Thoughts on the topic of assassination
By David Whetham, Vice President, EuroISME
Disclaimer: This blog entry is a copy of a Twitter thread from Prof David Whetham (@davidwhetham), VP of EuroISME. It was written as a response to Senator Lindsey Graham’s call to assassinate Putin.
Michael Gross says “For reasons that are often difficult to articulate, assassination evokes particular revulsion,” but why should this be? What is actually wrong with assassination?
Cicero records how the Roman senate refused to countenance the assassination, or “treacherous murder” of even a powerful enemy – one who was waging an unprovoked war. One can even find references in the Bible: Deuteronomy 27:24 states “A curse on him who smiteth his neighbour in secret.”
A little more recently, President Gerald Ford formally banned assassination in the 1970s as a tool of US policy in the embarrassing aftermath of the uncovering of various plots against international leaders that were considered unfriendly to US interests.
Kant explains this apparently pervasive attitude in practical terms in his pamphlet Perpetual Peace, where he argues that acts of hostility that make a mutual confidence “impossible during a future time of peace” such as the use of assassins, poisonings, breach of surrender and the instigation of treason – all of these things destroy the minimum level of trust required to achieve a stable peace at war’s end.
In a similar vein, Walzer to argues that: “The killing of political leaders is ruled out in international law even (or especially) in wartime – and ruled out for good reason – because it is the political leaders of the enemy state with whom we will one day have to negotiate the peace.”
However, Walzer does also suggest that: “There are obvious exceptions to this rule – no-one, no moral person, would have objected to an Allied effort to assassinate Hitler; we were in fact not prepared to negotiate with him – but ordinary leaders are immune”. How “bad” would a leader have to be to qualify?
There may be a very real cost in allowing someone who is carrying out particularly heinous crimes to continue with their policies. Genocide, the crime of aggression on a massive scale - these are actions that have such massive reflects, surely it would be better to stop such a policy directly by killing its instigator? So, why not accept that, just as not all killing is murder, perhaps not all assassinations are actually bad? If we don’t have a quarrel with the country, or its soldiers, only their leader, why not just kill the tyrant?
Wouldn’t such a norm be a good thing?
A word of caution.
The problem with any norm is that it doesn’t just get used by “nice people.” When we defend establishing a “justified assassination rule”, we imagine it being used for the world’s benefit to stop genuine threats to world peace. We think of the nastiest individuals or regimes and think about how much better the world would look without these people doing harmful deeds.
But, if something becomes a norm, it becomes a norm for everyone.
Just as the arguments for intervening in Kosovo in 1999 were repeated back to the West in 2008 by Russia to justify its intervention into Georgia to support the self-proclaimed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, it would be easy to see how creating or accepting a new norm would be used to give an unwarranted badge of legitimacy to much more than a dose of Polonium 210 in the cup of tea of a retired KGB officer…
Credits: Vincenzo Camuccini: The Death of Julius Caesar. Public Domain, Wikimedia.