textfiles-politics/regexConsp/art-04.xml

<xml><p>Volume : SIRS 1991 History, Article 56    
Subject: Keyword(s) : KENNEDY and ASSASSINATION
Title  : Do Assassinations Alter the Course of History?    
Author : Simon Freeman and Ronald Payne      
Source : European      
Publication Date : May 24-26, 1991   
Page Number(s) : 9  

EUROPEAN             
(London, England)            
May 24-26, 1991, p. 9            
"Reprinted courtesy of THE EUROPEAN."          
        
   DO ASSASSINATIONS ALTER THE COURSE OF HISTORY?    
    by Simon Freeman and Ronald Payne    
</p>
<p>
India faces collapse with the violent death of Rajiv Gandhi--or  
does it? Simon Freeman and Ronald Payne analyse the importance of  
individuals in the march of events     
</p>
<p>
   They have paid their tributes, expressed their horror and   
pledged, as they always do when one of their number is murdered, 
that democracy will triumph in the face of terrorism. Now, in  
their weekend retreats, with their foreign affairs advisers and  
their top secret intelligence reports, world leaders will have to  
judge the true impact on India of the assassination of Rajiv 
Gandhi.      
</p>
<p>
   They will conclude, perhaps a little unhappily for them but 
fortunately for the rest of us, that Gandhi's death is unlikely  
to be more than a footnote, if a substantial one, in the history 
of his country. India will not disintegrate. There will be no  
civil war. The Indian military will not stage a coup. Pakistan   
will not launch the oft-predicted strike which would set the 
region ablaze.       
</p>
<p>
   Some Indians, perhaps many, may die over the next month in  
the kind of primitive ethnic and religious feuding which has 
always threatened to destroy the country. But, unless history is 
truly mischievous, India will muddle through and get on with the 
business of trying to survive.     
</p>
<p>
   It is rarely the personal stature of a statesman which  
decides how pivotal his contribution to history will be. History 
usually depends less on the drama of an assassination or the 
status of the victim than on more profound political, economic or  
demographic forces. In retrospect, it often appears that assassin  
and victim were inexorably drawn together to become the catalyst 
for inevitable change.     
</p>
<p>
   The most spectacular assassination in modern European   
history--the shooting of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife 
at Sarajevo in 1914 by a Serbian student, Gavrilo Princip--was   
undoubtedly the immediate cause of the First World War. But few  
serious historians today subscribe to the theory that, had   
Princip not pressed the trigger that late June day in the cause  
of Serbian nationalism, the 19th-century order would have  
survived.      
</p>
<p>
   Dr Christopher Andrew, of Cambridge University, believes  
that the assassination merely set the timetable for war. He said:  
"Even if the Archduke had not been killed then there might have  
been a great war anyway." Other experts now talk not of Princip  
but of an explosive cocktail of nationalism straining within 
decrepit empires and of fatally dangerous alliances built by 
leaders from an earlier world.     
</p>
<p>
   It is possible to see Sarajevo as the climax to a period in 
which political murders became almost routine. The reference 
books on late 19th-century Europe are peppered with the names of 
hapless, long-forgotten politicians who were shot, bombed or 
stabbed because, so it was thought by the many bands of    
extremists, that was the only way to force change.   
</p>
<p>
   While there are no precise ways to assess the real    
importance of an assassination, historians like Andrew reckon  
that there are some general guidelines. In the stable, advanced  
democracies of today the murder of a top politician is unlikely  
to cause more than outrage and pain.   
</p>
<p>
   When the Irish Republican Army blew up the Grand Hotel in   
Brighton in 1984 in an attempt to kill Prime Minister Margaret   
Thatcher and most of her Cabinet, they hoped that there would be 
such disgust at the murders that the British public would force  
their leaders to pull out of Northern Ireland. But, even if  
Thatcher had died this would not have happened. Her death would  
probably have strengthened her successor's resolve not to bow to 
terrorism.       
</p>
<p>
   The IRA should have known this from the reaction to the 
killing five years earlier of Lord Louis Mountbatten,  
distinguished soldier, public servant and pillar of the British  
Establishment. The murder changed nothing in the province and  
only demonstrated, as if it was necessary, that determined   
terrorists often find ways to murder their chosen targets.   
Similarly, The Red Brigade anarchists who cold-bloodedly killed  
Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister, in May, 1978, achieved  
nothing except to ensure that the Italian authorities would hunt 
them with even more determination. Nor did the killers of Swedish  
Prime Minister Olof Palme accomplish anything. The murder--still 
unsolved--drew the usual, but clearly genuine, shocked response  
from world leaders. But even at the time they were hardpressed to  
pretend that Palme's murder would fundamentally matter to Sweden.  
</p>
<p>
   The Third World, on the other hand, is more volatile.   
Sometimes, as in India, countries are an uneasy blend of   
feudalism and capitalism, dynastic authoritarianism and    
