See - "Do Assassins Really Change History?" Are they trying to prepare us for something?
Days after John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at
Ford’s Theater and shot Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865,
Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, declared that “assassination has
never changed the history of the world.” Was Disraeli right?
One view, the “great man” theory, claims that individual leaders
play defining roles, so that assassinating one could lead to very different
national or global outcomes. In contrast, historical determinism sees leaders
as the proverbial ant riding the elephant’s back. Broader social, economic and
political forces drive history, so that assassinations may not have meaningful
effects.
Prominent examples of assassinations raise intriguing questions,
but do not settle the matter. Would the Vietnam War have escalated if John F.
Kennedy had not been killed? Would the Middle East peace process have proceeded
more successfully if Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel had not been
assassinated?
For any given individual historical episode, it is hard to know
for sure. But averaging over many such examples, statistics can begin to
provide a guide.
To better understand the role of assassinations in history, we
collected data on all assassination attempts on national leaders from 1875 to
2004, both those that killed the leader and those that failed. There’s a lot of
data: Since 1950, a national leader was assassinated in almost two out of every
three years. (Today’s leaders may rest considerably easier than those in the
early 20th century, when a given leader was about twice as likely to be killed
as now.)
Assassination attempts are more common in larger countries,
where there is a larger potential pool of assassins, and in countries at war. A
country with the population of the United States is 75 percent more likely to
experience an assassination attempt than a country with a population the size
of Switzerland’s.
Assassins are often inaccurate, and their victims are usually
bystanders. Even if the gun is fired or the bomb actually explodes, the
intended target is killed less than 25 percent of the time. Bombs prove
especially inaccurate, rarely killing the leader while causing substantial
collateral damage, killing an average of six bystanders and wounding 18.
A leader’s survival can depend on remarkable twists of fate. Idi
Amin, the Ugandan dictator, reportedly survived an assassination attempt in
which a live grenade bounced off his chest and killed or wounded several people
in a crowd nearby. Kennedy did not escape the bullet that killed him, even
though it was fired from 265 feet away and he was in a moving car. But
President Ronald Reagan survived being shot at close range, as John Hinckley
Jr.’s bullet punctured his lung but stopped just short of his heart.
Perhaps the most remarkable of all historical cases was Adolf Hitler’s survival of an assassination attempt
in a Munich beer hall in 1939. Had Hitler lingered 13 minutes longer, he most
likely would have been killed by a time bomb that destroyed the podium where he
had just spoken and that killed seven people. Why did he depart? Bad weather.
Fog grounded his flight back to Berlin, so Hitler left early to catch the
train.
The seeming randomness in leaders’ fates may help shed light on
the role of assassinations in history. We compared the 59 assassination
attempts in our data that happened to succeed with 192 close calls that
happened to fail.
We found that assassinations do have an effect on political
systems, but with caveats. For one, the effects are largely limited to
autocracies. On average, the deaths of autocrats have prompted moves toward
democracy, which appear 13 percentage points more likely than when following
failed attempts. Democracies, in contrast, appear robust: The deaths of
democratic leaders do not lead to a slide into autocracy.
Assassinations can also change the path of war. For countries in
moderate conflicts, with fewer than 1,000 battle deaths, assassinations feed
the flames, as these conflicts are more likely to intensify. On the other hand,
for countries already in intense conflicts, assassinations of leaders appear
more likely than failed attempts to bring the war to a close.
Failed attempts themselves may change outcomes; an autocrat who
survives an assassination attempt may crack down on opposition groups, leading
a country further from democracy. Our data are consistent with this
“intensifying autocracy” effect. Assassination attempts on autocrats thus bring
considerable risk: They appear to increase the chance of democratization if the
attempt succeeds, but lessen it in the far more likely event that the attempt
fails.
From Caesar to Lincoln, many leaders have met violent ends — and
many others narrowly escaped assassination. Ethics and law put enormous
restraint on state-sponsored assassination, though lone gunmen may be hard to
eliminate altogether. The historical evidence is that assassinations do matter
when targeting autocrats, but they primarily bring risk. Twists of fate may
have large influences on history — yet by their nature they remain outside our
control.
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