Volume : SIRS 1991 History, Article 56 Subject: Keyword(s) : KENNEDY and ASSASSINATION Title : Do Assassinations Alter the Course of History? Author : Simon Freeman and Ronald Payne Source : European Publication Date : May 24-26, 1991 Page Number(s) : 9
EUROPEAN (London, England) May 24-26, 1991, p. 9 "Reprinted courtesy of THE EUROPEAN."
DO ASSASSINATIONS ALTER THE COURSE OF HISTORY? by Simon Freeman and Ronald Payne
India faces collapse with the violent death of Rajiv Gandhi--or does it? Simon Freeman and Ronald Payne analyse the importance of individuals in the march of events
They have paid their tributes, expressed their horror and pledged, as they always do when one of their number is murdered, that democracy will triumph in the face of terrorism. Now, in their weekend retreats, with their foreign affairs advisers and their top secret intelligence reports, world leaders will have to judge the true impact on India of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.
They will conclude, perhaps a little unhappily for them but fortunately for the rest of us, that Gandhi's death is unlikely to be more than a footnote, if a substantial one, in the history of his country. India will not disintegrate. There will be no civil war. The Indian military will not stage a coup. Pakistan will not launch the oft-predicted strike which would set the region ablaze.
Some Indians, perhaps many, may die over the next month in the kind of primitive ethnic and religious feuding which has always threatened to destroy the country. But, unless history is truly mischievous, India will muddle through and get on with the business of trying to survive.
It is rarely the personal stature of a statesman which decides how pivotal his contribution to history will be. History usually depends less on the drama of an assassination or the status of the victim than on more profound political, economic or demographic forces. In retrospect, it often appears that assassin and victim were inexorably drawn together to become the catalyst for inevitable change.
The most spectacular assassination in modern European history--the shooting of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo in 1914 by a Serbian student, Gavrilo Princip--was undoubtedly the immediate cause of the First World War. But few serious historians today subscribe to the theory that, had Princip not pressed the trigger that late June day in the cause of Serbian nationalism, the 19th-century order would have survived.
Dr Christopher Andrew, of Cambridge University, believes that the assassination merely set the timetable for war. He said: "Even if the Archduke had not been killed then there might have been a great war anyway." Other experts now talk not of Princip but of an explosive cocktail of nationalism straining within decrepit empires and of fatally dangerous alliances built by leaders from an earlier world.
It is possible to see Sarajevo as the climax to a period in which political murders became almost routine. The reference books on late 19th-century Europe are peppered with the names of hapless, long-forgotten politicians who were shot, bombed or stabbed because, so it was thought by the many bands of extremists, that was the only way to force change.
While there are no precise ways to assess the real importance of an assassination, historians like Andrew reckon that there are some general guidelines. In the stable, advanced democracies of today the murder of a top politician is unlikely to cause more than outrage and pain.
When the Irish Republican Army blew up the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984 in an attempt to kill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her Cabinet, they hoped that there would be such disgust at the murders that the British public would force their leaders to pull out of Northern Ireland. But, even if Thatcher had died this would not have happened. Her death would probably have strengthened her successor's resolve not to bow to terrorism.
The IRA should have known this from the reaction to the killing five years earlier of Lord Louis Mountbatten, distinguished soldier, public servant and pillar of the British Establishment. The murder changed nothing in the province and only demonstrated, as if it was necessary, that determined terrorists often find ways to murder their chosen targets. Similarly, The Red Brigade anarchists who cold-bloodedly killed Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister, in May, 1978, achieved nothing except to ensure that the Italian authorities would hunt them with even more determination. Nor did the killers of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme accomplish anything. The murder--still unsolved--drew the usual, but clearly genuine, shocked response from world leaders. But even at the time they were hardpressed to pretend that Palme's murder would fundamentally matter to Sweden.
