Plutarch says that Julius Caesar dined with friends the day before he was assassinated. When conversation turned to considering the best way to die, Caesar looked up from the papers he was signing (being in company never stopped him working) and said, without hesitation: ‘Unexpectedly.’
Thanks partly to Shakespeare, Caesar’s has a claim to be one of the two or three best known historical assassinations. Another, plausibly argued here by Simon Ball as one of the most consequential, was that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, precipitating the first world war. Without it, the past century might have been unrecognisably different. The war might not have happened at all, or at least not as and when it did; and there might have been neither a second world war nor a Cold War in the forms and on the scale they took. But Ball wastes no time on such beguiling, pointless speculations. Taking Sarajevo as his starting point, he focuses on the impact of assassination on international politics, particularly on reasons for its deployment and reactions to it.
But it’s a slippery concept. Traditionally, the accepted definition in the Anglosphere was that assassination was murder with a political motive, whereas in the Francophone world it generally meant any premeditated murder. By the late 20th century, however, US and other governments were avoiding the word, decreeing that killings in self-defence were not assassinations and that the very use of the term was misleading, ‘a conclusion masquerading as a narrative’. Examining its evolution and increasing popularity over the past century or so, Ball quotes the historian Max Weber arguing that assassination is a product of the modern state, on the grounds that a state can succeed only by monopolising legitimate violence within its territory, which in turn makes assassination a tool for challenging the state. Germany after 1919, Russia between 1905 and 1910, British India, Egypt and Ireland both before and after the creation of Eire all featured bursts of multiple assassinations intended to undermine the ruling powers.
Successive British governments usually responded to assassination with what came to be known as the ‘liberal script’. This was framed by H.H. Asquith in response to the 1909 murder in South Kensington of an India Office official, Sir Curzon Wyllie, by a Hindu student from University College, London. Asquith viewed assassinations as originating from conspiracies involving very few extremists who were dangerous because of the violence of their methods rather than because they represented the tip of an iceberg. Governments should therefore respond by dealing with the assassins themselves, not by overreacting and killing large numbers of people, even if they were sympathisers, because that might provoke a genuine, broad-based threat to governmental legitimacy.
By 1937, Shanghai had become the acknowledged assassination capital of the world
This mostly worked. Although assassinations featured in the struggles for Indian, Egyptian and Irish independence, in the Malayan Emergency and in the establishment of the state of Israel, they were not decisive, and indeed may arguably have hindered the process. As Ball notes: ‘Assassination was not the danger. The real danger was support for assassination.’
But context makes a difference. Totalitarian states (a Mussolini coinage) combine assassinations with mass killings as a tool of domination; and if the tactic is used against them they usually respond with brutal reprisals. Ball quotes as an example the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the senior SS officer in Czechoslovakia and personal favourite of Hitler. Carried out by Czech members of SOE (Britain’s Special Operations Executive), it provoked reprisals of exceptional brutality even by Nazi standards and was later judged a technical success but an operational disaster.
In certain benighted periods and places there has even been what Ball calls ‘government by assassination’. In 1930s China, for instance, communists and nationalists assassinated each other, their own comrades and warlords, who in turn assassinated other warlords, who were assassinated by the Japanese occupiers, who also assassinated each other or were assassinated by Koreans. Also active were ‘assorted anarchists, cultists and narco-assassins, and a sub-culture of professional hitmen’. By 1937, Shanghai had become the acknowledged assassination capital of the world.
It was an earlier assassination, however – that of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin in 1928 – which Ball reckons to be another of the most consequential of the 20th century. Forgotten now by all but specialists, it strengthened Japan’s military, weakened Japanese democracy and enabled the conquest of Manchuria. This, in turn, furthered civil war in China, embedded the Japanese military’s power base in Tokyo and encouraged its Greater Japan aspirations, leading ultimately to the disastrous decision to go to war with America. As with Gavrilo Princip, the youthful assassin at Sarajevo, the arbitrary law of unintended consequence applies as often to assassination as to acts of good intent.
A more obvious consequence of assassinations is of course the removal of political elites from daily contact with their peoples. The phalanxes of guards around US presidents – not invariably effective, as we’ve seen – are evidence enough. But for Britons of a certain age, the gates of Downing Street are the starkest daily reminder. It is hard to believe now that one could routinely cut through Downing Street and walk within yards of a prime minister getting into their car. In the wake of the murder of Sir David Amess, MPs may now employ bodyguards at their surgeries.
Ball doesn’t spend much time on methods, beyond noting that sniping by rifle is more common in James Bond films than reality. (J.F. Kennedy’s assassination and Donald Trump’s near miss were exceptions.) Handguns and bombs have a long history – witness the 1605 Gunpowder Plot’s failed attempt on the life of James I and the successful 1812 shooting of Prime Minster Spencer Percival – and remain the weapons of choice, though Islamist extremists have a fondness for knives and Vladimir Putin for poisons. Now that we have targeted killings via drone or missile in undeclared wars between states or state-backed groups, the distinction between assassinations and acts of war is blurred. Most examples quoted by Ball are American – a reflection not only of the far-reaching consequences of 9/11 but of US openness compared with other nations. Although he mentions it, there is much more to be said about the continuous history of assassinations, internal and external, by Russian and Soviet governments since 1917.
As for the efficacy of assassination campaigns (not counting murders by individuals prompted by grievance or delusion), Ball is doubtful. Although empires appear to have contained and managed them more successfully than post-imperial nation states, which are more easily thrown into crisis, most VIP murders achieve little or nothing in advancing their cause. Indeed, there is some evidence that it is more effective to assassinate lower-level officials on whom the day-to-day functioning of the state depends. There is also evidence, not adduced in this book, that the capture of terrorist leaders causes more disruption than their killing – or martyrdom, as some would see it.
This is a big subject and Ball does well to cover as much as he does. But there should be more to come, especially a detailed analysis of the political and moral effectiveness of assassination as a tactic or strategy. But we can be sure of one thing. It ain’t ending any time soon; and Ball won’t lack material for a future book.
Comments