07/20/2024
[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]
Shall I always remember where I was and what I was doing when I got the news about the Trump assassination attempt last Saturday? Probably not; I can’t remember my kids’ names.
For the record, though, I was at the desk in my study browsing X. So I got the news the same way as, I am told, all the Millennials and Gen Z-ers get their news nowadays: from social media.
Mrs. Derbyshire gets most of her news from WeChat, a Chinese-language social medium. Over breakfast Sunday — which is to say, twelve hours or so after the event — she was showing me WeChat clips of T-shirts printed with the Vucci photograph that Chinese vendors were already online with, 68 renminbi per item, which is a bit short of ten dollars.
Buy now! https://t.co/reoKLSwszF
— John Derbyshire (@DissidentRight) July 14, 2024
There have of course been all kinds of questions and criticisms after the event.
DEI seems to have been a factor, the case there supported by news photographs of plump female Secret Service agents with confused expressions trying unsuccessfully to holster their sidearms.
To put it in Trumpian terms: The Secret Service were not sending their best.
There was a serious screwup here by the feds. Someone should take responsibility.
But then, if federal bureaucrats ever took responsibility for their screwups, there would be a lot of empty office space in Washington, D.C.
Political assassinations are rare, for which we should give thanks. They are sufficiently rare that in between them, we hardly ever think about them.
They’re not all that rare, though. July 8th, 2022 — two years almost to the day before this attempt on Trump — Japanese politician Shinzo Abe was giving a speech in public when a lunatic shot him dead with a home-made handgun [Shinzo Abe: Japan ex-leader assassinated while giving speech, BBC, July 8, 2022].
Abe was in the first rank of Japanese politicians, having served nine years as Prime Minister before stepping down at age 67 with health problems.
And if we are talking about close anniversaries, I hope it won’t be considered in bad taste for me — a lukewarm Trump voter, let me affirm, and a longstanding opponent of anyone comparing anyone to Adolf Hitler — to note that the Stauffenberg Plot to assassinate Hitler occurred on July 20, 1944 — eighty years less one week before last Saturday’s event.
Political history is actually full of assassinations, both failed and successful. Julius Caesar was by no means the first victim.
Nearly two hundred years prior to Caesar getting his ticket punched, China was coming to the end of the historical period called Warring States, an era of many small kingdoms struggling against each other. One of those states, the state of Qín, had conquered most of the others.
The ruler of one of the so-far-unconquered states, the northeastern state of Yan, sent a young knight named Jing Ke to assassinate the King of Qín.
The assassination failed, Qín conquered Yan and then all the other states, and six years after the assassination attempt against him the King of Qín declared himself First Emperor.
And that, boys and girls, is why his empire is today named “China.”
For a consolation prize, that young knight Jing Ke, the failed assassin, became a folk hero. If you want to show off to a Mandarin-speaking acquaintance, when last Saturday’s attempt on Trump comes up in conversation just murmur “Jing Ke cì Qín” (荊 軻 刺 秦).
And of course it’s not just ancient Rome and China. “When you strike at the King, you must kill him,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and probably every civilization that’s ever existed has some equivalent nugget of wisdom.
(Donald Trump himself, by the way, once deployed that Emerson quote himself on Twitter in regard to his own impeachment, although he seems to have got the quote secondhand from the New York Times, not from reading Emerson [Trump Quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson (And By Extension Paraphrases Omar from The Wire) by Jordan Hoffman, Vanity Fair, February 15, 2020].)
“Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to foresee the lesson of the Senate Impeachment Trial of President Trump. ‘When you strike at the King, Emerson famously said, “you must kill him.’ Mr. Trump’s foes struck at him but did not take him down. A triumphant Mr.Trump emerges from the … ..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2020
Yes, history’s full of assassinations and attempted assassinations. For a really full account I refer you to my favorite history buff Ed West, posting on his substack account July 18th: Brushes with death: History’s most notorious failed assassinations.
Teddy Roosevelt, Lenin, FDR, Charles de Gaulle, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, … Ed covers the whole field. I didn’t know until reading his piece that Queen Victoria survived eight assassination attempts.
30 May 1842. John Francis fired a gun shot at Queen Victoria as she was travelling in a horse-drawn carriage with Prince Albert on Constitution Hill, London. He missed from close range. His attempt was one of eight failed assassination attempts during her long reign. pic.twitter.com/2IAuNhQGCd
— Prof. Frank McDonough (@FXMC1957) May 30, 2021
A thing I sometimes ponder is assassination tech. This attempt on Trump by firing at him with a rifle, is kind of… old school. Are there somewhere would-be political assassins getting themselves technologically up to date with, for example, drones?
There surely are. In fact Nicolás Maduro, President-for-Life of Venezuela, claims that he was attacked six years ago by drones carrying explosives [Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro survives apparent assassination attempt, Guardian, August 5, 2018].
His claim has been disputed but it’s plausible. And true or false, tech advances fast in these areas.
Now, six years later, with near infallible facial recognition to guide them, one of those wee beasties could pick out the target victim in a crowd, whizz over there and blow his head off. With remote control, it could be hard to identify the drone operator.
I’m sorry to say it — I mean, I don’t wish death on anyone — but I’d bet a modest sum of money that there’s a successful political assassination by drone somewhere before January 2030.
I have a very tenuous connection to one political assassination attempt.
This one occurred nearly 200 years ago, in 1812. British politics at the time was dominated in foreign affairs by the wars against Napoleon and the differences with the USA that led to the 1812 War; in domestic matters, by the social and economic stresses of the early Industrial Revolution and the descent into madness of King George the Third.
The Prime Minister in early 1812 was a chap named Spencer Perceval.
In May of that year Perceval was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons by a disgruntled businessman, name of John Bellingham.
ON THIS DAY in 1812 …
Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated in the only event of this kind to have occurred in British history
Are you ready for a mega thread?
— Worcester Club (@Worcester_Club) May 11, 2023
Spencer Perceval died on the spot after uttering the last words, “I am murdered. I am murdered.” He was the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated, although Margaret Thatcher had a narrow escape in 1984.
So what’s the personal connection to your genial host? Well, each British Prime Minister sits in the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for some “constituency“ (= district in American). Spencer Perceval’s constituency was Northampton, the small provincial town where, a century and a half later, I was born and grew up.
Hey, I told you it was very tenuous.
The murder of Spencer Perceval by John Bellingham has an odd little footnote.
In the late 20th century there was a Member of Parliament named Henry Bellingham, of the same extended family as John, although whether a direct descendant or not isn’t clear.
Like Spencer Perceval, Henry Bellingham belonged to the Conservative Party — the “Tories.” He was first elected to Parliament in 1983, to a safe Tory seat — not Northampton: from the mid-20th century on we were a safe Labour seat.
But then, in the Labour Party landslide of 1997, Henry Bellingham lost his seat. Tony Blair’s Labour Party won it, much helped by the fact that a third party, a forerunner of Nigel Farage’s U.K. Independence Party, took a lot of votes away from the Tories.
Who was the leader of that third party? It was a certain Roger Percival, a descendant of Spencer Perceval (who, by the way, had 13 children).
So Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was murdered in 1812 by John Bellingham. Then, 185 years later, a descendant of Perceval caused a descendant of Bellingham to lose his seat in Parliament [The MP whose ancestor killed the prime minister, by Justin Parkinson, BBC, November 2009].
What goes around comes around.
Although sometimes it takes a while.
John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
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