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John Quiggin 
Tyrannicide
With the honourable exception of Timothy Snyder, today’s pundits have wimped out n the intellectual challenge dramatically posed by the failed attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. It looks as if this in fact falls into the “lone nutter” category, but it does raise as an urgent question whether Trump’s quasi-fascist statements and plans would justify killing him to prevent a tyranny.
The thinkers of the past were not so squeamish. Aristotle, Cicero, John of Salisbury, Melancthon, Suarez, Grotius and Milton all discussed the problem: not exactly the B team. And why not? Violence in war and rebellion is a good part of the portfolio of political and legal thought, as it is in their praxis. “Strife (polemos) is the father of all things”, said the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, and he wasn’t joking. Tyrannicide has not been an exotic niche issue for fanatics and eccentrics, but a core topic in the mainstream of Western thought. Not only in learned tracts. Racine’s last play, Athalie, is about an ideological reginacide in ancient Judaea. It was performed at Versailles in Madame de Maintenon’s bedroom.
Nor was it always a merely theoretical speculation. Cicero was murdered by Mark Antony and Octavian as triumvirs and heirs to the iconic tyrant Julius Caesar. Milton was a high official (“Secretary for Foreign Tongues”) under the Commonwealth, and a key propagandist, including a defence of the regicide of Charles I. A tricky task, as Charles was condemned by a dubious kangaroo court, as revolutionary tribunals tend to be. At the Restoration Milton was briefly arrested, but in the end the royalists limited their horrific vengeance to the voting regicides, and he spent the last decade of his life in peaceful obscurity. Grotius lived his entire life in a country in just rebellion against imperial Spain, which had incited the assassination of its heroic leader William the Silent in 1584 with a bounty of 25,000 crowns. Unsurprisingly, Grotius was on the opposite side to Milton in the tyrannicide debate.
Bringing this massive corpus of high-quality material to bear on the case of aspiring tyrant Donald Trump would require resources I don’t possess. That’s not the worst of it. Assassination is a specific category of political violence, so you need to look at the wider context. IIRC there is recent scholarship concluding that non-violent insurgent movements tend to get better results in the end than violent ones. Gandhi was right and Lenin wrong. The poster children for the happy endings are Indian independence in 1947 and the liberation of Eastern Europe in 1991. In the miserific corner of endless violence you have Palestine and Israel, 1947 to yesterday. Ireland, South Africa, and the American civil rights movement also point generally in the same direction.
This background at least calls for enhanced and sceptical scrutiny of past and future assassinations on claimed grounds of principle. You may be wrong on the facts (Tsar Alexander II, 1881). Your attack may fail. Both success and failure will foreseeably have bad as well as good consequences, and unforeseen ones. There may be preferable non-violent alternatives; in the Trump case, mobilising voters against him. Finally, you may not be able to change the tide of history either way. Impersonal forces count for more than Great Men. The death of the charismatic military genius Julius Caesar did not rescue the moribund Roman Republic from autocracy. That of the uniquely inspiring leader William the Silent did not turn the tide in favour of imperial Spain.
If there are large uncertainties, as is clearly the case with Trump, you can postpone the decision until things are clearer and the danger imminent. US history does not suggest that sitting Presidents are more immune than candidates. Some new technology (surveillance, clothing) lowers assassination risks; other technology raises them (sniper rifles, remote-controlled bombs, drones).
For lack of a serious case for the tyrannicide of Donald Trump, he is in no danger at all from me. But gorblimey, how could Thomas Crooks have missed, firing 8 shots at 500 feet from a modern weapon? Shooting was a serious sport at my school. I wasn’t a star, but at age 15 I could reliably hit a 12 inch target circle at 200 yards, without a telescopic sight, using a bolt-action rifle designed in 1895. Everything in MAGA-land is shoddy and incompetent, even attempted murder.
(second try)
Tyrannicide
With the honourable exception of Timothy Snyder, today’s pundits have wimped out n the intellectual challenge dramatically posed by the failed attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. It looks as if this in fact falls into the “lone nutter” category, but it does raise as an urgent question whether Trump’s quasi-fascist statements and plans would justify killing him to prevent a tyranny. The thinkers of the past were not so squeamish. Aristotle, Cicero, John of Salisbury, Melancthon, Suarez, Grotius and Milton all discussed the problem: not exactly the B team. And why not? Violence in war and rebellion is a good part of the portfolio of political and legal thought, as it is in their praxis. “Strife (polemos) is the father of all things”, said the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, and he wasn’t joking. Tyrannicide has not been an exotic niche issue for fanatics and eccentrics, but a core topic in the mainstream of Western thought. Not only in learned tracts. Racine’s last play, Athalie, is about an ideological reginacide in ancient Judaea. It was performed at Versailles in Madame de Maintenon’s bedroom.
