Time Essay: The Wars of Assassination

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That kind of killing is only distinguishable from pure terrorism, the other principal purpose of modern assassinations, by a matter of intention. Like the assassin state, the outlaw terrorists, even those who destroyed 83 innocents in the Bologna train station on Aug. 2, might also claim that their work is superior to conventional warfare. On moral grounds, they have their all-encompassing, all-justifying cause. And at the level of effectiveness they may point to whole sections of cities reduced to battle zones because of their bloody diligence. The real difference between assassin states and terrorists is that the states are not out to menace other countries as much as they are their own citizens. In a way, the leaders of these states have the best of both odd worlds: they are in power, and they act as if they are continually trying to usurp it.

Apparently these leaders believe that murder will ensure their longevity. They could be right, but history is discouraging on this point. Though a natural target for tyrannicide, Charles IX died of tuberculosis at the age of 23; but his brother Henry III, who was responsible for a couple of assassinations of his own, was stabbed to death by a fanatic, and his cousin and successor, Henry IV, who deserved much better, met the same end. In South America, Pizarro, who assassinated the Inca Emperor Atahualpa, was himself assassinated, thus setting a trend on that continent. Jean Paul Marat, who advocated bloodbaths for the French Revolution, wound up with a bloodbath to himself. Nestled in his suds, he assured Charlotte Corday, before she stabbed his heart, that his enemies "shall soon be guillotined."

If history does not favor assassins, literature offers no encouragement either. Characters like Brutus and Macbeth admitted such impediments to the success of their dark deeds as guilt and contemplation. One of the most interesting studies in assassination, Alfred de Mussel's Lorenzaccio, offers a bit more hope to Gaddafi & Co. in that everyone agrees that the murdered Alessandro de Medici was a first-class scoundrel. Yet, like Hamlet, the assassin Lorenzo goes to pieces in the play. The real Lorenzo was judged as much a traitor as a liberator. And De Mussel's Lorenzo, like his real-life model, is assassinated in turn, presenting yet one more example of lethal pigeons coming home to roost.

But an appreciation of the humanities is not the long suit of political murderers. Simple folk on the whole, they traffic mainly in the capacity of human fear, especially the fear of sudden death, and they trust the raddled citizenry to watch and sit still. The claiming of credit for assassinations is thus at once a show of force and a philosophy. The governments of Syria, Libya, Iran and elsewhere are not to be counted on for pity, or for maintaining a sense of international community. They may, however, be counted on for killings, which often give governments a stature they might never earn by more subtle or complex means.