The lure of political killing

From the Roman empire to Bolshevik Russia, the past shows how assassination fails to halt a society’s drift towards authoritarianism.

By Andrew Marr

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914) by Achille Beltrame. Picture by DeAgostini / Getty Images

In recent days, a dirty, disgraceful thought may have crept into the minds of some liberals: “Just an inch to the left…” The raw fear of a second Trump presidency – swaggering with authoritarian revenge at home and, abroad, childish dreams of a remodelled world, with plenty of space for Vladimir Putin’s expanding empire – drives extreme thoughts. With almost everything at stake, including the success or failure of a hard-fought-for Labour government, many of us can taste that fear on the tongue and feel empathy leaking from our bodies. And this is happening in a Western political world in which there is more anger, in which the language is more extreme, and where politicians, as most recently in our election, are pursued and abused.

It has never been more important to speak against the assassination instinct, to say that assassination as an idea is inhumane; as a political strategy is a dead end; and as a tactic is worse than futile. Assassination never “works”. If it kills the target, it creates a martyr and sows dragons’ teeth for a worse future. If it fails, as at Butler, Pennsylvania, it creates a living near-martyr, and elevates to seeming nobility a man for whom that fate seemed impossible.

When his son, Donald Trump Jr, said that Democrats calling his father “literally Hitler” created an atmosphere for attempted assassination, he was not wrong. And that same instinct for exaggeration – for example, anti-abortion campaigners describing Labour MPs as child killers – is all around us. Words, in mid-flight, can become sticks, stones and worse.

Then there is the question of consequence. The image of Donald Trump, defiant, blood pouring down his face with his fist clenched, has probably won him the November election. What can confused, uncertain Joe Biden do with that? Like almost every leader and would-be leader around the world, he can only offer condolences, support and expressions of shock. China’s Xi Jinping offered “compassion and sympathy”; Benjamin Netanyahu went for shock and prayers; Putin’s Kremlin slyly protested at the US government’s “policies of incitement to hatred”; and all democratic leaders joined in with good wishes.

This chorus of the mighty reminds us, however, that there is a kind of trade union of the political top dogs, and in their founding document clause one is against any of them being harmed. This is worth mentioning because there is a moral case made in favour of assassination, which is that it is better to end the life of a real or putative tyrant than to accept their tyranny. Brutus in Julius Caesar decides to destroy the serpent’s egg and “kill him in the shell” than allow his ally total power: “He would be crowned/How that might change his nature, there’s the question./It is the bright day that brings forth the adder/And that craves wary walking.”

We are all “wary walking” today. But the fatal danger is to conflate the circumstances taking us towards authoritarianism with the individual actor; to assume that by removing one human being, like a piece plucked from the board, you change the rules of the game. This is hardly ever the case and modern political life is even more complicated than chess. In it, economically secure, well-educated and well-defended societies provide little space for populists, never mind tyrants. Societies collapsing or in peril produce one such figure after another. We must always dig deeper. We must always look for political answers.

In periods of crisis, assassination, the ultimate shortcut, often produces the opposite effect from that intended. The most famous example is Gavrilo Princip’s shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria in Sarajevo in June 1914. Princip, a follower of the Black Hand, wanted a Slavic state outside the Austro-Hungarian empire. He did not intend the First World War.

The assassination of Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s associate and rival, in 1934, may have been a protest at Bolshevik repression, or ordered by Stalin – it’s a murky subject. Kirov became a Bolshevik icon, and his name is famous in Russia today. But his death, far from being any kind of liberation, provided the starter-motor for Stalin’s Moscow trials and the “Great Terror”. That was the direction the Soviet dictatorship was heading anyway, but the Kirov assassination gave it a further push.

The 1942 assassination of the brutal Nazi overlord Reinhard Heydrich, by British-trained Czech fighters, might seem morally cleaner. He was a horrible man, yet his death did nothing to weaken the Nazi regime and led to hundreds, including children, being killed in German reprisal attacks, most notoriously at the village of Lidice. It was a great tale of derring-do, but the aftermath was ugly.

Tyrants thrive in a social and political context; they are not lone actors or unique examples of human badness. Suppose Hitler himself had been assassinated in the late 1930s; widespread anti-Semitism, middle-class paranoia and Nazi authoritarianism were already deep-rooted in Germany. Had Hitler become its martyr, another leader would have emerged who would not, perhaps, have made Hitler’s mistakes – who would have waited until Britain was safely defeated before turning on the Soviet Union, or would never have done so, thus establishing a Nazi hegemony that lasted, as Robert Harris imagined in his novel Fatherland, until the 1960s. We cannot know, but history is full of perversities.

Question: would it have been moral to assassinate Saddam Hussein, rather than launch a war that killed hundreds of thousands? The obvious answer may be yes; but since we don’t know the parallel history of the subsequent struggle for power, the factions, the civil war, even there we cannot be sure. If you had been sitting in Munich’s Osteria Bavaria restaurant in the 1930s when the little man came in for his favourite plate of trout, and you were carrying a revolver, would you? Again, probably yes: as long as, not being divine, you accept you have no idea about the wider consequences.

The American context is different because America is a democracy and the victims of assassination have not been tyrants but chosen leaders. The same principle of a perverse victim-strengthening applies, however: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy all became virtually untouchable icons by assassination as well as by the lives they lived. Lincoln’s Union prospered. King became, posthumously, the spiritual father of modern melting-pot America. Kennedy became the unlikely patron saint of an American liberalism, a status that long outlasted his presidency.

The failed assassination of Donald Trump on 13 July does not, I think we can agree, make him a saint. But it takes him to a place in the American consciousness he has not had before – it raises him. With his instinct for the theatrical moment he immediately understood this and raised his clenched fist, grinding out “Fight, fight, fight!” as the blood streaked down his face – an image for ten million T-shirts. His initial message, that “in this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand united” was cleverly un-Trumpish.

For the US election, it probably seals the deal. But we don’t know that yet. We don’t know whether Biden will react by standing down, or who might replace him, or what’s coming next.

What we do know is that assassination is never the answer to political pain. It takes us further into a world where our politicians are separated from us, frightened of us and unable to speak to us, human to human. Assassination is common killing with delusions of grandeur. Trump is a threat to our world. But the attempt on his life, and the thinking that led to it, is a bigger one.