democracy. The demise of dictators often leaves a bloody vacuum. 
Yet even here, the assassination of a tyrant does not necessarily  
signal major upheaval. General Zia ul-Haque, who had ruled   
Pakistan since 1977, was blown up in his plane in the summer of  
1988. But, though he had long seemed crucial to the continuing   
stability of the country, his death seemed to be the fated climax  
to the era of military rule.     
</p>
<p>
   The murder of Egypt's President Sadat in October 1981 seemed  
then to herald some new dark age of internal repression and  
aggression towards Israel. But his successor, Hosni Mubarak, 
merely edged closer to the Arab world without returning to the   
pre-Sadat hostility towards Israel.    
</p>
<p>
   The killers of kings and dictators in other Arab countries  
have also discovered that they have murdered in vain. Iraq has   
endured a succession of brutal military dictators who have died  
as violently as they lived. The fact that Iraq has never   
experienced democracy is the result of economic and historical   
realities, not assassins' bullets. Saudi Arabia has also seen its  
share of high level killings yet, today, the House of Saud   
remains immovably in power.      
</p>
<p>
   But in the United States, where the idea of righteous   
violence is deeply embedded in the national consciousness, the   
grand assassination has been part of the political process for   
more than a century. Beginning with the murder of President  
Abraham Lincoln in 1865, the list of victims is a long and   
distinguished one. It includes most recently, President John F.  
Kennedy in 1963; his brother, Robert, heir apparent, shot in 
1968; Martin Luther King, civil rights campaigner and Nobel Peace  
Prize winner, gunned down the same year. Ronald Reagan could 
easily have followed in 1981 when he was shot and badly wounded. 
</p>
<p>
   John Kennedy's death now appears important for different  
reasons from those one might have expected at the time. It did   
not derail any of his vaunted civil rights or welfare programmes;  
rather his death guaranteed that his successor, Lyndon Johnson,  
would be able to push the Kennedy blueprint for a New America  
through Congress. Nor did it end the creeping US involvement in  
Vietnam.       
</p>
<p>
   But Kennedy has been immortalised by his assassin and the   
mythology of his unfulfilled promise will endure long after his  
real accomplishments are forgotten.    
</p>
<p>
   In a curious, perverse, sense he and his fellow-martyrs 
might live on as far more potent symbols of change than if they  
had survived into gentle retirement with their fudges revealed   
and their frailties exposed.     
</p>
<p>
   Why good leaders die and bad ones survive   
</p>
<p>
   Few names of hated tyrants appear on the roll-call of world 
leaders who fall to the assassin's bomb, knife or bullet, writes 
Ronald Payne. One of the curiosities of the trade in political   
murder is that those the world generally recognises as bad guys  
often live to a ripe old age or die quietly in their beds. Few   
who mourn the passing of Rajiv Gandhi would have shed so many  
tears had President Saddam Hussein been blown to pieces in Iraq. 
</p>
<p>
   There was a time only a few years ago when Americans and  
Europeans would have celebrated the violent demise of President  
Muammar Gaddafi. Both the Libyan leader and Hussein live on, as  
do Idi Amin of Uganda, or Fidel Castro, whom the American Central  
Intelligence Agency plotted so imaginatively and ineffectually to  
remove.      
</p>
<p>
   When academics play the game of what might have been, the   
consequences of assassinating such monstres sacres as Stalin and 
Hitler arise.      
</p>
<p>
   When the Russian dictator died suddenly of natural causes,  
the whole Soviet Union was paralysed because no leader dared 
claim the right to succeed him. That in itself suggests what 
might have happened had Stalin been shot unexpectedly at a more  
critical moment.       
</p>
<p>
   The timing of a political murder is crucial. Had Adolf  
Hitler been assassinated before he achieved full power or before 
his invasion of the Soviet Union, the history of Germany, and  
indeed of Europe, would have been very different.    
</p>
<p>
   Fascinating though such intellectual exercises are, it seems  
that as a rule it is the decent, the innocent and the relatively 
harmless who perish as assassins' victims.   
</p>
<p>
   The reason may not be far to seek. Tyrants watch their backs  
pretty carefully. The secret police are ever active. It is easier  
to kill statesmen in democracies where the rule of law prevails  
and the sad truth is that leaders in those countries which   
exercise authority through voting rather than shooting are more  
at risk than Middle East tyrants.    
</p>
<p>
   A further reason for the survival of the hated monster  
figure might be that Western intelligence services have been 
forbidden to go in for execution. The CIA and the British secret 
intelligence service are now out of the killing business. Even   
the KGB's assassination specialists seem to have been stood down.  
</p>
<p>
   In any case the Kremlin was hardly keen on the murder of  
ruling statesmen even in the bad old days. Soviet leaders  
understood the realities of power well enough to know that such  
acts were unlikely to further their cause.   
</p>
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