Assassination is as old as human history, but in long historical periods, assassinations were usually limited to power struggles between political groups, and civilian assassinations of political elites did not become a business until after the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.
As a result of the technological explosion, there was a global assassination boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the state of vitality · competition is still in sight.
In contrast, the assassination of Trump, which shocked the world some time ago, was just a "small thing".
01 Impossible Assassination: The Pre-Industrial Era
On March 2, 1757, Robert Damiens, a Parisian janitor, was sentenced to death for his attempted assassination ·attempt on the French king Louis XV alone.
In order to make Damien suffer as much as he lived, the king's ministers concocted a series of horrific punishments.
Historian Michel · Foucault gives a detailed account of Damien's torture in Discipline and Punishment:
The executioner tore open the flesh on Damien's chest and limbs with red-hot iron tongs, which was not easy, and the executioner tore two or three times in each place, and condensed the iron tongs, leaving a wound of six pounds of flesh, and then the executioner scorched his right hand holding the murder weapon with sulfur, and poured melted lead, boiling rosin, wax, and sulfur into the torn wound, and in Damien's wail, the torturers brought four horses, divided Damian's four horses, and finally threw his body into the stake and burned it.
According to one executioner's recollection, when they threw the stump at the stake, Damian was still breathing in blood.
The fate of the ancient assassins was roughly like that.
There are two types of assassinations, one is "official killing" and the other is "civilian killing".
Official killings are assassinations planned by sovereigns such as states or cabals, and such assassinations rely on abundant financial, organizational and technical resources and have a high success rate. Machiavelli, the political philosopher of the Renaissance, once said, "If necessary, the monarch should use immoral means to achieve his goals (such as honor and survival)", including political tactics such as assassination, subversion, and coup.
Machiavelli
From Caesar to Soleimani in the 21st century, "official killing" has gone through many iterations of technology, from sharp blade assassination to targeted killing by drones.
This history is of course also very interesting, but what I want to talk about today is not "official killings", but "people's killings" (at least on the surface, they seem to be people's killings), and the entanglement of technology and history behind them.
Massacres are Damian-style assassinations carried out by civilians against political, economic, and cultural dominants, and are "asymmetrical warfare."
In the history before the Industrial Revolution, civil killing was always a risky business with a very low return ratio. The slightest mistake will leave the assassin in endless pain and unable to die.
Some researchers have counted the causes of death of emperors in Chinese history, from the Qin to the Qing Dynasty, among the 256 emperors, 139 died of illness, 91 were killed, 6 committed suicide, 8 of unknown reasons, and 12 died of accidents due to other reasons (such as frolicking and falling into the water, taking drugs by mistake, etc.). Among the 91 emperors killed, many died from "official killings", but none of them died from "people's killings".
Ming Wuzong who fell into the water and died
Ancient monarchs deliberately maintained a sense of mystery vis-à-vis their subjects in order to highlight the "unfathomable majesty of heaven". The walls of the Forbidden Palace and the Janissaries separated the commoners from the king, and the assassins had no chance of succeeding unless they relied on the palace people to secretly communicate with them or organize a collective riot. Even if he had the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the dragon's face, the monarch was under the heavy protection of the guards.
Ancient bows and arquebuses had a very limited effective range. For example, until the 40s of the 19th century, the "Brown Beth" smoothbore guns issued by the British army only had an effective range of 80 yards (about 73) meters, and they needed to stand up to complete a series of complex operations when loading, often taking one minute. At the same time, the gunpowder in the powder pool relied on flint sparks to ignite, and was extremely susceptible to moisture, and the number of successful shots in ten launches usually did not exceed six or seven. It is difficult to imagine how civilians can accomplish assassinations with such guns.
Qing Dynasty shotspearmen
As for gunpowder, black powder, which was widely used in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, was a mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate, with a low decomposition rate and intensity, and its explosive lethality was extremely limited, and it could not be used for assassination.
In addition, whether it is a bow, arquebus, or black powder, they all have characteristics that are difficult to carry and conceal, and are not suitable for assassination scenes, and the assassin may be pushed to the ground by four or five big men before he has time to aim, and finally end up in a Damian-like ending. They are also too expensive for civilians. When a person tries to assassinate the sovereign, he must reserve sufficient funds and organize multiple assassinations, compensating for the lack of quality and precision of the assassination weapons with quantity, at which point we have already transitioned from "assassination" to "rebellion".
The epidemic of assassination is still in the past.
02 Dynamite Fetishism: The First Wave of Assassinations
After the mid-19th century, the asymmetry between the masses and the elites quietly shifted.
