Political Assassinations Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Political assassination involves the targeted killing of people, often but not always those who hold positions of political authority or political office. Typically, those who carry out such killings have a political or ideological motivation, although they range across the political spectrum, both right wing and left. While some assassination attempts have been carried out by individual sociopaths, the figure of the insane assassin has often been used to downplay or marginalize the larger political basis of the event. Political assassinations are directed or carried out also by members of states against civilians.

The term assassin has its origins in a militant Islamic secret society, Hashshashin, active in the Middle East between the eighth and fourteenth centuries. Motivated by religious and political reasons, this Shiite sect killed members of the Sunni elite. The first organized group to systematically use murder as a political weapon, they also were feared by invading Crusaders.

Assassination probably has always been a tool of politics. Among the earliest documented attempts is the attempted assassination of Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang around 210 BCE. The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE stands as one of the most famous early recorded assassinations. The number of political assassinations grew with the emergence and development of the modern nation-state. In the early modern period in Russia, four emperors—Ivan VI, Peter III, Paul I, and Alexander II—were killed in a span of less two hundred years. Democratic regimes have experienced political assassinations as well as totalitarian regimes. In the United States, assassins killed four presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy—and made attempts to kill others. Political assassinations are often tactics used by insurgent groups that lack the means to challenge a state’s military apparatus. Groups that have used assassination as a tool in larger sociopolitical struggles in the late twentieth century include, the Provisional IRA (Irish Republican Army) since 1969, the leftist Red Brigades in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, and Hezbollah.

With the internationalization of politics, assassinations carried out for local reasons have had wide-ranging impacts. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip in 1914 is generally viewed as the spark that set off World War I (1914–1918).The assassination of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi, in 1994, their airplane shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali, is identified as the incident that launched the genocide in Rwanda.

Activists also have been targets for political assassination. Human rights activist and philosopher of nonviolence, Mohandas Gandhi, was shot on January 30, 1948, by Nathuram Godse for seeking peace between Hindus and Muslims in India. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968 by James Earl Ray while in Memphis to assist striking sanitation workers. King’s assassination, which was widely viewed as an attack on the civil rights movement as a whole, set off waves of rioting in several major American cities. During the 1970s, U.S. Senate hearings revealed that political assassinations against leftist and black power activists had been carried out by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as part of their counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO).

Critics of state violence point out that more people have been killed through state actions than have been killed by nonstate assassins. Critics of states are certainly not lacking when it comes to martyrs. The Haymarket martyrs, Joe Hill, Frank Little, Gustav Landauer, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Kronstadt sailors, and the Maknovists of Ukraine are only a few of the poor and working-class victims of state violence. The administrations of U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have sanctioned political assassinations, including against elected political leaders such as Mullah Omar. State-sanctioned assassinations have been cloaked in euphemisms such as targeted strikes or extrajudicial executions. Recent assassinations carried out by the U.S. government include the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Sheikh Abd-al-Rahman by guided bombs against a so-called safe house outside of Baghdad.

Assassinations have long been advocated by political theorists, including those whose works are still highly regarded. Sun Tzu argued, on military grounds, for the use of assassinations in his book The Art of War. In his classic of political theory, The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli argued the utility of assassination.

One of the most notorious treatises on political assassination comes from the anarchist Sergei Nechaev in his pamphlet Catechism of the Revolutionist. Nechaev’s work inspired Bolshevik leader Vladimr Lenin. Anarchism stands as the political philosophy most associated with advocacy of political assassination in part because of the theory of “propoganda of the deed” in which some anarchists proposed assassinations as means to inspire the exploited to mobilize against elites. Figures like Ravachol and Emile Henry during the nineteenth century and Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President McKinley in 1901, are among the most famous anarchist assassins. In fact few anarchists have even advocated violence. The characterization stems largely from the startling bombings and assassinations that arose from the despair of the 1890s. Many anarchists, such as Leo Tolstoy, have argued that political assassinations primarily serve to strengthen the state and provide a potent excuse for the state to increase repression and control of the population. Political assassinations, for Tolstoy, do little to inspire the people and represent little more than cutting off one of the hydra’s heads. A new leader always emerges to take the place of the one assassinated.

Bibliography:

Gross, Michael L. Moral Dilemmas of Modern War:Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Iqbal, Zaryab, and Christopher Zorn. “Sic Semper Tyrannis? Power, Repression, and Assassination since the Second World War.” The Journal of Politics 68 (2006): 489–501.
Lentz, Harris M. Assassinations and Executions: An Encyclopedia of Political Violence, 1865–1986. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1988.
Assassinations and Executions: An Encyclopedia of Political Violence, 1900 through 2000. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002.
Nelson, Michael. Guide to the Presidency. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2008.
Snitch,Thomas H. “Terrorism and Political Assassinations: A Transnational Assessment, 1968–80.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 463 (September 1982): 54–68.