Mass psychosis, Covid, and the shooting of Donald Trump

But was Disraeli actually wrong? After all, Franz Ferdinand’s death was merely a pretext for war, rather than the cause of the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. If the archduke had survived Gavrilo Princip’s attack, historians have argued that war might have been delayed but not prevented.

Secret service marksmen (Image: free)

So, the assassination merely triggered the beginning of fighting within a contest that had been organised, planned and formalised, with the various participants already having chosen sides, irrespective of what happened in Sarajevo. In other words, even accepting that the assassination was the “spark”, war was already coming.

History abounds with examples such as this, which makes it difficult to prove or disprove Disraeli’s assertion which, for me, has become one of those conundrums that can keep you awake at night. And surely Lincoln would have made less of a mess of post-civil war reconstruction than the inadequate Andrew Johnson, who was eventually impeached in 1868?

I’ve thought about this question more recently because of the assassination attempts on the lives of former President Donald Trump in July in Pennsylvania and Robert Fico - the Prime Minister of Slovakia, who was shot five times on May 15, in what has been described as “an attack on democracy”. Do these attempts on these lives of politicians suggest something broader about Western culture and the nature of political debate in the mid 2020s? Will they change history?

An answer to this question seems easier to offer than trying to solve the conundrum at the heart of Disraeli’s observation. The attempts on Trump and Fico’s lives were indeed an attack on democracy and also suggests how we are increasingly choosing to resolve issues in contemporary culture by shouting at, rather than talking with one another and, in doing so, through discussion, finding a way of resolving problems.

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That resolution might not be perfect - in other words, it might not suit one or other group’s interests entirely, but it does offer a consensus which unites the various parties at that time. That’s the reality of democratic elections - your “side” might not win, but you have enough faith in the process that you accept the result and try and get your side elected next time – as we did in the UK on July 4.

That rather rosy and romantic view of democracy, which I accept has genuine problems that need to be resolved, doesn’t seem to fit with a zeitgeist that prioritises conspiracy theory above evidence, opinion over fact, and personal identity as a basis for judging the world and where, as a result, we seem to have slowly become gripped by a form of mass psychosis.

In other words, where we have lost touch with reality. That psychosis has been prompted by a number of different emotional fears and anxieties, most of which predated but were exacerbated by the COVID19 pandemic and which would include global warming and, in the immediate European context, the threat posed by Russia and therefore anxieties about nuclear Armageddon - anxieties which, of course, President Putin is only too happy to exploit.

In relation to Russia, sides also seem to have already been chosen and I am often left wondering to what extent the 2020s are similar to what we now know about the 1920s and 1930s. We are expecting war and not quite certain if we could avoid it by adopting a policy of appeasement or challenge and, if we choose the latter course of action, what form that challenging should take and how far it should go.

Ironically, the history of political assassinations can help us here. There have been periods in world history when assassination was common but also other times when it all but disappeared. Looking at those trends tell us something about how to resolve problems without resorting to violence and, alternatively, what circumstances can all too easily lead to war.

The aftermath of the shooting (Image: free)

There were, for example, remarkable increases in the frequency of assassination both in early modern Europe and in the 19th century - both of which seem to have been related to sectarian conflict and the public visibility of those who were targeted, while the post 1950 period saw few assassinations, even if some were high profile. In 1975 the USA even introduced a ban on federal employees assassinating people!

Even if we existed in a period of “Cold War”, there were formal rules of engagement which wanted, at least publicly, to respect international law. This period of relative absence of assassination would seem to be over and even in the USA it’s impossible to ignore the invasion of the US Capitol in January 2021, when several prominent Democrats and even Vice President Mike Pence were threatened with hanging or being shot by protestors.

A few years previously we had the Russian state kill, or attempt to assassinate British citizens in Salisbury in 2018. Politics has become polarised, angry and intolerant and sadly history tells us that these are exactly the conditions that nurture political assassination.

So, does the assassination of a political opponent really help to change history? I’d like to believe Disraeli that it does not, if only because that might discourage someone from using a gun and instead turn to the ballot box, although the noisy and bigoted shouting that now seems to characterise public discourse doesn’t offer much hope for the future.