On July 13, 2024, then-candidate and former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated in Butler, PA. It seemed fitting to schedule this post to coincide with the anniversary of that event.
Obviously, that was real and Eric wrote this years before that attempt so the only relationship is the topic, but Eric wrote about fictional asssasination attempts within the context of how they have unfolded historically and the historical outcomes versus was the assassin/attempted assassin wanted. Within the 1632verse, the assassination of Mayor Dreeson is, I believe, the most impactful one on the people within the Ring of Fire.
Spoiler: Eric’s conclusion is that strategically, assassination is a terrible choice, and is fully separate from targeting leaders on the battlefield during active military engagements. I’m not Eric and I didn’t know him personally, but I would guess – based on having read a great deal, at this point, of what he posted – that he makes his argument in this way because it’s harder to argue with facts and figures than feelings, and those facts and figures fully support the strategic argument. It’s harder to find numbers to support a moral argument, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t agree with it. That just means he chose not to include it in this pair of posts.
– Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine)
Baens Bar
22 November 2016 08:13
Mutter. People keep misconstruing my attitude toward assassination. It’s not fundamentally moral, it’s strategic. As a tool of statecraft, the track record of assassination is utterly abysmal. Once in a while, an assassination accomplishes the purpose of the assassin (or the people behind him). Probably the best modern example was the assassination of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by the right-wing fanatic Yigal Amir. The assassination pretty much accomplished Amir’s purpose, which was to swing Israeli politics drastically to the right and foreclose any possibility of a peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.
But that’s rare. Here’s what happens far more often:
First, most assassinations are actually assassination _attempts_, because they fail. The consequences of such failures are invariably drastic and almost always work against the aims of the assassins. (There’s a similar dynamic with coup d’etats. If they fail — and most of them do — the backlash is severe. Take a look at what just happened in Turkey.)
Secondly, even when they succeed, assassinations usually have outcomes which are radically different from the intent of the assassin or assassins. Some examples:
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, occurred on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo when they were shot dead by Gavrilo Princip. The aim of the assassination was to advance the independence of the southern Slavic territories. What actually followed was that World War I was triggered off, and most of the Balkans wound up being ravaged. It’s true that eventually, in the course of the Second World War, Yugoslavia emerged as an independent nation under Tito, but that process had nothing to do with the assassins of 1914.
An even better example is the assassination of William the Silent, the Prince of Orange, by a Catholic partisan of Spain. William the Silent was succeeded as leader of the Dutch rebels by his son Maurice of Nassau, who was _even worse_ from the standpoint of the Spanish trying to reconquer the Netherlands. Maurice of Nassau is universally considered one of the greatest military commanders of the 17th century — and after his death he was succeeded by his half-brother Fredrik Hendrik, who was _also_ one of the great leaders in Dutch history.
I could go on — and on, and on — but the simple fact is that assassination attempts usually fail and even when they do succeed the end result is usually far different and worse than what the perpetrators planned for. It’s the sort of “strategy” that mostly appeals to armchair strategists.
The attempted killing of Wallenstein at the battle of the Alte Veste at the end of _1632_ is a different kettle of fish altogether. The use of snipers on battlefields has a long and often successful history, and their usual target (if they can spot them) are enemy commanders. The purpose of sniping, however, is narrowly tactical — screw up the enemy on the battlefield — rather than some sort of grandiose pseudo-strategy.
As for using Julie at Linz to attempt to kill Murad… This would only work if Murad and all his subordinates were idiots. The fact that the Americans have at least one marksmen who can kill at extraordinarily long range is widely known. If they see the big dirigible approaching, all Murad has to do is climb off the observation tower and take shelter. Duh.
More Thoughts on (Fictional) Assassination
Note: This post is from February 2008. 1635 The Dreeson Incident was not published until December 2008.
28 February 2008 04:11
Just to reiterate what I’ve said many times before:
1) I never said assassinations wouldn’t happen in the 1632 series. Of course they will.
2) All I said was that the historical record is pretty unequivocal:
— The majority of assassinations FAIL, to begin with. Don’t ever forget that — as the authors of the “empirical study” promptly did when they concluded that the majority of successful assassinations of autocrats have a “tendency” to produce democratic results. Jesus H. Christ. If that’s the best they can come up with…
Most assassinations FAIL, folks. Don’t ever forget that. It’s Rule Number One — and Rule Number Two is that you can bet your sweet patootie that the backlash from a failed assassination attempt is very definitely not going to be what the would-be assassins intended.
Rule Number Three is that even successful assassination attempts rarely produce anything close to the historical end result the assassins were aiming for. Not more than 10% — and that’s being generous.
Add all three rules together, and what you wind up with is some pretty stark mathematics when it comes to assessing how useful assassination is as a political tactic. Start with a failure rate that is at least 60%. Then, of the 40% remaining, figure that not more than 10% of those _successful_ assassination attempts is going to produce anything close to the results you were shooting for.
So, using assassination as a tactic has less than a 5% success rate — and most of the 95% failures are pretty disastrous.
That’s why I have repeated stated that my heroes will not use assassination as a political tactic. That’s because they have an IQ significantly higher than that of carrots and think tank scholars.
Finally, I will repeat the distinction I’ve made many times before between assassination as a political tactic and the deliberate targeting of enemy leaders in battlefield situations. I don’t consider the latter to be “assassination” because there is no attempt here to carry out a so-called “surgical strike” on the historical process. It’s simply a form of sniping, part of the generalized violence in any battlefield. The sniper has no end goal other than simply killing the enemy leader. The assumption here is that the almost inevitable effect of confusing the enemy’s leadership during a battle by taking out as many of the enemy leaders as possible is worth doing in and of itself. Even if — which often happens — you wind up down the road a ways with a more capable enemy leader. Doesn’t matter. Sniping is a _battlefield_ tactic, with immediate and limited goals. It’s not a pretentious so-called strategic design which some egghead in a think tank swears will have XYZ effects if carried out properly.
Eric
