Assassination

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that political assassination, which has caused innumberable victims throughout history, is very hard to define because there are many forms of political violence. The author points out that the present postmodernist era of civilization is socially characterized by anomie, which causes instability and lack of social order, which in turn result in dangerous acts of political violence. The paper concludes that political assassinations usually cease when two cultures or two different ideological groups find a way to tolerate each other and, instead of fighting, establish common external rules by which to play the game.

From the Paper:

"The moral perspective on political murder is intrinsically related to its political dimension. As assassination contravenes to the moral principles and ideals as set by religion, it also contravenes to the principles of democracy, which, as form of government, seems the closest to the religious moral order. Democracy is at present the universally accepted type of rule, although it still has many variants according to the country or region where it develops. It can be said that the beginnings of American democracy were the first steps towards the establishment of the Western civilization."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. 1997. Political Assassination Events as a Cross- Cultural form of Alternative Justice.International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Vol.38: 25-30.
• Feliks, Gross. 1974. The Revolutionary Party. Essays in the Sociology of Politics. Westport: Greenwood Press.
• Ford, Franklin L. 1985. Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Harlow, Barbara. 1996. After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing. London: Verso.
• Havens, Murray Clark, Carl Leiden and Karl M. Schmitt. 1970. The Politics of Assassination. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall

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