Assassinations against rulers became street fashion in Europe and the United States. In the 34 years from 1880 to 1914, leading politicians of global influence who were assassinated by civilians include:
Tsar Alexander II of the Empire of Russia (1881)
法国总统萨迪·卡诺（Sadi Carnot）（1894）
西班牙首相德尔卡斯蒂略(Antonio Canovas del Castillo)(1897)
Elizabeth, Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1898)
King Umberto I of Italy (1900)
美国总统威廉·麦金莱（William Mckinley）（1901）
葡萄牙国王卡洛斯一世（Carlos I）（1908）
Pyotr Stoplypin, Prime Minister of the Russian Empire (1911)
西班牙首相卡奈来哈斯(Jose Canalejas)(1912)
希腊国王乔治一世（George I）（1913）
The most famous, of course, is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1914), which directly led to the First World War, resulting in 35 million casualties.
Alexander II
If we were to count the lucky ones who were assassinated but survived, the list would also include:
Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1905)
西班牙国王阿方索十三世（Alfonso XIII）（1906）
......
As for the high-ranking bureaucrats who have been assassinated, there are countless of them.
The reasons why assassinations have become popular are, firstly, political, and secondly, technical.
Politically, the social contract theory put an end to the medieval theory of the divine right of kings and the absolutist theory of kingship in the early modern period, and demanded that power be held accountable to the public.
Social Contract Theory
In countries where monarchy is abolished, politicians must appear publicly in speeches, rallies or other campaigns to express their views and attract popular support; In countries that retain their monarchy, the monarch must also adapt to the demands of modern society for political visibility, moving from the deep palace to the streets, increasing contact with people's daily lives, and creating the image of a so-called "protector of well-being".
All this, exposing the ruling class to the public's view, also creates a breeding ground for assassination.
For anarchists, assassination is not terrorism, but a legalized act of defiance. In the eyes of the protesters, invisible and microscopic violence masquerades as a law and social norm to impose a brutal dictatorship in capitalist society. Every law, every church, every job is based on violence.
In the face of pervasive violence, vulnerable exploited must respond with unpredictable violence. The question is not whether violence is justified, but how it can be used to destroy property and power structures in modern society as effectively as possible. This philosophy is often referred to as "propaganda de par le fait" (propagande par le fait).
The cult of assassination also influenced Chinese youth at the turn of the century. The "People's Daily", founded by the League, once published:
"There are two kinds of anarchist movements that are sabotage: advocacy, secret relations, and assassination...... The tyrant and the people were unbearable, so the bomb was a sniper of Bolang, and this third law was also. Those who are in charge of these three laws, or the coercion group, or the execution group, punish tyrants and corrupt officials for the crime of rebellion against the people, so that the generations will reflect and repent" ("Types and Commentaries on Social Revolutionary Movements in Europe and America")
The so-called assassination is "the crime of rebellion against the people against tyrants and corrupt officials." The revolutionaries of the late Qing Dynasty did indeed achieve the unity of knowledge and action in this regard. In 1905, Wu Yue, a native of Tongcheng, Anhui Province, assassinated the "Five Ministers of Overseas Countries". In 1907, Xu Xilin, a native of Shaoxing, Zhejiang, and others assassinated Enming, the governor of Anhui. In 1910, Wang Jingwei, a native of Foshan, Guangdong, used explosives to assassinate the regent Zaifeng (attempted).
However, without technological innovations, the praise of assassination will remain on paper.
Technically, the advent of modern gunpowder made it possible to carry out long-range assassinations by means of bombs or guns. United States historian Hedrick reminds us that until the beginning of the 19th century, Western control over the world was quite limited, however, from the 30s and 40s of the 18th century, industrialization and scientific progress made European colonial wars easier and easier, and the invention of steam engine ships, tropical medicine, and new weapons allowed Westerners to finally dominate the world in the second half of the 19th century.
Deringer pistol
Weapons such as firearms underwent technological innovations never seen before in the 19th century. Year 1825. United States engineer Henry · Derringer designed an extremely small front-loading firecap single-shot pistol that could even be hidden in a handbag or stockings. In the 40s of the 19th century, the German region began to massively equip breech-loading rifles capable of firing 5-7 times per minute from a lying position. In the 50s of the 19th century, France developed a Minérence bullet that could increase the hit rate of the compound gun to 94.5% at 100 yards (about 91 meters) and 52.5% at 400 yards (about 364 meters).
Prussian infantry
Infantry firearms, which have been upgraded to dangerous ranged weapons at this point.
In 1866, Nobel invented nitroglycerin explosives. This explosive is extremely destructive, capable of generating large amounts of debris and shock waves, causing serious damage to the human body, and is easy to carry.
These new weapons have widened the generational gap between Western and non-Western civilizations, and at the same time changed the balance of power between elites and masses, making it possible for civilians to be killed with a single blow. In the frenzy of technological progress, along with the colonial wars, it was precisely the violence within Western societies.
