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Tyrannicide or tyrannomachia is the killing or assassination of a tyrant or unjust ruler, purportedly for the common good, and usually by one of the tyrant's subjects. Tyrannicide was legally permitted and encouraged in Classical Greece. Often, the term "tyrant" was a justification for political murders by rivals, but in some exceptional cases students of Platonic philosophy risked their lives against tyrants. The killing of Clearchus of Heraclea in 353 BC by a cohort led by his own court philosopher is considered a sincere tyrannicide. A person who carries out a tyrannicide is also called a "tyrannicide".

The term originally denoted the action of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who are often called the Tyrannicides, in killing Hipparchus of Athens in 514 BC. In modern terms, carrying out a tyrannicide, as in taking life of another person, is a criminal act, and lawbreakers are liable to police arrest and trial by a court.

Political theory

Tyrannicide can also be a political theory and, as an allegedly justified form of the crime of murder, a dilemmatic case in the philosophy of law, and as such dates from antiquity. Plato describes a violent tyrant as the opposite of a good and "true king" in the Statesman, and while Aristotle in the Politics sees it as opposed to all other beneficial forms of government, he also described tyrannicide mainly as an act by those wishing to gain personally from the tyrant's death, while those who act without hope of personal gain or to make a name for themselves are rare.

Support for tyrannicide can be found in Cicero's De Officiis, Seneca's Hercules Furens, and Plutarch's Lives. Cicero argued that tyrannicide could be a moral duty in certain circumstances to protect the state. Seneca, through his plays, explored the idea of resisting tyranny. Plutarch, in his biographical work, presented tyrannicide as a defense of liberty and justice.

Various Christian philosophers and theologians also wrote about tyrannicide. In late antiquity, they debated whether the Bible justified tyrannicide. Passages such as the Books of the Maccabees, Daniel 7:27, and Acts 5:29 seemed to justify the practice while others such as Romans 13, Exodus 22:27–28, Proverbs 8:15, and 1 Peter 2:13–18 seemed to condemn it. Theologians were also inspired by rumors of Emperor Julian the Apostate, the final pagan Roman Emperor, being killed by a Christian.

During the Middle Ages, most theologians were influenced on the subject by Augustine of Hippo's The City of God, which said that Christians should obey secular authority. The scholastic philosopher John of Salisbury was the first medieval Christian scholar to defend tyrannicide, under specific conditions, in the Policraticus, circa 1159. His theory was derived from his idea of the state as a political organism in which all the members cooperate actively in the realization of the common utility and justice. He held that when the ruler of this body politic behaves tyrannically, failing to perform his characteristic responsibilities, the other limbs and organs are bound by their duty to the public welfare and God to correct and, ultimately, to slay the tyrant.

In Thomas Aquinas's commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Aquinas gave a defense not only of disobedience to an unjust authority, using as an example Christian martyrs in the Roman Empire, but also of "one who liberates his country by killing a tyrant." In 1408, the theologian Jean Petit used biblical examples to justify tyrannicide following the murder of Louis I, Duke of Orleans by Petit's patron John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. Petit's thesis was extensively discussed and eventually anathematized by the church at the Council of Constance.

A Shone Treatise of Politike Power, written by John Ponet in 1556, argued that the people are custodians of natural and divine law, and that if governors and kings violated their trust, then they forfeited their power, whether they relinquished their positions voluntarily or whether they had to be removed forcefully. The Monarchomachs in particular developed a theory of tyrannicide, with Juan de Mariana describing their views in the 1598 work De rege et regis institutione, in which he wrote, "oth the philosophers and theologians agree, that the prince who seizes the state with force and arms, and with no legal right, no public, civic approval, may be killed by anyone and deprived of his life..." The Jesuistic casuistry developed a similar theory, criticized by Blaise Pascal in the Provincial Letters. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates by John Milton in 1649 also described the history of tyrannicide, and a defense of it when appropriate.

