The word ‘assassination’ suggests something clinical, bloodless, without suffering. Routine; all in a day’s work. Though even murder has an air of formality about it. As if the crime is the work of some schemer, to be solved only by a Holmes or a Columbo. Then there’s always ‘kill’. A reliable Germanic root. Kill. Almost forces the meaning into you as you read it. (There’s something about four-letter, one-syllable English words of the form consonant-vowel-double consonant that has that wonderful effect.) To be sure, the almost-assassin was, in every account, killed.
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
That is, there are connotations to the type of death, or near death, one can experience. And in the case of the former president of the USA it is at least logical to assume some element of the political was involved; that this attempted execution, or termination, or cessation of life, was indeed an assassination. (But maybe he just didn’t like the guy; maybe he was a neo-Hinckley.)
In the realm of politics and propaganda, death becomes a subject in itself. Brutus did not assassinate Caesar, but rather “as he was ambitious, I slew him”, implying an element of the sacrificial, the scapegoat, a submission, or resignation, to a higher purpose. In this case “for the good of Rome”, for the survival of democracy. They were “sacrificers, not butchers”. The result was that the tyrant didn’t merely die but rather “suffered death”, as if it were a natural cause. While Marc Antony, the master of political propaganda, saw those daggers as the daggers of “butchers”, of “villains, murderers” and “traitors”.
Taking a “bullet for democracy”?
In much the same way, it was universally reported that democracy itself survived an assassination attempt. Donald Trump declared that he had taken “a bullet for democracy”, while it was almost impossible to avoid seeing the image of him standing before an American flag with his clenched fist raised in defiance, a symbol of the protest synonymous with social justice fighters of the 20th century (who were, you might note, largely anti-democratic). This is the age of the image, after all; any doubt about the connection between democracy and the political system, here represented by Trump, has only been reinforced, either forcefully or subliminally.
Is assassination ever justifiable?
Every sane and reasonable commentator has pointed out that murder is wrong. That it is never the way to go about things. It is one of the most memorable ‘thou shalt nots’ in the Bible, after all the neurotic preamble about other gods. As Andrew Marr writes in the New Statesman, “assassination as an idea is inhumane; as a political strategy is a dead end; as a tactic is worse than futile.” (The tautology here confirming the lazy use of assassination as a synonym for murder.)
But just as the Bible then goes on to offer a mandate for genocide in the name of the Lord, it is always possible to justify murder in some hypothetical context, provided the cause is just and the reasoning sound. It is a moral question. Everyone has asked, “Would you kill X if you could?” Marr offers the example of Hitler and notes that, as in other historical cases of assassination, it would only have led to another figure taking his place. But given what we know now, the question is at least debatable, if meaningless. The point is, if you knew that murder, assassination, whatever, would lead to less misery and suffering, then it would be more than morally justifiable to act.
Thus the justification for official murder is given by those who control the sources of information. When the US vapourised South Vietnam, for example, it did so because it knew that it was saving the Vietnamese (and the wider region) from the greater evil of communism. Or when US-supplied weapons are used by Israeli forces to destroy Palestinians, it is only in retaliation against immoral acts by religious fanatics, in the morally righteous cause of self-defence. You can think of your own examples. Marr offers Saddam Hussein, asking whether it would have been moral to assassinate him rather than launch a war: “the obvious answer may be yes”.
Here we see how intellectuals can internalise the moral actions of the state (as if states themselves were moral agents) while also arguing that, when it’s a state or organisation we disagree with, it becomes morally debatable. Marr does not for example ask whether it would have been acceptable to assassinate Saddam Hussein while the US and UK and other Western allies supported him in his genocide of the Kurdish minority in Iraq. “Assassination is never the answer to political pain” – unless we are the assassins, he might have added, then it is possible.
Attempted assassination of Trump
The question with Trump then is, Would his death have made any difference to the misery and suffering in the world? In the neoliberal age, in which politics (particularly in the US and the UK) serve the interests of corporations, especially the financial sector, at the expense of worker rights and the wellbeing of the poor – what’s euphemistically called a “friendly business environment” – the differences between leaders becomes almost negligible for anyone in need of political action.
For corporations and shareholders the difference between a Democrat 28% and a Trump 15% rate of corporate income tax is perhaps significant; but the misery and suffering element is lacking. While state-sponsored terror – whether in Indochina, Latin America or the Middle East – and the cross-party focus on the neoliberal economic model, which has led to enormous levels of income inequality since 1980, are guaranteed whether or not the leader is blue or red, Obama or Bush. And while there might be an argument that Trump’s climate change denial is an existential threat to our species, it is almost certain that another Republican with an emphasis on individual (ie corporate) liberty will continue to downplay the impact of human-induced emissions for the greater good of deregulation and lower taxes.
The point is that individuals and personal whims doubtless make a difference, but speculations about such things are baseless and hold little interest. To understand and change the world, it is important to pay attention to what is really happening, not what might happen. It was first and last a question of morality: murder is wrong, unless it could be justified. This says nothing about the state of democracy, but to suggest it does is to miss the point entirely and sweep away the crucial question along with the bogus ones.
As Marr writes, “economically secure, well-educated, well-defended societies provide little space for populists, never mind tyrants… we must always look for political answers”. Perhaps ask how the people of Vietnam, Nicaragua, Palestine, view the democratically elected US presidents. The word tyrant might come up. He also notes that America is a democracy and that its victims of assassination were not tyrants but “chosen leaders”. His examples of Lincoln (elected when over half the population couldn’t vote) and Kennedy (who escalated the war in Vietnam from aggression to outright attack) suggest otherwise; while his other example, Martin Luther King, was not elected at all.
What this does is lump all political action that is outside the accepted channels, whether it is an assassination attempt or a popular grassroots movement, into the group marked ‘populist’. By extension, any political opinion that is not within the narrow spectrum of accepted discourse is censured. Democracy is a word that must be defined in advance and is constantly redefined to suit the needs of the user.
To the modern western intellectual this means anything resembling the current system, in which the electorate freely votes to transfer its wealth to the top 0.1%, and to surrender its hard-won rights and privileges to multinational corporations. It is a world where politics is ‘done’ by one group of people on behalf of others; in which political action must never be in the hands of the majority, and change can only come from above.
The attempted murder of Trump has only entrenched this position, only solidified the solidarity among what Marr unironically calls the “trade union of the political top dogs”. So, it isn’t so much that Trump took a bullet for democracy, but rather it seems that democracy took a bullet for Trump and the establishment.
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