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Depends on who you consider "Inner Party members." Nobody tries to assassinate, say, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, despite the IRS's unpopularity.
I remember reading a thread on Tumblr discussing how we remember the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that launched World War I, but we forget that political assassinations were not uncommon in turn-of-the-century Europe, compared to after the World Wars, mostly of people we would consider rather "mid-level" in the government — not notable enough for the sort of fame-seeking that motivates most assassination attempts on heads of state. The question was raised of why this changed, and the general answer was that in Europe (or at least parts outside Western Europe) back then, even ministry heads and upper-level bureaucrats were members of the hereditary aristocracy — personally important beyond their government office, and not readily replaceable.
Nowadays, though, such jobs are held by interchangeable human cogs in the bureaucratic machine. Take out the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, and his or her #2 will be in their office within the week, and the operation of the IRS will proceed without the slightest hiccup. Hit the J. Edgar Hoover building with a truck full of explosives*, and the rest of the FBI continues with business as usual.
This is why I disagree with our own @KulakRevolt's Substack piece "Assassination War & the Death of Bureaucracy," because, long before assassinations of IRS agents "cause a Johnstown style 2/3 flight from the profession," (which even he estimates would take "merely 100 IRS agents" being killed annually), you'll long since run out of assassins willing to die to take out utterly-replaceable human cogs, only to see the machine grind on undaunted.
Sure, the mostly-figurehead merely-elected politicians whose names and faces are known to the public might have to worry, but then, see the "mostly figurehead" part.
*Example inspired by Vox Day's claim in this post that the Oklahoma City attack was a "false flag" precisely because it was in Oklahoma City:
McVeigh picked the Murrah Building as a target because that was the field office where the Waco raid was planned.
Sure, which puts paid to Vox's "false flag" narrative. But it instead highlights another weakness of assassination and terrorism as political tools in this sort of modern context: the choosing of the symbolic over the effective. To borrow Max Weber's terms, it's favoring "values rationality" (Wertrationalität) over "goal rationality" (Zweckrationalität); that is, what "sends a message" or embodies a particular value over what actually achieves a concrete end.
But the point of both terrorism and many partisan actions is to create fear, provoke a vast overreaction by the victim, and to inspire further action from others through what 19th century Russian nihilist social revolutionaries called “Propaganda of the Deed”. If Osama Bin Laden had secretly bought the Hostess company and increased the amount of sugar and trans fats in each Twinkie by 10 percent, he could have killed far more Americans than 9/11 did, and he would probably still be alive. But I doubt that would have fulfilled any of his political or strategic goals.
Except when has this ever actually happened? My understanding, from what I've read on the topic, is that "Propaganda of the Deed" never actually worked, not like the revolutionaries hoped, and was in fact counterproductive.
(If I thought such an act would inspire others on the same side to follow suit, well…)
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