United States and the leaders of Russia were among the first to embrace new technologies.
Nitroglycerin explosives
In 1865, Booth, a sympathizer of the Confederates, ended the lives of Abraham ·Lincoln with a 0.44 caliber Dehringer pistol. In the United States, where guns are free and individualism is favored, lone wolf shootings have become part of United States' political culture. Among the United States presidents assassinated after Lincoln were James A. Garfield, William McKinley, and Kennedy, and the weapons that killed them were the British Bulldog revolver, the Johnson "Safety Automatic" revolver, and the Carcano rifle, all of which were products of the second half of the 19th century.
Garfield Cut
McGinlecce
Kennedyche
In contrast to American-style gun culture, the Russian anarchists under the Tsar had a penchant for bombs. They launched two bomb attacks against Alexander II in 1880 and 1881, and although Alexander II narrowly escaped the first, he was seriously wounded in the second attack.
The development of the modern chemical industry made it possible for any civilian with a certain amount of savings and knowledge to make explosives.
Two months after the death of the Tsar, Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin wrote an article entitled "The Spirit of Revolt", in which anarchists were encouraged to attract public attention and incite widespread insurrection through bomb assassinations and other means.
Kropotkin
The political activism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was mixed with utopian and techno-fetishistic sentiments, and nitroglycerin dynamites became the object of praise for revolutionaries. United States anarchist ·Johann Most, who also dumped explosives, claimed that the modern world was dominated by "stupidity, corruption, and prejudice" and that we must rely on violence for the rebirth of society, and in 1885 he published a pamphlet entitled "The Science of Revolutionary Warfare," in which he wrote:
"Today, the importance of explosives for social justice through revolution cannot be overstated. One will see that this substance will play a decisive role in the next stage of world history".
Most
The Science of the Revolutionary Cause is an operational guide on how to practice bomb assassination. The experience provided by the authors includes:
(1) Assassins are better off obtaining ready-made explosives from conventional industry than making nitroglycerin themselves;
(2) a violent impact is the only reliable way to make an explosive explode,
(3) Assassins can obtain blasting caps and fuses from gun suppliers;
(4) the assassin needs to decide on the length of the fuse according to his own retreat path;
(5) Attention should be paid to the blasting direction, the explosive can form the maximum destructive effect on the side that is subject to resistance,
(6) The optimal form of the bomb is a sphere, and the assassin can cast a hollow sphere from the foundry, or cast it himself (the author attaches the manufacturing process), etc.
Interestingly, though, Moster was not involved in any of the political assassinations himself.
03 From Delhi to Beijing: The Underground Black Market for Bombs
In order to carry out assassinations, Eurasia during this period even formed underground networks for the manufacture and teaching of bombs.
Most of the first explosive devices were made by Russia refugees in exile in Europe and transported to Russia over long distances, and it was not until 1905, with the help of European experts, that Russia anarchists began making explosives in remote suburbs of their native cities.
Russian anarchist
They bought glycerin, concentrated nitric acid and concentrated sulfuric acid from the market, mixed concentrated nitric acid and concentrated sulfuric acid in a 1:3 ratio, and added glycerin to the mixture in a 1:1 ratio. Eventually, the assassins added nitroglycerin with absorbents and stabilizers such as diatomaceous earth, and a makeshift assassination device was complete.
Russia's anarchists had so much experience in making and carrying out bomb assassinations that they became technological pioneers in Russia, Central Asia, Northeast Asia, and even South Asia. In 1907, the forerunners of the Soviets, the Bolsheviks in Russia, asked the anarchists to teach them the craft of making explosive devices in laboratories on the Soviet-Finnish border.
However, after 1905, Tsarist Russia gradually intensified its repression of the revolt, and a large number of activists were executed. Russia, skilled in bomb making, fled westward to Paris, the "old revolutionary district" or crossed to Japan via Siberia and set up new laboratories in cities such as Nagasaki.
At that time, Paris and Japan were inhabited by political dissidents from two Asian countries, India nationalists gathered in Paris, and Japan was a window for Chinese youth to understand the world. Students in Japan were exposed to Western law, political science, philosophy, and natural science through Japan translations, and established their own political organizations in Japan.
Paris in the 1900s
Since the United Kingdom colonists strictly forbade the free circulation of weapons in the colonies, the Indian resistors could only use fairly primitive means to manufacture weapons. To change that, He·mchandra Kanungo, a India living in Paris, learned how to make assassination bombs from Russia exile Nocolas Safranski ·. Upon his return to India, Kanungo established his own explosives laboratory in Calcutta.
