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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24810 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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It’s almost like the people who assassinate public officials aren’t particularly rational.

That suggests an interesting speculative question: how often have assassins shifted the course of world history toward something they would have preferred, making the assassination "rational" in some sense?

Most of the time, the effect seems to be neutral at best. Princip did nothing for Serbian nationalism. Goatse provided a founding myth for a secular, not Hindu, state. James Earl Ray didn't kill the Civil Rights Movement but birthed a martyr. Charitably, Brutus may have delayed empire for a decade or so. Who knows what Oswald's political opinions were, but it's almost certain that they didn't come to fruition.

The only effective assassination I can really think of is Booth's. He managed to eliminate a politician who was a genuine driving force toward something the "deep state" wasn't particularly interested in, and it made the Reconstruction stillborn, with a new President not particularly interested in tackling a hard problem anyways. It was going to be a hard slog anyways, but he killed it with a bullet.

Maybe there were some Russian anarchists who maybe helped the serfs a bit?

Explicit note for any insane Motteizans (and lurking Feds): even ignoring morality, most of the time assassination seems useless at best and counterproductive at worst.

Well, the Japanese May 15th incident in 1932 and the October 12, 1960 assassination of Asanuma Inejirō are what immediately comes to mind for me. Also from Japan, there's the Isshi incident of July 10, 645; the Sakuradamon incident of March 24, 1860; and the League of Blood incident (a precursor to the May 15 incident).

And, of course, depending on how you define "shift[ing] the course of world history toward something they would have preferred," there's the 47 Rōnin, the revenge of the Soga Brothers, and the Igagoe vendetta.

I guess the lesson might be that it works better in Japan?

Bashir Gemayel’s assassination, maybe? Alexander III’s assassination definitely contributed to a communist revolution, albeit in an accelerationist way and not directly.

That’s of course ignoring Game of Thrones-style assassinations of family members to seize the throne; those are historically confined to certain circumstances(Macedonian monarchies, the Ottoman Empire, etc) but well represented in the historical record.

I'll have to read up on Gemayel.

As for Alexander II (I think you mean, though I just found out III was the object of an assassination attempt by Aleksandr Ulyanov, elder brother of the most famous Ulyanov), I'm on the fence. The assassin's ideological program seems consistent with Communist revolution: the long temporal gap, conservative reaction, and WW1 being the more immediate cause all point in the opposite direction. Maybe I'd land on a half point?

Court intrigues seem less like history and more like bookkeeping to me, though perhaps that's just distance and time obscuring the historical changes they caused.

Where's the line between an assassination and a purge? Because if you kill enough people, that frequently makes a difference.

I'm taking a more limited definition of assassination: an individual who attempts to change how he is governed by killing an individual or small group who govern him. I'd say this excludes a government killing domestic opponents (governments can kill on a much grander scale, since they are not the governed but the governors) and soldiers killing other soldiers (two governments sending their governed to kill each other to resolve a dispute).

Assasination of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, by a man motivated by his mother getting scammed by a Korean New Religious movement, led to it and particularly its influence on Japanese politics put under scrutiny.

how often have assassins shifted the course of world history toward something they would have preferred, making the assassination "rational" in some sense?

Darius the Great killed (a man allegedly falsely claiming to be) Bardiya, who was ruling Persia, which allowed him to take over the Persian Empire. Darius got what he wanted and was good at managing the Empire too, so that worked out for him.

Court intrigue and usurpers seem categorically different from the modern assassin.

Goatse provided a founding myth for a secular, not Hindu, state.

Putting the “ass” (both of them) in “assassination”.

On a serious note, I would say that Leon Czolgosz got at least a piece of what he wanted in killing Bill McKinley. McKinley’s successor genuinely did make significant efforts to rein in some of the worst practices of large predatory corporations which were exacerbating the obscene levels of wealth inequality typical of the period. Sure, America never got full anarcho-socialism like Czolgosz and his comrades hoped - although it wasn’t for a significant lack of trying by the Wobblies and other major communist labor movements of the time - but I would say that at the very least taking out McKinley probably moved thing at least directionally toward his assassin’s goals.

Bill McKinley

I definitely had to look this up, you’re talking about William McKinley. I didn’t recognize the name from the list of presidents stuck in my head, I thought you were talking about some other politician.

Yes, there’s a bit in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins where people sing a patriotic campaign song calling him “Bill McKinley”.

I’ve tried to find out if during McKinley’s life, people actually did refer to him familiarly as “Bill”. The only concrete example I’ve found is that during the Battle of Antietam, McKinley drove a supply wagon carrying, among other things, coffee, and that this led to political opponents later in his career derisively referring to him as “Coffee Bill”.

to reign in

"rein in" is an equestrian term and has no G.

Yeah, that’s what I get for posting right before I go to sleep.

Putting the “ass” (both of them) in “assassination”.

I like.

I'm not convinced that Teddy changed the trajectory of the regulatory state. This is all speculative, of course, but both Democrats (stagnant in support, admittedly) and a meaningful and growing number of Republicans were anti-corporate in sympathies. Teddy may have been the particular executor of many anti-corporate policies, but had McKinley not been assassinated, would his vision have dominated for the next 20 years? I suspect eventually someone outside of it would have won a Presidential election (perhaps TR himself).

Princip did nothing for Serbian nationalism.

Princip started a chain of events that led to the Serbian-dominated Kingdom of Yugoslavia. On the other hand, there was a bloody war in-between which he deeply regretted (and didn't live to see the end of).

TIL that Goatse killed Gandhi, and we know all too well that Marat was slain by Tubgirl.

I don’t know who assassinated Pupienus, but there’s probably a fitting meme somewhere…

Goatse provided a founding myth for a secular, not Hindu, state.

Thank you for this typo, I needed a good belly laugh

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