Political Assassinations Rarely Achieve Goals

The Assassination That Never Works

On March 15, 44 BCE, a group of Roman senators stabbed Julius Caesar to death on the floor of the Senate. They believed they were saving the Republic. They believed that removing the man who had made himself dictator for life would restore the old system of rule by the Senate. Caesar's body was still warm when his allies began consolidating power. Within a decade, his adopted son Octavian was emperor. The Republic was gone. The assassins had killed Caesar. They had killed the Republic.

The pattern is not unusual. Political assassinations almost never achieve what their perpetrators intend. The killers of Archduke Franz Ferdinand wanted to free Bosnia from Austrian rule. They got a world war. The killers of Abraham Lincoln wanted to avenge the Confederacy. They got a unified nation that passed the 13th Amendment. The killers of John F. Kennedy wanted to change American policy. They got a government that was more determined to continue it.

History records over a thousand political assassinations and attempts. In fewer than 10 percent of cases, the assassins achieved their stated goal. In the rest, they achieved the opposite.

What Everyone Knows

The public imagination tends to treat political assassinations as turning points. A single bullet, a single knife, and history pivots. The murder of Franz Ferdinand started World War I. The murder of Caesar ended the Roman Republic. The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. changed the civil rights movement. The narrative is dramatic: a single act can alter the course of history.

The narrative is also wrong. The assassination did not start the war. The war was already inevitable. The assassination did not end the Republic. The Republic was already dead. The assassination did not change the movement. The movement had already changed.

What History Actually Shows

The assassination of Julius Caesar is the classic case of a political murder that achieved the opposite of its intended effect. The conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius, believed that killing the dictator would restore the institutions of the Republic. They did not understand that the Republic had already been hollowed out by decades of civil war. The Senate they wanted to restore was a body of men who had spent their careers competing for the favor of generals. Caesar was not the cause of the Republic's decline. He was a symptom. His murder did not cure the disease. It accelerated it.

The assassins who killed Franz Ferdinand in 1914 had a clear goal: to break the Austro-Hungarian Empire's grip on Bosnia and unite the South Slavic peoples. They were members of the Black Hand, a Serbian nationalist organization. They believed that killing the Archduke would trigger a war that Serbia could win. The war that followed killed 20 million people. Serbia was occupied. The South Slavic peoples were not united. The assassins' goal was not achieved. The opposite was.

The killing of Salvador Allende in 1973 was not an assassination in the usual sense. It was a military coup, backed by the United States, that ended with Allende dead in the presidential palace. The goal was to prevent Chile from becoming a socialist state. The result was a dictatorship that ruled for 17 years, killed thousands, and destroyed the Chilean economy. The goal of preventing socialism was achieved. The cost was a regime that made socialism look appealing to a generation of Chileans.

The Part That Got Buried

The pattern that runs through these cases is the same: the assassins do not understand the system they are trying to change. They think they are removing an obstacle. They do not see that the obstacle is not the man. The obstacle is the system that produced him.

The men who killed Caesar thought that the Republic was a set of institutions that could be restored. They did not see that the Republic had become a set of relationships that depended on men like Caesar. When he was gone, the relationships did not revert to an earlier form. They found new men to fill the space he had left.

The men who killed Franz Ferdinand thought that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a structure that could be broken by removing one of its leaders. They did not see that the empire was already breaking on its own. The assassination was the spark, but the fire was already there. The war that followed was not caused by the assassination. It was caused by the alliances, the militarism, the nationalism that had been building for decades.

The Ripple Effect

The failure of political assassinations to achieve their goals is not a historical accident. It is a structural fact. An assassination is an act of violence against a person. Political change is a transformation of systems. The two are not connected in the way assassins imagine.

The assassination of a leader can create a power vacuum. Power vacuums are filled by the people who are best positioned to fill them. Those people are rarely the assassins. The men who killed Caesar were senators. The men who filled the vacuum were generals. The men who killed Franz Ferdinand were students. The men who filled the vacuum were generals, emperors, prime ministers. The assassins are never the ones who benefit.

The Line That Says It All

Political assassinations almost never work because the men who commit them believe they are removing a man, but what they are removing is a symbol—and a symbol, once killed, becomes a martyr, and a martyr is harder to defeat than the man ever was.