Canungo
A similar story occurred in Japan, where in 1905, Huang Fusheng, the leader of the Sichuan branch of the League, asked Sun Yat-sen to introduce him to technicians who knew about explosives to compensate for the inferior equipment of the insurgents. After some twists and turns, Huang Fusheng and Yu Peilun, a Sichuan native who was studying chemistry in Japan, also learned how to make bombs from Russia exiles, and in the experiment, Yu Peilun's eyes were injured and his arm was broken.
Yu Peilun believed that "there is nothing more practical than a strong powder bomb", and he also wrote a book of more than 25,000 words "Safe Explosives Manufacturing Law", detailing the principles, formulas and manufacturing procedures of explosives production, which was passed on to the revolutionaries and even won the reputation of "bomb king". Among those who were deeply influenced by Huang and Yu, there was a Cantonese named Wang Jingwei.
Yu Peilun
On February 24, 1910, Wang Jingwei planned a bomb attack in Beijing to assassinate the regent Zaifeng.
On December 23, 1912, Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy of British India, was bombed in Delhi and wounded himself in the back.
两颗炸弹有着同样的技术来源，他们均来自俄罗斯无政府主义者的炸弹实验室。 （上述技术传播路线参考：Yin Cao，Bombs in Beijing and Delhi，Journal of World History , December 2019, Vol. 30, No. 4 (December 2019), pp. 559- 590）
04 Choosing One and Other: Assassination and Political Wisdom
Today's assassinations, both technical and ideological, do not completely transcend the logic of the end of the 19th century. However, the frequency of assassinations has decreased significantly compared to a hundred years ago.
Assassination and human political wisdom are in a state of trade-off. The logic of anarchism is that the existing dictatorship of the bourgeoisie will not be able to collapse unless it is subjected to pervasive violence and terror. However, after the end of the 19th century, political activists gradually came to grasp two other tactics of action: social revolution and reformism.
The former inspired the later Bolsheviks and Chinese revolutionary youth, who overthrew the millennial relationship of imperial autocracy and feudal personal dependence through the revolution of the workers and peasants, while the latter became popular in Western Europe, and left-wing organizations such as the Socialist Party of France and the Labour Party of United Kingdom abandoned their revolutionary programs and instead sought to participate in politics by leading trade unions and party elections, and implementing gradual reforms to improve labor rights after taking power.
The Socialist Party of France in the 1920s
In the midst of revolution and reform, the terrorism of assassination, along with the classic form of bombing, gradually fell silent.
By the late 20th century, only United States was plagued by political assassinations among the world's major countries. Of the 14 presidents of the United States since Roosevelt, eight were assassinated, and one (Kennedy) was killed in an assassination. Of the eight assassinations, seven took the form of shootings.
It seems that in a country with a high degree of gun liberalization, lone wolf raiders have little interest in the cumbersome process of making improvised bombs.
However, in recent years, political violence in United States has risen sharply due to the increasing polarization of United States and social division.
Attacks on United States public officials are becoming more common, with a far-left man shooting and wounding Rep. Steve ·Scalise in 2017, Trump supporters sending bomb mails to more than a dozen Democrats in 2018, far-right plotting the kidnapping of Michigan ·Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, and Supreme Court Justice Brett · Brett in 2022 Kavanaugh) was assassinated in a plot......
Whitmer
In 2017, 3,939 physical threats against members of Congress were reported in the United States, and in 2021, that number soared to 9,625. In this regard, in the United States, which is increasingly politically divided over immigration, abortion and free trade, Trump's assassination has long been "a mountain of rain and a storm."
Political violence is not confined not only to United States territories. Globally, the number of assassinations around the world has dropped from more than 1,000 per year in the early 90s to less than 100 in 1999, but by 2015 the number of assassinations had risen rapidly to more than 900.
I was applauding you a moment ago
Are we going backwards in history?
There are many different interpretations of this problem.
One of them, terrorism researchers Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware from Georgetown University, identify the psychology of political assassins as "accelerationism," "who have lost interest in normative political action that has been eroded by political polarization and the principle of family property, denies the effectiveness of the current system in providing public goods and maintaining order, and believes that the only way to hasten disaster is to create chaos." in order to achieve social transformation in a short period of time. ”
Accelerationism
The psychology of the accelerateists is the same as that of the anarchists more than 100 years ago.
The development of modern technology has made it possible for civilians to possess weapons of medium destruction, and it has also posed a huge dilemma for those in power, who must be able to carry out endless reforms of the political representation and economic distribution system with higher organizational power if they are unable to effectively control firearms and other weapons due to various political and historical inertia.
When the pace of reform stagnates, when the three factors of gun freedom, rising social inequality and political polarization are superimposed, and when a new generation of assassination technology represented by 3D printed weapons and small drones is about to arrive, the destructive desires that have been suppressed in the process of civilization will be resurrected in assassination one after another.
This is the dilemma facing United States today and a potential challenge to the world.