Grave dancing redux
Sometimes, some people are so unfathomably detestable that you have to celebrate their death
Charlie Kirk was well-regarded amongst conservatives both in the US and abroad. Although many left-leaning figures didn’t agree with what he had to say, they condemned his assassination in the strongest possible terms. The people celebrating his death were a fringe minority, as it should be. Just because we might disagree with someone on a political level doesn’t mean we should just dance on their grave.
Now we move onto Ian Watkins. As frontman of the rock band Lostprophets, he became popular among music fans in the 00s, some of whom he got to know on a very personal level. He would often invite girls from the crowd backstage- many of whom were under the age of consent- and ply them with drugs before having sex with them. Not the first time a rockstar has done this, obviously, but in his case it was only the tip of the iceberg.
In 2012, after arresting Watkins for drug possession, South Wales Police discovered that he may have had an indecent image of a child- a charge that he initially pleaded not guilty to. He would be arrested again on drug charges a month later, whereupon the police searched his house. Upon doing so, they found extreme child and animal pornography on his computer. It would later be discovered that he had raped, or attemped to rape, children as young as 1, with some instances being personally recorded. These children were often those of female fans who willingly offered them up to him. While in remand, he referred to the sex abuse as “mega lolz” in a call to another female fan, and while serving a 35 year jail sentence tried to groom the two year old daughter of yet another. The password to his laptop was literally “I FUK KIDZ”
In short, a disgusting man, and a man almost certainly guilty of what he was sent down for given he openly bragged about his crimes. So it’s no surprise to see people almost universally celebrating his murder in HMP Wakefield, his jugular slashed by another inmate. This was actually the second time somebody had attempted to murder him- the first was in 2023 when he was taken hostage and wounded by three other prisoners. As a paedophile, and a celebrity paedophile at that, he was not the most popular inmate, and one wonders whether his placement next to several particularly violent offenders was deliberate.
Ian Watkins abused his position as a famous rockstar in some of the most vile ways imaginable. The fact that his victims included BABIES makes this even worse, and some are even hailing his assassin as a hero. Now, while I am glad that a man who brought so much pain to people is dead, I do not believe murder is heroic. His killer has been arrested and will likely get a long extension to his sentence as I doubt very much it was in self-defence given previous incidents.
It is a rare case of people being absolutely justified to celebrate a person’s death- but do not celebrate the person who did it.