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The assassination attempt on the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico shows how far the Ukraine war has raised the political temperature of Europe above boiling point.
Juraj Cintula, a 71-year-old former security guard, amateur poet and alleged would-be assassin, is described by the authorities as being “a lone wolf”, but the attack evidently had its origin in the ferocious political confrontations in Slovakia stoked by the conflict in Ukraine.
Assassinations usually come in two basic types – those carried out by individuals acting on their own and those carried out openly or covertly by governments.
The latter are seldom described as “assassinations” but as “targeted killings”, such as the Israeli killing of three Iranian generals in their consulate in Damascus on 1 April. Yet there is little real difference between the two in terms of motivation and effects.
The war in Ukraine and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza are now producing about one international crisis a month, with each crisis marking an escalation in violence and instability. Political leaders seldom understand that wars automatically produce “wildcards” like assassinations and other unforeseeable acts of violence that catch decision makers by surprise.
This happens because all sides in a war try to do something unexpected which will hurt their enemy. Moreover, hatreds and fears bred on far away battlefields may impel individuals to take a gun and do some killing themselves.
The poison of the Ukraine war and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has by now envenomed the political atmosphere in much of the world. The Fico assassination bid could be the precursor of a wave of private and state assassinations similar to that in the US in the 60s.
But killing leaders seldom solves anything. Suppose that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu succeeds in his aim of killing Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, does anybody imagine that this will bring an end to the Palestinian demand for a homeland? Realistically, the greater the military success of Israel in Gaza, the more likely it is that Palestinians will resort to acts of terror to keep their cause alive, just as they did after the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967.
Assassinations are an integral component of warfare. Abraham Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth at the end of the American Civil War in 1865 in the hope of reviving Confederate resistance.
Controversy has raged over how much the Confederate government knew about the conspiracy to kill Lincoln and other Union leaders. But it had certainly supported an earlier plan by Booth to kidnap the president. Confederate leaders must have known how easily a kidnapping could turn into a killing.
The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo was part of a plot whose organisers were linked to Serbian intelligence. In the event, the killing achieved its aim because it helped provoke the First World War which led to the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Assassinations of political leaders have so much impact because they crystallise, in a stark moment of extreme violence, complex struggles between or within communities and nations.
I can remember exactly where I was, standing in the lobby of a hotel in Kuwait in 1981, when I saw a mob of people trying to read news agency tape pinned to a board that announced the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat during a military parade in Cairo.
I can still recall the names of the other guests at a dinner party I was attending in Jerusalem on the night that Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead by an ultra-nationalist gunman as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv in 1995.
How great was the impact of these two assassinations? Surprisingly little changed in Egypt after the death of Sadat, but the killing of Rabin, the leader who had signed a peace agreement with the Palestinians, opened the door a year later to Benjamin Netanyahu becoming Israeli leader, a man whose core conviction was that no compromise was necessary with the Palestinians. The hideous consequence of this belief is being played out in Gaza today.
The Fico assassination attempt is already fading from the news agenda since the victim was never well-known internationally, came from a small country, and is still alive, despite being hit by five bullets. Yet his shooting is further evidence that the Ukraine war is inexorably destabilising neighbouring states. Nato allies are inching towards sending military trainers to Ukraine to teach its troops how to use newly dispatched military equipment. President Macron has proposed that French and other Nato-powers should send troops to fight there.
Western governments show an astonishing lack of realpolitik in their understanding of the Ukraine conflict. Netanyahu is criticised by Washington and its allies for not saying what would happen in Gaza after the end of war. Yet exactly the same accusation could be made about Western policy towards Ukraine, where Western objectives remain shadowy and unrealistic.
Is the plan to fight Russia to a standstill, so President Vladimir Putin will give up and order his troops home? But there is no sign of this being likely to happen, indeed quite the reverse. The stock response of Western government on being asked about how the war should end is to dodge the question by saying that this decision will be made by the Ukrainian government, but its aim is to defeat Russia, something that few believe is possible. Meanwhile, diplomacy has become a dirty word, suggesting appeasement if not treachery.
The present stalemate is too unstable to last for long. Russia has the strategic advantage of being a much larger and militarily more powerful state than Ukraine. Supposedly, this imbalance between the combatants will be corrected to the advantage of Ukraine by the coming supply of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of US wonder weapons.
But sceptics remember the boosterism last year about how ultra-modern heavy tanks – US M1-Abrams, German Leopard 2s, and British Challenger 2s – were going to sweep through the Russian front lines in an advance that stalled humiliatingly a few miles from the starting point.