Abraham Lincoln believed that assassinating a leader is morally justified when a people has suffered under a tyrant for an extended period of time and has exhausted all legal and peaceful means of ouster. He saw tyrannicide as a necessary last resort to protect liberty and justice. Lincoln's views, shaped by the American Civil War, reflect the ethical debate on violent resistance against tyranny, emphasizing that removing a despot can be a moral imperative to restore democratic governance and human rights.

Aleister Crowley, in the preface to The Book of the Law and in his 1941 broadside "Liber OZ", emphasized the right to rebel against tyranny. He argued for the individual's right to live by their own will and resist those who would thwart this right. During World War II, Crowley's writings highlighted the need to oppose totalitarian regimes to protect individual freedoms. His philosophy, called Thelema, asserts that individuals have inherent rights, including self-defense and personal freedom, even against oppressive rulers.

Cambridge's David George has argued that terrorism is a form of tyranny of which tyrannicide is a negation. He posits that tyrannicide serves as a countermeasure to terrorism, which uses fear and violence to subjugate populations. In George's view, the assassination of tyrants can be an act of liberation, dismantling oppressive structures and restoring autonomy. This situates tyrannicide within a broader discourse on the ethics of political violence, suggesting it aims to eliminate tyranny and restore justice.

History

Throughout history, many leaders have died under the pretext of tyrannicide. Hipparchus, one of the last Greek leaders to use the title of "tyrant", was assassinated in 514 BC by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the original tyrannicides. Since then "tyrant" has been a pejorative term, lacking objective criteria. Many rulers and heads of state have been considered tyrannical by their enemies but not by their supporters. For example, when John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865, he wrote that he considered Lincoln a tyrant while comparing himself to Marcus Junius Brutus, who stabbed the Roman dictator Julius Caesar in 44 BC. Booth famously shouted "Sic semper tyrannis!" during the assassination.

Tyrannicides have a poor record of achieving their intended outcome. Caesar's death, for example, failed to bring a return to republican power, and instead led to the Roman Empire, but it galvanized later assassins. Several of Caesar's successors (Roman Emperors) came to their demise by assassinations, including Caligula, who was stabbed in 41 by Cassius Chaerea and other Praetorian Guards, and Domitian, stabbed in 96 by a steward of Flavia Domitilla named Stephanus. Many attempts on Commodus's life in the late 2nd century failed, including the one instigated by his own sister Lucilla, but he ultimately fell victim to his own excess by a successful murderous coup. Other emperors assassinated from within include Claudius, Caracalla, Elagabalus, Marcus Aurelius Marius, and Severus Alexander. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, tyrannicide continued in the Eastern Roman Empire when Emperor Andronikos I Komnenos was tied to a pillar, beaten, and dismembered by a mob in 1185.

Tyrannicide has also been connected to revolution, with many taking place during successful revolutions, and others sparking revolutionary upheavals. In the midst of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre took power as the President of the National Convention, but after leading the Reign of Terror from 1793 to 1794, he was executed by beheading by the National Convention. Russian Tsar Nicholas II was executed by the Bolsheviks as an enemy of the people in 1918, following the 1917 October Revolution. The Romanian Revolution, one of the Revolutions of 1989, enabled a group of defected Romanian People's Army soldiers to capture Nicolae Ceauşescu, the country's communist leader, and to stage a trial after which he was executed by a firing squad of paratroopers Ionel Boeru, Georghin Octavian and Dorin-Marian Cirlan.

Many assassins have been killed in the act, such as Rigoberto López Pérez, who shot Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García in 1956. Claus von Stauffenberg tried to kill Adolf Hitler on 20 July 1944, was sentenced to death by an impromptu court martial and executed a few hours after the attempted murder. Others were prosecuted for the killing: Antonio de la Maza and his conspirators were executed after their shooting of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic in 1961, as was Kim Jaegyu, who shot South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee in 1979. Five of the members of Young Bosnia who were involved with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo were sentenced to death by hanging, while eleven were sentenced to various years in prison, including Gavrilo Princip who fired the fatal shot. Khalid Islambouli was one of three members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad executed for the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the autocratic President of Egypt in 1981. Both Hipparchus's assassins were themselves killed, Harmodius on the spot and Aristogeiton after being tortured, and the major conspirators in the plot to kill Caesar were likewise killed or forced to commit suicide.

