There was a discussion I read somewhere else where someone said to change the current political system you’d have to well put a hit out on about 5 or 6 political leaders in the government
And that started a long arduous argument on whether assaination of ones government and policy makers would actually help or not
Has there ever been a historical murder of a leader that actually helped out its people in the long run ?
Some argued Julius Caesar but that would only work if you believed he was going to crown himself king and ignored the 20 years of civil war until Octavian crowned himself augustus…
Well, going from Caligula to Claudius was a step in the right direction.
And it’s still controversial which regicides in the Wars of the Roses were or weren’t improvements (though one could argue which of those were assassinations versus executions versus battlefield deaths).
Yeah, whacking Caligula has got to be the all time winner.
Of course when the Praetorians then proclaimed Uncle Claudius as the new emperor, everyone thought he was going to be an ineffectual puppet, what with his well known mental defects.
So it’s not like the conspirators killed Caligula and then had a great plan to improve things. It was more like, “Hey let’s kill Caligula, how can it get any worse?” And then when Claudius steps up everyone is like “Oh, shiiiiiiit”.
And then Claudius is all, “Hey remember when Tiberius and Sejanus and Caligula basically murdered ninety percent of the Julio-Claudian family? Except me? Why didn’t they bother to have me killed? Because I was an idiot, right? OK, so who’s the idiot now?”
Then he goes and marries Messalina and then Agrippina, and the Romans are all, “…you?”
In Spanish we don’t have a exact word for assassination. The false cognate “asesinato” just means murder. We usually have to clarify when it’s a “political murder”.
However, Dominican Spanish has borrowed the word “ajusticiamiento”, or execution of a person condemned to death ti describe another type of killing: the assassination of a tyrant. The word can ve roughly translated as “the making of justice”. We had to “make justice” twice. Both times are generally seen as good things.
There seems to have been an unspoken goal in the original discussion that prompted this thread. Spelling that out, might be helpful, to guide the discussion.
My instant guess, is that someone was trying to argue that assassination, in and of itself, is an inherently bad idea.
I would suggest, IF that is the case, that the way to argue it is NOT to try to list a lot of assassinations, and make judgments about how beneficial they may have been and to whom. Instead, the better question to ask is,
Has declaring assassination to be a LEGITIMATE way to change a government, proven to be a positive idea in the long run for a nation?
When I learned about the life of Huey Long, I was surprised that I’d never heard a peep about him in school.
And I always wondered if maybe that was because the story of his death would have carried the message to schoolkids that sometimes, assassination had solved (or at least prevented) a problem.
Even if Long hadn’t become an American dictator as his detractors warned, his impending square-off against FDR could have thrown a monkey wrench into the U.S.'s preparation for WW2. I don’t know if Long lived long enough to have voiced opinions on isolation vs. intervention in Europe, but he would have probably opposed FDR’s interventionism (if only for political reasons) when the time came.
Huh! I just Googled, and found nothing. Another “fact” I must have picked up somewhere and always thought was true. I apologize to the thread, and to the memory of the monstrous son of a bitch who did so much harm to human civilization.
He should have been assassinated – Genghis and Atilla also – and that would have saved millions of lives, and advanced human history by hundreds of years.
The assassination of Mussolini may qualify. His regime was already on the skids, but his death helped end it and facilitate Italy’s switch to the Allies and development of a democratic republic.
It is entirely possible that the assassination of JFK made things better.
We’ll never know for sure of course because if we do chose to kill a leader we can never be certain of the choices they would make and how their rule would pan out for better or worse. nor whether the alternatives are better or worse.
Stephen Fry mused on this in his novel “making history”
That reminded me that in Spain, Generalissimo Franco is still dead…
I mean that, before his death, Franco had let it be known that Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco was going to be the successor and new dictator. I remember reading reports that after ETA spectacularly assassinated Blanco that many in Spain (most in secrecy then) did agree that the terrorists actually did hit a proper target while they condemned the assassination officially. Most did agree later that with Blanco and Franco dead that then there was no consensus among the defenders of the regime and then the opponents became bolder and the change to democracy was accelerated.
I mean that, before his death, Franco had let it be known that Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco was going to be the successor and new dictator. I remember reading reports that after ETA spectacularly assassinated Blanco that many in Spain (most in secrecy then) did agree that the terrorists actually did hit a proper target while they condemned the assassination officially. Most did agree later that with Blanco and Franco dead that then there was no consensus among the defenders of the regime and then the opponents became bolder and the change to democracy was accelerated.