Are we returning to an age of assassinations?
the Hub, 16 June 2022
Might assassination as a political tool return, after an early 21st century hiatus?
Nicholas Roske was arrested on June 8th and charged with the attempted murder of Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the American supreme court. The 911 call that Roske himself made—“I need psychiatric help”—led to his arrest across the street from Kavanaugh’s house. He allegedly made assassination threats, was heavily armed, and travelled from California to the justice’s Maryland home. He was angry about a potential supreme court ruling restricting abortion rights.
Congressional hearings into the January 2021 assault on the Capitol are focusing American attention on political violence. The Kavanaugh threat got relatively less attention. The New York Times put the news on page 20, and the Washington Post filed it under “Local Crime and Public Safety”, next to a report about a traffic accident.
If you get your news from a still more progressive source, at Mother Jones the senior news editor was not as sanguine about bloodshed at the Supreme Court.
“We apparently just came unacceptably, terrifyingly close to catastrophe,” wrote Jeremy Schulman. “The assassination of a Supreme Court justice would be … a threat to American democracy every bit as severe as the January 6 insurrection and Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. … Everyone, across the ideological spectrum, needs to take this completely seriously and figure out what can be done to prevent the country from plunging into a new era of political violence reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s. The fate of our republic depends on it.”
The fate of the republic does not depend upon it; after all, the assassinations of the 1960s did not vanquish it. But it did shape the politics of the time, and while assassinations have not been a regular part of political life for a few decades, it is not foolish to worry that they may return.
Assassination was a present danger and a political force throughout the twentieth century. Assassinations go back much further, of course, to Julius Caesar most famously—a development that loosed that demon in imperial Rome. Several of Caesar’s successors were also assassinated.
The most consequential assassination of our time set off the Great War—a calamity that resonates even today. Austria-Hungary went to war after the 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne. By the end of the war, the Austrian emperor, German Kaiser, Russian tsar, and Ottoman sultan were all deposed. Gavrilo Princip’s bullet may have been the most consequential shot in history.
In a century of unprecedented violence there would be many more political killings, perhaps the most notable being the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 in a newly-independent India. Gandhi was killed by a fellow Hindu, a nationalist who objected to Gandhi’s conciliatory approach to Muslims and the new state of Pakistan.
The first family of Indian independence, the Nehru/Gandhis (no relation), would suffer two assassinations. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was assassinated in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, succeeded her. He was assassinated in 1991 by the Tamil Tigers.
For Americans, the 1960s was the time of the assassins. John F. Kennedy was killed as president in 1963, and his brother Robert while campaigning for president in 1968. Just months before RFK’s assassination, Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. In 1969, Malcolm X would be killed in New York. In 1972, Alabama Governor George Wallace was shot while campaigning for president. He survived but remained paralyzed for life.
In 1970, Canada had its most prominent assassination since that of D’Arcy McGee in 1868. Pierre Laporte, deputy premier of Quebec, was killed by the Front de libération du Québec during the October Crisis.
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