Outright revolt was the context for other tyrannicides and allowed individual killers to escape or remain anonymous. During World War II and the Italian resistance movement, Walter Audisio claimed to have led his team of partisans in the abduction and execution by firing squad of Benito Mussolini in 1945. The circumstances remain clouded, though Audisio was later elected to both the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the Italian Senate. In 1990, Samuel Doe, the President of Liberia, was tortured to his death. In 1996, during their takeover of Afghanistan, Taliban soldiers captured Mohammad Najibullah, the President of the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and dragged him to death. Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, was executed in 2006. During the 2011 Libyan civil war, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was killed in the Battle of Sirte, in unclear circumstances.

Literature

Tyrannicide is a popular literary trope. Many works of fiction deal with the struggle of an individual or group of individuals to overthrow and kill an unjust tyrant. Often the tyranny is caused by a usurper to a royal throne, where the conclusion restores the proper heir. Children's literature frequently deals with the subject. Folk tales like The Nutcracker include the act, as do some video games series, like The Legend of Zelda and Star Fox. Examples in Disney animation include The Lion King and Aladdin which both involve the tyrannical takeover of a monarchy and its overhaul. Fantasy works like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Brothers Lionheart, A Song of Ice and Fire and science-fiction series like Star Wars and Doctor Who all deal with the killing of tyrants. Besides Julius Caesar, a number of William Shakespeare's plays deal with the subject, including Hamlet, Macbeth, and Richard III. Friedrich Schiller based the play William Tell and the ballad Die Bürgschaft on existing legends of tyrannicide. The Italian dramatist, poet and philosopher Vittorio Alfieri devoted much of his work to this issue.

