I hope I don’t come off as sounding dismissive or like a jerk here, I’m really hoping to engage.
I get the sense from what you write that you have a reasoned objection on moral grounds to using images of violence to promote a political idea. But I’m not exactly sure, like maybe you see this as a tactical issue of promoting politics, like you feel this using violent images to counter violent images is blurring rather than sharpening distinctions. I also wonder if this is actually personally affecting you, like do images of guillotines disturb you? (And I’m not claiming these are on the only possible reasons you are saying what you are saying, they are just the ones that come to my mind)
I think some of the criss-crossing threads of this discussion deal with the first two issues. On the reasoned, moral objection the reception you’ve gotten for that argument is the one you’ve gotten, the point has been made, and (I know this is just my opinion) the odds that someone walks away with with a more enlightened position on the matter have hit diminishing returns. On the tactical issue I think the rebuke about using civility against fascists and oppressors is dead on. It’s always much better to resolve things peacefully than with violence, but when someone’s intent is to harm you, not repelling force with equal force is basically just submitting to abuse.
If anyone personally finds images of guillotines disturbing I can really get that. It’s hard for me not to empathize with the last instants of life of a person blinking as the blood drains from their head. I mean, I imagine they are probably in a complete dissociated state and not even really themselves in any meaningful way, but it’s hard not to think of what it would be like to look up at the sky knowing that not only this is it, but you really are just a broken machine and that entire thing that you think of as you is about to turn off like a switch. It’s horrific.
When I think about the elite people running society into a further and further unequal dystopia, I don’t hope they have their heads cut off, but I do curse them for creating a situation where that might happen. Our obsession with the killing of kings is just another kind of reverence for kings. In a violent revolution the harms are going to go far beyond a few human deaths (because that’s all the elite are, humans). The whole society is going to turn on itself in a massive witch hunt for the disloyal (to one side or another) and the violence will be catastrophic. The new rulers will probably be as bad or worse than the old ones. No one knows if they are going to end up being a target of the violence (okay, some groups like transgender people know they are). No one wins.
For me guillotine images are a momento mori. We are in dark, grim times and horrible things are going to happen. There’s a part of me that wishes for a revolution but there is also a part of me that is so afraid of death that I think of killing myself just to get it over with. I don’t speak for anyone by myself, obviously, but I hope that helps to explain what people mean when they talk about “false equivalency”. Violent images in support of Trump are targeted at people who are glad that children are being held in cages and sexually abused by their government-funded captors and people who are looking forward to shooting up a church full of black people or a nightclub full of gay people. Images of the guillotine on this site are targeted towards people who feel the need for a concrete symbol of their intangible and intolerable sense of the dark times we are in.
