ABSTRACT
Every assassination, no matter how demented the killer or how slight the impact, changes history: one special and peculiar piece, one unique human being, is gone from the board, and his passage was violent. The single revolutionary assassin acting alone, often from motives suspect to the threatened, can rarely anticipate that one murderous deed alone will change the board. Most assassinations, however, including those in the international arena, are still national – based, reflecting specific national conditions. One-party states that are potentially vulnerable to a conspiracy of assassins are better off than those areas that have slipped into endemic violence, no matter what the form of the existing institutions. In the turmoil of rampant inflation, uncertainty at the center, guerrilla armies in shoot-outs with the police, it is hardly surprising to find a high incidence of assassination. Assassination is and will remain one facet of revolutionary politics, a conventional tool of the rebels' trade.