The Third World, on the other hand, is more volatile. Sometimes, as in India, countries are an uneasy blend of feudalism and capitalism, dynastic authoritarianism and democracy. The demise of dictators often leaves a bloody vacuum. Yet even here, the assassination of a tyrant does not necessarily signal major upheaval. General Zia ul-Haque, who had ruled Pakistan since 1977, was blown up in his plane in the summer of 1988. But, though he had long seemed crucial to the continuing stability of the country, his death seemed to be the fated climax to the era of military rule.
The murder of Egypt's President Sadat in October 1981 seemed then to herald some new dark age of internal repression and aggression towards Israel. But his successor, Hosni Mubarak, merely edged closer to the Arab world without returning to the pre-Sadat hostility towards Israel.
The killers of kings and dictators in other Arab countries have also discovered that they have murdered in vain. Iraq has endured a succession of brutal military dictators who have died as violently as they lived. The fact that Iraq has never experienced democracy is the result of economic and historical realities, not assassins' bullets. Saudi Arabia has also seen its share of high level killings yet, today, the House of Saud remains immovably in power.
But in the United States, where the idea of righteous violence is deeply embedded in the national consciousness, the grand assassination has been part of the political process for more than a century. Beginning with the murder of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, the list of victims is a long and distinguished one. It includes most recently, President John F. Kennedy in 1963; his brother, Robert, heir apparent, shot in 1968; Martin Luther King, civil rights campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner, gunned down the same year. Ronald Reagan could easily have followed in 1981 when he was shot and badly wounded.
John Kennedy's death now appears important for different reasons from those one might have expected at the time. It did not derail any of his vaunted civil rights or welfare programmes; rather his death guaranteed that his successor, Lyndon Johnson, would be able to push the Kennedy blueprint for a New America through Congress. Nor did it end the creeping US involvement in Vietnam.
But Kennedy has been immortalised by his assassin and the mythology of his unfulfilled promise will endure long after his real accomplishments are forgotten.
In a curious, perverse, sense he and his fellow-martyrs might live on as far more potent symbols of change than if they had survived into gentle retirement with their fudges revealed and their frailties exposed.
Why good leaders die and bad ones survive
Few names of hated tyrants appear on the roll-call of world leaders who fall to the assassin's bomb, knife or bullet, writes Ronald Payne. One of the curiosities of the trade in political murder is that those the world generally recognises as bad guys often live to a ripe old age or die quietly in their beds. Few who mourn the passing of Rajiv Gandhi would have shed so many tears had President Saddam Hussein been blown to pieces in Iraq.
There was a time only a few years ago when Americans and Europeans would have celebrated the violent demise of President Muammar Gaddafi. Both the Libyan leader and Hussein live on, as do Idi Amin of Uganda, or Fidel Castro, whom the American Central Intelligence Agency plotted so imaginatively and ineffectually to remove.
When academics play the game of what might have been, the consequences of assassinating such monstres sacres as Stalin and Hitler arise.
When the Russian dictator died suddenly of natural causes, the whole Soviet Union was paralysed because no leader dared claim the right to succeed him. That in itself suggests what might have happened had Stalin been shot unexpectedly at a more critical moment.
The timing of a political murder is crucial. Had Adolf Hitler been assassinated before he achieved full power or before his invasion of the Soviet Union, the history of Germany, and indeed of Europe, would have been very different.
Fascinating though such intellectual exercises are, it seems that as a rule it is the decent, the innocent and the relatively harmless who perish as assassins' victims.
The reason may not be far to seek. Tyrants watch their backs pretty carefully. The secret police are ever active. It is easier to kill statesmen in democracies where the rule of law prevails and the sad truth is that leaders in those countries which exercise authority through voting rather than shooting are more at risk than Middle East tyrants.
A further reason for the survival of the hated monster figure might be that Western intelligence services have been forbidden to go in for execution. The CIA and the British secret intelligence service are now out of the killing business. Even the KGB's assassination specialists seem to have been stood down.
In any case the Kremlin was hardly keen on the murder of ruling statesmen even in the bad old days. Soviet leaders understood the realities of power well enough to know that such acts were unlikely to further their cause.