.

First off, and let me state this clearly for those in the back, The Murder of Charlie Kirk was NOT justified and was a crime against Kirk, his kin, and our nation.

The events in Utah last week have spurred my pondering and thinking about assassination. There are certainly persons whom nearly everyone might agree would have improved the world by being subjected to a successful assassination, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and many others. Such a conclusion though comes from the precise knowledge of history. We know of the deaths of millions because that is in our past, but such is not the case for any assassin of these people save the fanciful time traveler.

A man successfully killing Hitler in 1930 does not know of the mass murder to come. Oh, the clues are certainly there, the hate that spews from the party and its leader is vile, intense, and unending but thinking that such hatred might lead to mass murder and knowing it will are two very different things. If Hitler dies in 1930, he’s quickly forgotten just another of dozens of politicians murdered in Germany’s turbulent post-Great War period. It’s also important to remember that Hitler worked within the system. Even as he and his party stated clearly a hatred for democracy, they pledged to destroy it from within, by using the system itself to gain the power to annihilate liberal democracy. The perspective from 1930 would be one where a divisive rabble-rousing politician with noxious views is murdered by his enemy.  The people of that parallel reality could never know what the act of assassinating Hitler changed for them and the world.

Conversely, there are assassinations in our history that we mourn and decry as terrible events, Lincoln, Kennedy, King, and others but we cannot know the shape of the world if these leaders had lived. Any projection of that parallel world is more likely than not to be heavily influenced by the political biases of whoever is making the projection. Lincoln’s reconstruction might have avoided Jim Crow and the horrors it created, or he might have continued to amass power in the office of the president fundamentally changing the nature of our system of government and becoming an American dictator.

We can’t know.

Only with historical hindsight, when the act becomes impossible, can we say with anything approaching certainty that in some cases assassination can be a good. In reality we muddle along, ignorant of the future’s shape and in those cases, the real-world cases, there are vanishingly few cases that justify assassination and last week, no matter how odious he may have been, does not meet those criteria.