When World Leaders Suffer a Violent Death

Two days ago comedienne Kathy Griffin released photos in which she was holding up a mock-up of a bloody head resembling that of President Donald Trump. Following a general uproar, Griffin then apologized for the photos, which had been taken by provocative celebrity photographer Tyler Shields.

“I went too far,” Griffin posted in an Instagram video. “I beg for your forgiveness.”

Kathy Griffin can be excused for going too far.

Half the world and most of America would like to see Trump’s head on a platter, a la Judith and the head of Holofernes, an invading Assyrian general of Nebuchadnezzar who was dispatched to take vengeance on the nations of the west that had withheld their assistance to his reign. In the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, Holofernes was about to destroy Judith’s home in the ancient city of Bethulia. Renaissance artists including Donatello and Artemisia Gentileschi have famously depicted the gruesome decapitation by Judith of the head of Holofernes in sculpture and paintings.

In spite of Griffin’s apology, two days ago CNN fired Griffin, who will hence not be celebrating New Year’s Eve with Anderson Cooper next year at Times Square, an entertainment gig she has enjoyed for many years.

The same day that Griffin released her photos, Washington, DC police arrested a man with an AR-15 assault rifle, a 40-caliber handgun, and ninety rounds of ammunition in front of Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital. The man who was arrested, one Bryan Moles of Edinboro, Pennsylvania, was charged with carrying a pistol without a license and possession of unregistered ammunition.

The arrest followed a tip from a person who warned authorities in Pennsylvania that Moles intended to kill the President when he arrived in DC, that he “wanted to be like Timothy McVeigh,” who murdered 168 people including a number of babies and toddlers in Oklahoma City in 1995 with a huge terrorist truck bomb at the Murrah Federal Building.

Why are these two incidents not a surprise?

Donald J. Trump has conducted his life and now his presidency with threats, swagger, bullying, lies, innuendoes, arm-twisting, manipulation, and very likely, a variety of illegal acts. His conduct to date as President resembles the careers of famous despots through the ages whose tyrannical actions eventually led to their violent deaths.

Even before Trump took office, a mere two days after his election on November 9, 2016, assassination threats against him were flooding Twitter—Trump’s chosen method of communication with his electoral base. A simple search reveals hundreds of calls to “gun down” the next leader of the free world.

One user wrote that the “only” remaining question after the historic and polarizing election was who will “assassinate” Trump. Some users even cited the inauguration date of January 20, 2017 as a deadline for the assassination.

Indiana police were powerless to prevent a hanging of Trump in effigy by an Army veteran in the Fort Wayne area—just after Trump’s swearing in as President—in a lawn display showing Trump hanging by a noose and holding the Soviet flag. A banner proclaimed that, “Trump is a disgrace to America & makes me ashamed I ever served.”

“Kill Trump” graffiti appeared in Oakland, escalating all over the country in following days, weeks, and months by actual violence and threats of violence against women, minorities, the LGBT community, welfare recipients, the disabled, religious groups including Muslims and Jews, and perceived immigrants—violence and threats that clearly emanated from Trump supporters and the new normal Trump milieu. That atmosphere of violence has repeatedly threatened since the election to spin out of control.

A look into history reminds us of assassinations or attempted assassinations of leaders who were both accomplished and exceptional or despotic and murderous. The motives for killing a prominent person vary widely.

For example, among American Presidents, there have been four successful assassinations:

— Abraham Lincoln, shot to death by Confederate sympathizer actor John Wilkes Booth in 1865 at the end of the American Civil War;

— James Garfield, shot to death by Charles J. Guiteau, a rejected federal job applicant, in 1881 at a Washington, DC railroad station months after Garfield was sworn in;

— William McKinley, shot to death on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition at the Temple of Music in Buffalo, New York in 1901 by anarchist millworker Leon Czolgosz; and

— John F. Kennedy, gunned down by ex-marine Lee Harvey Oswald during a motorcade in Dallas, fewer than three years into Kennedy’s term of office in 1963.

Other eminent American politicians, civil rights leaders, and artists who were murdered because of their beliefs in an especially short violent period included:

— Medgar Evers, civil rights activist who was shot to death in 1963 by Mississippi white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith;

— Malcolm X, black Muslim minister and human rights activist who was shot to death in 1965 by a group of opposing black power activists;

— Martin Luther King, Jr., internationally known minister, civil rights leader, and Nobel Peace Prize winner who was shot to death in 1968 in Memphis by racist James Earl Ray;

— Senator and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy who was shot to death two months later in 1968 by Palestinian-born Sirhan Sirhan because the senator had supported Israel in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967;

— George Moscone, mayor of San Francisco, and Harvey Milk, gay San Francisco Supervisor and activist, shot to death at San Francisco City Hall in 1978 by homophobic former San Francisco Supervisor and opponent Dan White; and

— John Lennon, British singer, musician, and founding member of The Beatles, shot to death in 1980 in front of his New York City residence by a mentally unbalanced fan Mark David Chapman.