Nor was it always a merely theoretical speculation. Cicero was murdered by Mark Antony and Octavian as triumvirs and heirs to the iconic tyrant Julius Caesar. Milton was a high official (“Secretary for Foreign Tongues”) under the Commonwealth, and a key propagandist, including a defence of the regicide of Charles I. A tricky task, as Charles was condemned by a dubious kangaroo court, as revolutionary tribunals tend to be. At the Restoration Milton was briefly arrested, but in the end the royalists limited their horrific vengeance to the voting regicides, and he spent the last decade of his life in peaceful obscurity. Grotius lived his entire life in a country in just rebellion against imperial Spain, which had incited the assassination of its heroic leader William the Silent in 1584 with a bounty of 25,000 crowns. Unsurprisingly, Grotius was on the opposite side to Milton in the tyrannicide debate.
Bringing this massive corpus of high-quality material to bear on the case of aspiring tyrant Donald Trump would require resources I don’t possess. That’s not the worst of it. Assassination is a specific category of political violence, so you need to look at the wider context. IIRC there is recent scholarship concluding that non-violent insurgent movements tend to get better results in the end than violent ones. Gandhi was right and Lenin wrong. The poster children for the happy endings are Indian independence in 1947 and the liberation of Eastern Europe in 1991. In the miserific corner of endless violence you have Palestine and Israel, 1947 to yesterday. Ireland, South Africa, and the American civil rights movement also point generally in the same direction.
This background at least calls for enhanced and sceptical scrutiny of past and future assassinations on claimed grounds of principle. You may be wrong on the facts (Tsar Alexander II, 1881). Your attack may fail. Both success and failure will foreseeably have bad as well as good consequences, and unforeseen ones. There may be preferable non-violent alternatives; in the Trump case, mobilising voters against him. Finally, you may not be able to change the tide of history either way. Impersonal forces count for more than Great Men. The death of the charismatic military genius Julius Caesar did not rescue the moribund Roman Republic from autocracy. That of the uniquely inspiring leader William the Silent did not turn the tide in favour of imperial Spain.
If there are large uncertainties, as is clearly the case with Trump, you can postpone the decision until things are clearer and the danger imminent. US history does not suggest that sitting Presidents are more immune than candidates. Some new technology (surveillance, clothing) lowers assassination risks; other technology raises them (sniper rifles, remote-controlled bombs, drones).
For lack of a serious case for the tyrannicide of Donald Trump, he is in no danger at all from me. But gorblimey, how could Thomas Crooks have missed, firing 8 shots at 500 feet from a modern weapon? Shooting was a serious sport at my school. I wasn’t a star, but at age 15 I could reliably hit a 12 inch target circle at 200 yards, without a telescopic sight, using a bolt-action rifle designed in 1895. Everything in MAGA-land is shoddy and incompetent, even attempted murder.
Well, the guy did kill two people, after all.
I’m hoping that maybe this incident will somehow inspire our society to try to calm down. I’ll have to check out Snyder just out of curiosity … but, I don’t think we are anywhere near a situation in which we need to think seriously about bumping off presidents.
I’ll admit, there has been some wobble in our institutions, notably the Supreme Court. Yet there are still thousands of federal judges standing between us and tyranny. In addition to guns, we have a lot of lawyers here.
Even if the Supremes try to sit on the rest of us like eggs, I think there will be much litigation. As disappointed as I am in the GOP, I know there are thousands, probably millions, of Republicans who still know right from wrong. (I know a few of them.) (I have no explanation for why they go along with all this. It is just the weirdest thing to watch.)
And even Congress can just stop paying for things if it wants. We aren’t out of options.
These kinds of processes though will take too long for Ukraine – Europe is going to have to step up, if the Dems lose. (And it would be great if Europe could do better on the Mideast too – though, that is a complicated topic.)
I am sorry to say, I still don’t know enough history to keep up, James. Btw, if you remember, what was that short-ish book on English history you had recommended?
And, keep with the prayers, people, pleeeeeeease. Every little bit helps.
There cannot be any case for pre-emptive tyrannicide. This presumes knowing the future with absolute certainty which is impossible. It appears that the failed, incompetent and unjustifiable attempt on Trump’s life has simply improved Trump’s election chances. That is not a good thing.
“There cannot be any case for pre-emptive tyrannicide.”
Surely that statement goes too far. Ok, I know, I know…Godwin. But, to lead with a/the prime example… before and after claiming the Chancellorship and further before he proclaimed himself Fuhrer, ie. well before he was indeed Tyrant, there were several sadly never acted upon assassination of Hitler plans made by people with eminent means in high military positions, and an actual near miss attempt by a lone small town clockmaker/labourer, one of the last to be murdered by order of Hitler after torture and years rotting in prison. The guy was kept alive for so long because Hitler refused to accept that he alone had built and planted the bomb. Post war the clockmaker was declared a hero with medals awarded, monuments erected, and movies made.
I should also say the brave clockmaker assassin was relatively young at 36 years of age. Also that the above post relied on a somewhat faulty memory regarding Hitler’s status at the time of the assassination attempt but not the earlier unexecuted military plots.
Georg Elser – Wikipedia
N, it took Hitler next to no time to sort out the constitution, reichstag, and legal system including judges, lawyers, etc., and have it all fall in line. I suspect that where not explicitly stated in the US Constitution then with the help of the Trump Supreme Court sufficient emergency Presidential powers will be found to exist fit for purpose. IMHO, if Biden remains the DNC candidate Trump likely wins, and also wins a Trumpian Congress and Senate; and rapidly converts all government agencies to the Trump cause. Project 2025 has tens of thousands of replacements at the ready…
Like that earlier Austrian tyrant wannabe, Trump has also long since made his struggle and solution a matter of public record.
It is also an issue that extends to the government of Australia as Project 2025 affiliated organisations are already well embedded at the highest levels here. See the latest example: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2024/07/16/milton-dick-pentecostal
See, it is entirely possible to hold a grown-up discussion on this explosive subject without lighting the fuse that would get us all banned or anathematized.
My short list of eminent dead scholars who did the same should have included Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. For centuries, it really was a perfectly normal topic to write about.
Putin is a better test case than Trump. He’s an international pariah, like a pirate. In his unprovoked war of aggression, he has committed war crimes on a huge scale, and ruined his own country, for fanciful reasons. He has closed all domestic channels of non-violent protest and change. Should we complain if he meets with an unfortunate accident, like Prigozhin? Cf. the killing of Beria after Stalin’s rather suspicious death. 25,000 crowns is clearly an inadequate incentive. Try $10bn plus immunity.
PS on the Hitler case. The Nazis engaged in the organized political murder of their enemies )officials, judges, journalists ..) on some scale before they came to power. The heroic Münchener Post published regular lists of Nazi murders, until it was shut down immediately after they came to power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchener_Post There was abundant evidence in 1933 of the true nature of Hitler’s party. So far, Trumpist violence is almost all talk, plus lone-wolf vigilantism.
Trump is not the cause of anything. He is the final symptom.
If anyone were to try to do it, Svante, I agree that a fake emergency would be the easiest way. We really bugged out completely after 9/11.
The question is – did we learn anything in the last 23 years? And I don’t know. Meanwhile, plenty of people are mad at us again.
I didn’t know that, about the Munchener Post, James. That’s very interesting. And the Snyder piece was very good, thank you. There was much food for thought.
Though otoh, it seems also true to me that for the 1% types, things in the US are so good, why would they want to change? What else could they possibly want? They basically run everything already, sort of – and without having to kill anyone (directly).
Religious fanatics make a lot of noise but I am not sure how many of them there really are. (I admit though I have little insight into Voldemort followers.)
As for the election, I guess I would go with what the pollsters say – although, polls seem less reliable now. There is too much at stake to worry about anyone’s ego. That’s kind of why I’m thinking Hilary – everyone knows everything about her already. Could she win the Midwest this time? (No one else is thinking her, though, afaik. And, I haven’t watched the polls closely.)
We had some debate into that direction when Trump did not accept his defeat after the last election. I´m still going with Trump is not particular competent and old. That he is about to win another election says a lot of sad things about the US i´d rather not like to think about, since i cannot do anything about it and am unhappy enough without thinking about it.
My counter example, Kurtz in Austria did not last long after being my example for some one scarier in some ways, fortunately. Poland, also rather shaky for a long time, now has a new government. Orban and Erdogan are still at large.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that lab creation is the most likely source of the COVID-19 pathogen, SARS-CoV-2 . This New York Times article lays out the case VERY clearly, convincingly and without sensationalism.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html
There is voluminous circumstantial evidence that the Wuhan Lab was the source of the outbreak through a lab leak. There is close to confirming evidence (to a high degree of probability) that the Wet Market was NOT the source.
There is also very considerable evidence of a direct cover-up conducted by the Chinese authorities and an aiding and abetting of that cover-up by American (and other Western interested persons, meaning at least some researchers, funders and organisations.
Because of research cooperation between Western organisations and persons with China, it was in their interests to accede to and even support the Chinese position that it was a natural outbreak. These research interests involved money, scientific prestige and self-interest in avoiding accountability. It was also in the interests of neoliberal governments, corporations, oligarchs and their paid functionaries, employees and scientists with conflicts of interest to cover up the real origin and dangers of COVID-19 and to also downplay its real dangers. This indirectly enabled free circulation of the virus by proscribing (mandating against) control responses other than an inadequate vaccine and an inadequate vaccine program.
This was in order to *not* shut down the dominant business model of neoliberal capitalism which requires free circulation of capital and relatively free human movement (intra- and international) for the production and consumption purposes of unfettered neoliberal capitalism no matter what other costs, human and environmental, this free circulation entails. These parties not only colluded reflexively via a confluence of interests in suppressing proper research of the origins but also in minimising the very real harms and dangers of COVID-19 to people: especially the aged, the very young, the vulnerable and large underprivileged classes.
This cover-up via a structural or systemic confluence of interests appears to have successfully suppressed / prevented any discovery of any incontrovertible positive evidence (the “smoking gun”) thus far. This suppression almost certainly cannot succeed indefinitely. Eventually, the truth will come out, even if it takes 30 years. I doubt it will take that long. I think 1 to 2 decades should easily suffice. I will watch with interest, if I live that long, to see what comes out. Social murder will out: be demonstrated and proven in the mid to long run.
Two things people living in broken democracies always say