Politicians are always credulous about magical new weapons, vastly expensive and therefore few in numbers, that are going to win unwinnable wars. Well-documented US and UK failures in Afghanistan and Iraq against lightly armed enemies have taught them no lessons.
My heart sinks when I hear armchair generals and pundits pontificating about how Russia has a brief window of opportunity this summer, but this will soon close when all that splendid new equipment arrives. Ukrainian experts, when not in propaganda mode, suggest that this is wishful thinking.
They explain that many American weapons are ineffective or simply do not work. They add that much of the money allocated to build field defences around Kharkiv and elsewhere disappears into the pocket of the regional military authorities.
This does not mean that Russia will win a decisive military victory, but a forever war leaves plenty of time and space for more assassinations, massacres, coups d’etat, surprise attacks and disastrous retreats.
There is too much lamentation about the supposed prevalence of false facts, toxic social media and black propaganda, and too little appreciation of the fact most people today have a phone camera and a recording device which makes it much easier to establish the truth and contradict lies.
A good recent example of this is the New York Times examination of more than 100 videos showing clashes at the University of California, Los Angeles on 30 April, when pro-Palestinian protesters were attacked for nearly five hours by pro-Israel assailants while the police stood by and did nothing.
As the paper reported: “The videos showed counterprotesters attacking students in the pro-Palestinian encampment for several hours, including beating them with sticks, using chemical sprays and launching fireworks as weapons.”
CNN did an equally good job a little earlier in more difficult circumstances with its reporting on what Palestinians call “the flour massacre” on 29 February, accusing Israeli soldiers of opening fire on Palestinians desperate for aid. Some 100 Palestinians were killed and 700 injured.
Israel said many had been trampled to death by the crowd or were run over by aid vehicles. After a detailed investigation, CNN produced a compelling report called “Dying for a bag of flour: Videos and eyewitness accounts cast doubt on Israel’s timeline of deadly Gaza aid delivery.”
CNN explains that its reporters “collected testimonies and videos from 22 eyewitnesses, many of whom had travelled from other cities across Gaza in the hopes of finding something for their families to eat. When the convoy passed through an Israeli checkpoint on Al Rashid Street, the main north-south route designated by the Israeli military for humanitarian aid, survivors recalled Israeli troops opening fire on crowds as they tried desperately to reach the food aid.”
These meticulous journalistic investigations by the mainstream media are impressive, but they naturally take time to carry out and the news agenda has often moved on by the time they appear. Curiously the New York Times and CNN are not very good at highlighting their journalism at its best.
I was walking across the road beside St Pancras Station a couple of weeks ago. The traffic lights were red and the pedestrian light green. Suddenly, two young men on electric scooters, ignoring the lights, raced through the throng of people on the crossing, narrowly missing myself and others.
Now a new law making it an offence to cause death or serious injury by dangerous, careless or inconsiderate cycling is being introduced in the House of Commons on the initiative of former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith.
I have always disliked him because of his self-important, and usually ill-informed, pronouncements on almost everything, but on cyclists and cycles he has got it right.
Over the years cyclists, cycles and cycle lanes have become things of virtue, regardless of the danger they pose, and the same exaggerated tolerance extends to electric scooters. Moreover, the bicycle and scooters have become the city planners’ knee-jerk answer to traffic congestion.
I had experience of this in Canterbury, where I live, when the local council abruptly introduced 300 electric scooters to be rented for a small sum. At first they were little used, but then they started to disappear though I seldom saw anybody riding one.
A friend who worked for the company that was in charge of the electric scooter scheme explained to me that people in the poorer parts of Canterbury had discovered that each scooter had a lithium battery worth £25 if sold on the local black market.
They would take the scooters to a secluded spot, Bingley Island on the Stour River being a favoured spot because it is close to the city centre and is covered in bushes.
Once there, the person who had rented the scooter would conceal themselves in a bush where they used a hand-held blow torch to cut off the lithium battery. They then threw the remains of the bicycle into the river.
The scheme continued for many months until the number of surviving scooters had fallen to about 25. They were then, so my informant told me, withdrawn overnight and the scheme abandoned shortly before the local elections last year.
I went to see Made in England, a documentary feature film directed by David Hinton and narrated by 81-year-old Martin Scorsese about the lives and films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
This seems to me to be exactly what a documentary about great films and filmmakers should be, explain the quality and originality of what they achieved in films like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, A Canterbury Tale, Black Narcissus and The Tales of Hoffmann.
Scorsese, one of several renowned American filmmakers who admired Powell and Pressburger at at a time when they were forgotten in Britain, explains why these are some of the greatest films ever made.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
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