See also

• Assassination
• Regicide
• Sic semper tyrannis

References

1. Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de. "Tyrannicide." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Thomas Zemanek. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0001.682. Originally published as "Tyrannicide" in the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 16:785 (Paris, 1765).
2. Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Tyrannicide" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
3. "Tyrannicide". Britannica.
4. ^ Webb, E. Kent (October 18, 1997). "The Athenian Tyrannicides: Icons of a Democratic Society". University of Washington. Archived from the original on 2018-12-25. Retrieved 2008-10-30.
5. Goebel, Julius Ludwig (1915). The recognition policy of the United States. Columbia University. pp. 24–29. Retrieved October 30, 2008.
6. ^ Mohamed, Feisal G. (May 11, 2013). "In Syria and Beyond, the Tyrant as Target". The New York Times. Retrieved May 16, 2013.
7. Aristotle, Politics X
8. ^ Beres, Louis Rene (1990–1991), Assassinating Saddam: A Post-War View from International Law, vol. 19, Denv. J. Int'l L. & Pol'y, p. 613
9. The Routledge history of terrorism. Randall David Law. Abingdon, Oxon. 2015. ISBN 978-0-415-53577-9. OCLC 892804140.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
10. Fine, Jonathan (2010). "Political and Philological Origins of the Term 'Terrorism' from the Ancient Near East to Our Times". Middle Eastern Studies. 46 (2): 271–288. doi:10.1080/00263201003619927. JSTOR 20720662. S2CID 143268246.
11. Voegelin & Von Sivers 1989, pp. 122–123.
12. Nederman, Cary J. (1988), "A Duty to Kill: John of Salisbury's Theory of Tyrannicide", The Review of Politics, 50 (3), Cambridge University Press: 365–389, doi:10.1017/S0034670500036305, S2CID 145277381
13. For Aquinas, "when what is ordered by an authority is opposed to the object for which that authority was constituted ... not only is there no obligation to obey the authority, but one is obliged to disobey it, as did the holy martyrs who suffered death rather than obey the impious commands of tyrants." One may even be "praised and rewarded" for being the "one who liberates his country by killing a tyrant." Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, trans. J.G. Dawson (Oxford, 1959), 44, 2 in O’Donovan, pp. 329–330.
14. C Watner (1986), "Oh, Ye Are For Anarchy!": Consent Theory in the Radical Libertarian Tradition (PDF), Journal of Libertarian Studies
15. Fülöp-Miller, René (1997). Power and Secret of the Jesuits. Kessinger Publishing. pp. 313–318. ISBN 0-7661-0056-1. Retrieved October 30, 2008.
16. Ganns, H. G. "The Jesuits and Tyrannicide," The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XXVII, 1902.
17. Luxon, Thomas H., ed. (March 2008). "Milton: The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates". The Milton Reading Room. Dartmouth College. Retrieved 2008-10-30.
18. Johnson III, Boyd M. (Spring 1992). "Executive Order 12,333: The Permissibility of an American Assassination of a Foreign Leader". Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. Cornell University Law School Research. Retrieved July 27, 2019.
19. White, Ronald C. A. (2009). Lincoln: A Biography. Random House.
20. Dirck, Brian R. (2012). Lincoln and the Constitution. Southern Illinois University Press.
21. Sutin, Lawrence (2000). Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. St. Martin's Press.
22. Pasi, Marco (2014). Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics. Routledge.
23. George, David (1988), "Distinguishing Classical Tyrannicide from Modern Terrorism", The Review of Politics, 50 (3), Cambridge University Press: 390–419, doi:10.1017/S0034670500036317, S2CID 146523905
24. George, David (1995). The Ethics of Political Violence. Cambridge University Press.
25. Coady, C. A. J. (2008). Morality and Political Violence. Cambridge University Press.
26. Law 2009, p. 18.
27. Booth 2000, p. 17.
28. Law 2009, p. 23.
29. ^ Montefiore, Simon Sebag (October 26, 2011). "Dictators Get the Deaths They Deserve". The New York Times. Retrieved October 31, 2011.
30. Law 2009, p. 26.
31. Cassius Dio, Roman History, 71.1, 3; 73.4.4–5.
32. Graubard 1999, pp. 72–73.
33. Borge 1982, p. 54.
34. Diederich 1990, p. 20.
35. "Hearts and Minds; Without Kim Jae-kyu? The Morality of Tyrannicide". Korea Times. July 18, 2000.
36. Ajami, Fouad (September–October 1995). "The Sorrows of Egypt: A Tale of Two Men". Foreign Affairs. Council on Foreign Relations. doi:10.2307/20047301. JSTOR 20047301.
37. "What Price Brutus?". Time Magazine. April 7, 1947. Archived from the original on February 3, 2011. Retrieved October 31, 2011.
38. McGrail, Mary Ann (2001). "Tyranny in Shakespeare". Utah Valley State College. Archived from the original on 2012-08-02. Retrieved 2008-09-18.
39. Gérard Chalian, Arnaud Blin, The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda, p.82, 2007.

Bibliography

• Borge, Tomás (1982). Sandinistas Speak. Pathfinder Press. ISBN 0-87348-619-6.
• Booth, John Wilkes (2000). Right Or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06967-6.
• Diederich, Bernard (1990). Trujillo: The Death of The Goat. Waterfront Press. ISBN 0-943862-44-2.
• Graubard, Stephen Richards (1999). A new Europe for the old?. Vol. 126. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-7658-0465-4.
• Law, Randall David (2009). Terrorism: a history (illustrated ed.). Polity. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-7456-4038-9.
• Voegelin, Eric; Von Sivers, Peter (1989). The collected works of Eric Voegelin. University of Missouri Press. ISBN 0-8262-1142-9.

External links

Quotations related to Tyrannicide at Wikiquote

• Murder
• Dictatorship
• Killings by type