possible that Thompson’s assassin had Heydrich’s story in mind as he carefully planned his assassination of Thompson and his escape, like Jan Kubis, on a bicycle. Unlike Heydrich, who lived long enough to shoot back, Thompson died on the spot. Thompson's killer got away without being fired upon. Like Gabcik, the assassin’s gun jammed and he had to make emergency repairs on the fly. The parallels are uncanny.

Our pundits and politicians cautiously refrain from expressing any sort of approval for the assassin’s deed. They hold on to civility as if polite restraint were a banister at the edge of a dark ledge. However, the lid on the suppressed ire of America’s beaten, abused masses has been momentarily loosened - oceans of snark, dismissive memes and jokes have been pouring forth on social media. One Facebook quip asserted, “sympathy (for Thompson) is denied. Greed is a pre-existing condition.” Still, many, like former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, will gush with platitudes:

"This is horrifying news and a terrible loss for the business and health care community in Minnesota. Minnesota is sending our prayers to Brian’s family and the UnitedHealthcare team."

Chris Hedges, on the other hand, wrote starkly and objectively about Thompson's death - seeing the UHC leader as having a legal mandate to inflict death and suffering upon his customer/victims:

"These corporations, in moral terms, are legally permitted to hold sick children hostage while their parents bankrupt themselves to save their sons or daughters. That many die, at the very least premature deaths, because of these policies is indisputable.

Nothing absolves the killer of Thompson, but nothing absolves those who run for-profit health care corporations that embrace a business model that destroys and terminates lives in the name of profit."

UHC denies health coverage to 32% of claims. How do the insurance denials stack up to the slaughter of Lidice villagers, the gassings at Operation Reinhard death camps and the mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen? People in the US live five years less, on average than people in Ireland, where health care is a human right and not a matter of extortion for profit. In other words, we Americans collectively lose (in a comparison with Ireland) 1,665,000,000 years of life to the greed of corporations like UHC. Private medical insurance is America's Lidice.

There may be no way to fully measure the bloodshed and emotional pain that Brian Thompson caused, but we have a few metrics. Some 79 million US residents have accumulated 220 billion dollars of medical debt. UHC pulls in some 16 billion in annual profits. The medical debts and the corporate profits line up as a sort of balance sheet of ethical implosion. We are a nation in which deaths, depression, anxiety and suicides comprise the collateral damage of our economic and political system.

Our system does not have the recognizable patina of evil that Reinhard Heydrich projected. Here, in the US, murder has a rather strange, lusterless inevitability that invites indifference. But when I read about Brian Thompson's death, I had a sudden, overwhelming sense that the anomie of our America has not achieved complete surrender. There are still partisans on bicycles who have not given up the ghost. America, in the shadow of looming fascism, still has a pulse.

Jia Tolentino, writing in The New Yorker, observed that this entire episode - the assassination and the outpouring of derisive bile, will cause many, in Tolentino’s words, to ask, “are we really so divided, so used to dehumanizing one another, that people are out here openly celebrating the cold-blooded murder of a hard working family man?”

Tolentino wrote a well balanced, detailed and thoughtful piece, but I worry that she is selling the social media keyboard warriors short. The reaction to the assassination is not one of dehumanization, but a belated effort to mobilize whatever meager life force still thrashes about in the hearts of America’s masses, its serial victims. This sudden outpouring of rebellion (aimed at our brutal, murderous medical system) must also be eager to confront America’s military orgy, and our national determination to fry the planet. I hear, in the social media quips, an echo of the resistance evoked by George Floyd’s murder.

It is too early to know whether this event will gather large numbers of people for sustained resistance. The fate of the anonymous killer is also a potent variable. Will he be shot by police or captured? Perhaps, he will escape, and be permanently ensconced as a mysterious force in our collective imagination. There are millions of people, suddenly aroused to care about an anonymous assassin who did something that neither Trump nor Harris could ever do - fight for universal health coverage. By the way, Reinhard Heydrich was, like Brian Thompson, a hard working family man.