“A man in ambush,” said Nina. Isolated from the world, fighting on his own. Hard to find anything like it in political history. He lived like Robinson for almost twenty years, maintaining his solitary war against global capitalism. In the cabin they found the Diary, partly written in Spanish and partly encoded, in which he recorded his life and kept detailed notes of his attacks.
The district attorney had requested the death penalty, and Thomas refused to follow the advice of the lawyers that his brother had hired from a prestigious New York firm, who expected him to plead insanity and seek protection under the corresponding legal provisions in order to avoid execution. Munk, however, had rejected that option and requested to conduct his own defense.
The fact that he refused to seek protection due to insanity was considered, by the lawyers, to be proof of insanity. Only lunatics argue that they aren’t insane, because no one in their right mind is going to insist on their sanity. For Munk, on the other hand, this discussion of insanity couldn’t be a condition of the trial but rather its result. (“They are defining as an essence what should be the object of analysis,” he said.) Therefore, he asked that his writings and actions be the focus of the legal debate, not his character. No one is ever just a murderer or lunatic, but rather several things more, simultaneous or successive, whereas an action can indeed be defined by its own character, by its objectives and its consequences. He argued that the state wanted to declare him insane so that his political arguments would be discounted as ravings. His arguments and reasoning weren’t being considered, which was classic in the United States, where radical political motives were viewed as aberrations of personality. According to Munk, to diagnose him as a lunatic and prevent him from defending himself was to employ the techniques of Soviet psychiatry, which had always asserted that dissidents were lunatics because no one in their right mind would oppose the Soviet regime, a paradise that manifested the direction of history. The United States, now that it has triumphed in the Cold War, believes that it is Leibniz’s perfect world and that those who oppose it are in the wrong. “I’m not the one who invented violence; it existed before and will continue to exist. Or must only cases in which the violence has a political target be considered acts of insanity? In short, only those who oppose the system are insane; the rest are just criminals,” he said.
The general discussion centered most of all around the how (how Munk was able to do what he did), but not the why behind his doing it. They never asked those questions in cases of political acts (why did Oswald kill Kennedy?); they were only interested in the how (he was high up in an office building with a high-precision rifle), but once they finally asked the question as to the cause, the answer was always insanity.
Tom had refused to speak to his brother or his father and only agreed to receive his mother, the Polish pianist, as the media called her. She was a resolute and courageous woman who drew the repudiation of all the journalists commenting on the case because she spoke her mind and didn’t complain. He isn’t crazy, my son, even if his actions are incomprehensible. I want them to judge him and listen to him before they condemn his actions. She was the only one who appeared to understand him and to be on his side, and that was proof that something was wrong with her, so everyone insinuated that the eccentric and disturbed Polish pianist was the one truly responsible for her son’s condition. On her way out of their visits the mother never paused, and only once did she confront a reporter from NBC, who’d called Munk the monster from the forest.
“Do you know him? Did you speak with him?”
“His actions are enough for me.”
And her response couldn’t be heard over the hostile cries of onlookers who swore at her with hatred.
She visited him every day but in the end gave in, and, fearing her son would be sentenced to the death penalty, she too signed the declaration of insanity. From that moment onward her son refused to talk to or see her anymore. Munk refused to betray his principles in order to save his life. He had the constitutional right to defend himself unless he was declared insane, and his brother was in litigation to have him deemed incapable of handling his own defense.
In the background, outside the circle of journalists, lawyers, and onlookers who were happy to insult him and wave at the cameras, there was a small group of activists in front of the courthouse protesting against the death penalty. They were demanding a political trial for Munk rather than a criminal trial. They held up posters showing his face as a young university student, with slogans like Bush is the criminal. A lone protester, apart from everyone else, held up a poster on which he’d written Munk points the way. He was the first one the police dragged off to their vans.
At the beginning of August they would transfer Munk to Sacramento and the preliminaries of the trial would begin. The district attorney began the arguments and public opinion was in agreement with the allegations, but the specter of the death penalty, circling in the air, made the debate more serious.
In The Nation, one of the psychoanalysts who’d been summoned by the court said of Thomas Munk and his opinions: “His story is not only fascinating but illuminating and persuasive. Terrorists use ideas to justify appalling acts of violence but ideas alone do not create terrorists. Munk emerges not as a clinically insane person but as a
