Conspiracy Theory: Assassinations
// April 25th, 2009 // No Comments » // Conspiracy Theories
Death has been used as an extreme solution to a spectrum of problems from the very start of human history. Genesis, the first book of the bible rapidly followed the creation of the world and the expulsion if Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden with its first murder - assassination of Abel by his brother Cain.
From that biblical point onwards, and for the rest of recorded time, murder for material, religious, or political gain has been the option to be used when all others failed, or proved themselves too difficult or inconvenient.
Mercifully, murder, most of the time, has always been viewed as a somewhat radical means to an end; not something that is undertaken
Joseph Stalin
THE NATURAL ORDER
For many centuries, assassination was primarily the sport of kings. The slaying of a king, queen, or any hereditary nobleman was not only the death of an individual but it could also change lineage and threaten dynasties.
In a political system where power was handed down for father to eldest son or daughter, and marriages were arranged to cement alliances, reinforce treaties, or combine rival families, assassination was nothing more than the other side of the same coin. The murder of the royal father, or the son and heir, changed the inherited order and could arrange the affiliations of nations.
England’s Henry VIII took eight wives, and either divorced or executed them because not one was able to bear him a son. Richard III fought and won the first phase of the Wars of the Roses for the House of York, but found himself a distant sixth in the line for the crown. His only way to gain ultimate power was to murder or have murdered all who stood in his way until he finally ascended the throne, and it would take another war to bring him down.
THE POLITICAL ORDER
When dramatic elections replaced the rule of hereditary monarchs, the basics of assassination did not cease to be a political last resort, but the reasons for the kill profoundly changed. The coming of the ballot box meant that death ceased to be the only way to remove an unpopular or unstable ruler. Prime ministers and presidents could, sooner or later, be voted out of office, and no son or daughter would automatically rule in his or her place.
Although some would claim that royal conspiracies and assassinations continue today, citing the conspiracy allegations that have surrounded the 1997 deaths of Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul in the place de l’Alma tunnel in Paris, and how they might have been the work of the British secret intelligence service MI6 with the collusion of French officials.
Diana, having divorced Prince Charles, was already an inconvenient woman, and the thought that she might further embarrass the House of Windsor by marrying/being pregnant by Fayed was - the the opinion of Prince Phillip, the prime suspect in most conspiracy theories - too unthinkable for her to be allowed to live.
For the most part, though, assassination became the expedient tool to those in a democracy who were in too much of a hurry to wait for an election, and of any group who distrusted the will of the people and wanted to circumvent the process and impose a minority agenda.
A prime, 20th-century example of such a negation of democracy happened in Chile in 1973, when Chilean president Salvador Allende appeared to be leading his country too swiftly in the direction of socialism for the tastes of some of his generals, and also those of the Nixon administration and the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States.
Unwilling to wait for an election, or to take the chance that the Chilean people might not vote Allende out of office, a place coup was implemented. Allende died as thanks and infantry stormed the presidential palace, and Chile was subsequently ruled by a military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet for almost two full decades. This was a repressive dictatorship that tortured and “disappeared” thousands of its citizens.
THE JFK LABYRINTH
In Chile in 1973, the objective of the assassination was clear for all to see. The only question has ever been about the degree of US involvement in the coup d’etat that removed Allende.
JFK
When, however, the conspiracy of assassins is more convert and shadowy, even their ultimate goals remain a matter for speculation. This was certainly the case in the death of President John F. Kennedy. The truth has been so well concealed and the facts have becomes a blurred in what has to be the most famous assassination of the 20th century, almost every part of it remains open to question.
All we know for sure is that the president of the United States was shot dead, a little after noon on a sunny November day, while riding in a motorcade in an open-topped limousine through the city of Dallas, Texas.
As an angry and seemingly insoluble debate continues to rage as to whether Kennedy was slain by Lee Harvey Oswald, the supposed lone gunman, or by the Mafia, or by a shadowy power elite of his political enemies and their allies in the intelligence community, we are left totally unable to see the purpose of his death, because we have no way of really knowing what might have been had Kennedy lived.
Some theorists claim that the Kennedy administration, had it continued, would have avoid the US’s costly 12-year involvement in the Vietnam war. But we cannot be sure, and indeed, we may never know, as the hope that one or more of JFK’s killers will finally make a deathbed confession grows fainter with the passage of time.
In his 1991 movie JFK, director Oliver Stone has one of his characters state a simple rule at least tentatively deciding who or what was behind a political assassination.
Ask the question “who benefits?” Like or dislike Stone and his work, and agree or disagree with his politics, the usefulness of the question cannot be disputed. Once the question “who benefits?” has been answered, one at least has a working hypothesis of the “why” of an assassination if maybe not the full complete “wherefore.”
History records that Philip II of Macedonia was stabbed to death by his lover Pausanias, at a lavish farewell feast be leading combines Greek armies on an invasion of Persia. Not unlike Lee Harvey Oswald, Pausanias was immediately killed before he could reveal the motive behind his crime.
It might have been a lovers’ quarrel, but history, invoking Stone’s simple test, has always blamed the murder on Philip’s son Alexander. With his father dead, it was Alexander, later known as Alexander the Great who led the Greeks into Persia, brought down the Persian empire, and went onto conquer the known world, while Philip remained little more than a footnote in history.
WHO BENEFITS?
The only problem with the principle of “who benefits?” is that, in some cases, the concept of “benefit” may only really exist in the mind of the assassin or the conspiracy behind his actions. When a tubercular student called Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, in June 1914, it has always been assumed that he was protesting at the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Serbia.
If this was the case, the long-term results were a long way from anything Princip may have intended. His executive action touched off a chain of events that repidly involved Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the United States, plus numerous far-flung colonies, and sparked off the bloody carnage of World War I, causing the deaths of tens of millions, and such peripheral upheavals as the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. “Benefit” may also be an abstract concept like revenge, as it would appear to be in the case of the assassination of US president Abraham Lincoln.
Although some more material reasons have been advanced by Lincoln conspiracy theorists, the weight of evidence would appear to indicate that John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators were seeking revenge for the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War by the Lincoln-led Union.
Wilkes and the other plotters may have hoped that the slaying of Lincoln would inspire the exhausted South to carry out a desperate and spontaneous uprising, and a fresh round of hostilities, but the real outcome was a fast death for Booth, the slightly slower trial and execution of his associates, and far harsher treatment of the Southern states during the period know as Reconstruction. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones, assassins don’t always get what they want.