Previous to and following that uncertain period, there were attempted assassinations of the following influential American politicians:

— Former Governor and Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana, a populist and would-be Presidential contender who founded the national Share Our Wealth clubs, and was shot to death in 1935 at the state capital in Baton Rouge by Carl Weiss, son-in-law of a political opponent;

— Presidential candidate Governor George Wallace of Alabama who was shot by young Arthur Bremer in 1972, confining Wallace to a wheelchair for the rest of his life;

— President Gerald Ford, attacked twice, the first time in early September 1975 by Manson family cult member Lynette Fromme in Sacramento, whose efforts to shoot Ford were thwarted by a Secret Service agent, the second a few weeks later by extremist housewife Sarah Jane Moore in San Francisco, who fired twice at Ford but missed; and

— President Ronald Reagan, shot in 1981 only two months after being sworn in and very nearly killed by John Hinckley, Jr., who served a prison term of thirty-five years before being released in 2016.

Looking back more than two millennia, we acknowledge assassinations of various high officials and heads of state for a multiplicity of reasons, some no doubt justified and others validated only in the minds of the assassins. The most significant include the following:

— Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, stabbed to death in 44 b.c. outside the Roman Senate by multiple assassins;

— Caligula (Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus), known for his cruelty, sadism, extravagance, and sexual perversity, assassinated in 41 a.d. by a conspiracy headed by the Pretorian Guard in order to restore the Roman Republic, which failed;

— French King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette, executed by guillotine in the Place de la Revolution in Paris in 1793 after being convicted of conspiracy and high treason during the French Revolution;

— Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, shot and killed in 1914 by Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip, triggering the First World War;

— Russian Tsar Nicholas Romanov II, the Tsarina Alexandra, their four daughters and only son, shot, bayoneted, and clubbed to death in 1918 at Yekaturinburg by Bolchevik troops following the Russian Revolution and the abolition of the Russian monarchy;

— Pancho Villa, retired Mexican revolutionary general, shot to death in 1923 with four of his entourage en route to pick up a gold consignment by a conspiracy of men allied with politicians who opposed Villa’s proposed re-entry into Mexican politics;

— Leon Trotsky, exiled Marxist revolutionary and Soviet politician killed with an ice-axe in 1940 at Coyoacán, Mexico by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish communist and probable agent of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin;

— Italian dictator “Il Duce” Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, shot and killed by Italian partisans in 1945 as they tried to flee to Switzerland, whereafter their bodies were hung upside down in Milan and displayed publicly for revilement by the masses;

— Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi, preeminent leader of the Indian independence movement in British-ruled India, shot to death at point blank range in 1948 by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse;

— King Abdullah I of Jordan, grandfather of King Hussein, shot to death in 1951 while attending prayers by Mustapha Ashu, a 21-year-old Palestinian tailor’s apprentice; four conspirators who were part of a plot to oppose Jordanian/Lebanese peace talks with Israel were later executed;

— Patrice Lumumba, former Prime Minister of the Congo, executed in 1961 by firing squad a year after he had been deposed in an army mutiny;

— Salvador Allende, Socialist President of Chile, either shot or forced to commit suicide by the military during a military coup in 1973;

— Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Prime Minister and President of Pakistan, hanged in 1979 by the state following a highly questionable trial and appeal for purportedly authorizing the murder of a political opponent;

— Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, shot to death in 1981 during a victory parade in Cairo by Lt. Khalid Islambouli, member of an Egyptian Islamic Jihad conspiracy, along with eleven others;

— Indira Gandhi, Indian Prime Minister, shot to death in 1984 by two of her bodyguards following the Indian Army’s assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar which heavily damaged the Sikh temple;

— Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, despised by their countrymen and executed by firing squad in 1989 against a prison wall after a short imprisonment and a brief show trial or revolutionary coup d’état;

— Samuel Doe, President of Liberia, tortured to death in 1990 in Monrovia by a guerilla war faction (Doe had murdered his predecessor President William R. Tolbert, Jr. ten years earlier);

— Indira Gandhi’s son Rajiv Gandhi, successor Indian Prime Minister killed in a bomb attack in 1991 by Sri Lanka Tamil Tiger militants and their Indian allies, which also killed sixteen others;

— Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, shot to death by Israeli ultranationalist Yigal Amir at the end of a 1995 rally in Tel Aviv in support of the Oslo Accords;

— Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, executed by hanging in 2006 after being captured and convicted of crimes against humanity by the Iraqi Special Tribunal for the murder of 148 Iraqi Shi’ites in the town of Dujail in 1982, in retaliation for an assassination attempt against him during a reign of terror that stretched from 1979 to 2003, following the American-led invasion of Iraq;

— Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan and head of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, killed by shooting and bombing in 2007 during a re-election campaign in Rawalpindi during which twenty-four other people were killed; a variety of governmental failures and purported ties to terrorist groups have been asserted as causes of this perplexing assassination; and

— Muammar Gaddafi, deposed Prime Minister of Libya and de facto head of state, wounded and captured in 2011 while hiding in a culvert, and then killed by soldiers after a battle at Sirte, Libya.

The above is a partial list of both exemplary fallen leaders and artists and of powerful, skillful manipulators of political and military power for their own ends through history.

Whether Donald Trump will ever join this list of assassinated leaders is a topic frowned on by the Secret Service no doubt because in Trump’s America, suggestions of violence too often lead to actual acts of violence.

For a more comprehensive list of noteworthy assassinated individuals, see http://www.thefamouspeople.com/assassinated.php and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinations.