Assassination Ancient and Modern

I write this on the 160th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on 14 April 1865. Reflecting on that event prompts a thought: that political assassinations in the modern era – over the last couple of centuries – differ rather markedly from those in antiquity, in at least the respect that the victims in the modern era – Lincoln, Ghandi, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Yizhak Rabin, Olof Palme – were not people who had invited the murderer’s hand because they were egregiously evil, but rather the opposite; whereas the murders of Caesar, Caligula, Caracalla and others (Nero was condemned to death and committed suicide after fleeing Rome) were prompted by their threat to freedom (Caesar) or their appalling behaviour (Caligula).

Assassination even of wicked leaders is not to be condoned, ever. Instead there should be remedies against tyranny and evil in a due process of law and politics, for which a robust constitution is needed that will – if it fails to prevent unfit persons from getting into power in the first place – provide a means for removing them and where appropriate punishing them. Obviously, the test of a good constitutional order is whether it protects a society against the advent of tyrants; as Frederick Douglass said, ‘We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.’ The imperfections of the constitutional orders of the ‘advanced liberal democracies’ of today fail to satisfy this principle, alas and again alas, but this failure does not legitimise murder, rather it prompts (or should prompt) a determination to utilise every legitimate means of opposition in the short term, and reform in the medium term.

Under the cosh of punitive and illiberal government this irenic suggestion seems unappealing, even vacuous. But one must consider the future. I give an example in my current book Discriminations about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Human rights protocols say that everyone is entitled to a due process at law, the right to mount a defence and to be treated humanely when arrested and tried. Bin Laden, mass murdering terrorist, is a distasteful subject indeed for such kid-glove handling. Pragmatism combined with a desire for revenge made his killing by Navy Seals Team 6 seem justified. It could be argued that he died not in an extra-judicial killing but as an enemy combatant. The pragmatic point was that being killed and his corpse disposed of in the Arabian Gulf, rather than his person being transported to Guantanamo Bay for trial, prevented his being used as a focus of terrorist activism. But the real point is not about Bin Laden, it is about the USA. Is the USA a country that values and upholds human rights principles? Does it observe due process, and eschew assassination as a technique of policy?^[1] Would it not have been better for the long-term improvement of the world as a site of rights and equities to bear the short-term cost of giving even the morally ugliest people what human rights protocols enjoin? The Nuremberg Trials did that; why have standards fallen?

Thinking, in bad times, that short-cut solutions to immediate problems are sometimes justified, is dangerous. Consider the fact that war is a massive confession of failure on the part of human beings and societies to find rational ways to adjust problems. Assassination is au fond a moment of war – of using a bullet or bomb to force an issue. At the other extreme of violent action, war is mass assassination. Nothing good comes from violence, from its abruptness, its wrenching of circumstances into a new configuration whose consequences are unpredictable – to say nothing of the horror and grief of those who ‘survive’ it. Thinking of the future again: who is the winner in the eventual outcome: the tyrant who imprisoned or killed the dissenter, or the dissenter? Even though history is first written by victors, it is at last written by truth. Those who stood up to tyrants, those who answered the question ‘What will you sacrifice to do the right thing?’ as they did, are the real winners. They have the thing whose worth is above all else: the respect of clear-thinking, kind and well-intentioned people.

We live in darkening times, rapidly darkening; to watch a documentary on 1930s Germany is beyond chilling in the parallels. To feel helpless as individuals in the face of a world in which the principles of rights and liberties mean nothing to the likes of Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Orbán, Xi, Modi and others on the resurgent Right, is to feel a growing suffocation. What to do?

Answer - this: to find one of the ways, however small, however local in application and effect, to resist, and to have one’s own answer to the question, ‘What are you prepared to sacrifice for what is right?’

---

^[1] CIA archives might give grounds for a negative answer in too many other cases for comfort.