Ghanima Atreides (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
atreideslioness) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh2023-09-20 01:26 pm
atreideslioness) wrote in fandomhigh2023-09-20 01:26 pm
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The History of Assassination. Wednesday, First Period [9/20]
As students arrived today, Ghani was putting a very awake and chatty Trebor into what resembled a pack-and-play, except that when she pushed a button, a force field surrounded it.
Look, you deal with assassination threats your way, Ghanima handles them in hers.
"So!" she said, as Trebor made babbling sounds in the background. "Some of you have wondered what is the difference between assassination and murder."
"Perhaps some of you will say money, because a professional killer is historically involved in the vast majority of assassinations, with personal assassination only really coming into fashion in the last few centuries."
"However, the answer is simple: how much of a public figure is the victim? An assassination is the murder of a public figure, and they are often politically motivated. If someone kills your dog, regardless of if they were paid to do it or not, that’s not an assassination, that’s just murder -- unless, perhaps, your dog was running for mayor and there was a disagreement on policy."
This was Fandom Island, Ghanima ruled out nothing.
"So, to be clear, first up, we have homicide," she said, actually walking over the board to write the word large across it. "Homicide is a manner of death, when one person causes the death of another. Not all homicide is murder, as some deaths caused by another person are manslaughter, and some are lawful; such as when justified by an affirmative defense, like insanity or self-defense."
"Then we have murder. The unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another. The victim is a regular person, and the motive is often personal. He murdered her because he suspected her of having an affair. She murdered him for his inheritance. Or it was an impulsive murder fueled by an argument of some kind."
"Then, finally, crowning the pile, is assassination. A murder by sudden or secret attack of a public figure, often for political or religious reasons."
"The earliest known use of the verb "to assassinate" in printed English was by Matthew Sutcliffe in A Briefe Replie to a Certaine Odious and Slanderous Libel, Lately Published by a Seditious Jesuite, a pamphlet printed in 1600, five years before it was used in Macbeth by William Shakespeare. However, assassination as a tool is far older than our use of this particular word for the act."
"The Egyptian pharaoh Teti, of the Old Kingdom Sixth Dynasty in the 23rd century BCE, is thought to be the earliest known victim of assassination, though written records are scant and thus evidence is circumstantial. Two further ancient Egyptian monarchs are more explicitly recorded to have been assassinated; Amenemhat I of the Middle Kingdom Twelfth Dynasty in 20th century BCE is recorded to have been assassinated in his bed by his palace guard, meanwhile contemporary judicial records relate the assassination of New Kingdom Twentieth Dynasty monarch Ramesses III in 1155 BCE as part of a failed coup attempt. Between 550 BC and 330 BC, seven Persian kings of Achaemenid Dynasty were assassinated."
"Both The Art of War, a 5th-century BC Chinese military treatise, and Chanakya's political treatise Arthashastra cover assassination, and its costs. I will teach Art of War either in the spring, or next fall."
"Now, I'm curious. How do you feel about the lines between homicide, murder, and assassination?"
Look, you deal with assassination threats your way, Ghanima handles them in hers.
"So!" she said, as Trebor made babbling sounds in the background. "Some of you have wondered what is the difference between assassination and murder."
"Perhaps some of you will say money, because a professional killer is historically involved in the vast majority of assassinations, with personal assassination only really coming into fashion in the last few centuries."
"However, the answer is simple: how much of a public figure is the victim? An assassination is the murder of a public figure, and they are often politically motivated. If someone kills your dog, regardless of if they were paid to do it or not, that’s not an assassination, that’s just murder -- unless, perhaps, your dog was running for mayor and there was a disagreement on policy."
This was Fandom Island, Ghanima ruled out nothing.
"So, to be clear, first up, we have homicide," she said, actually walking over the board to write the word large across it. "Homicide is a manner of death, when one person causes the death of another. Not all homicide is murder, as some deaths caused by another person are manslaughter, and some are lawful; such as when justified by an affirmative defense, like insanity or self-defense."
"Then we have murder. The unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another. The victim is a regular person, and the motive is often personal. He murdered her because he suspected her of having an affair. She murdered him for his inheritance. Or it was an impulsive murder fueled by an argument of some kind."
"Then, finally, crowning the pile, is assassination. A murder by sudden or secret attack of a public figure, often for political or religious reasons."
"The earliest known use of the verb "to assassinate" in printed English was by Matthew Sutcliffe in A Briefe Replie to a Certaine Odious and Slanderous Libel, Lately Published by a Seditious Jesuite, a pamphlet printed in 1600, five years before it was used in Macbeth by William Shakespeare. However, assassination as a tool is far older than our use of this particular word for the act."
"The Egyptian pharaoh Teti, of the Old Kingdom Sixth Dynasty in the 23rd century BCE, is thought to be the earliest known victim of assassination, though written records are scant and thus evidence is circumstantial. Two further ancient Egyptian monarchs are more explicitly recorded to have been assassinated; Amenemhat I of the Middle Kingdom Twelfth Dynasty in 20th century BCE is recorded to have been assassinated in his bed by his palace guard, meanwhile contemporary judicial records relate the assassination of New Kingdom Twentieth Dynasty monarch Ramesses III in 1155 BCE as part of a failed coup attempt. Between 550 BC and 330 BC, seven Persian kings of Achaemenid Dynasty were assassinated."
"Both The Art of War, a 5th-century BC Chinese military treatise, and Chanakya's political treatise Arthashastra cover assassination, and its costs. I will teach Art of War either in the spring, or next fall."
"Now, I'm curious. How do you feel about the lines between homicide, murder, and assassination?"
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During the Lecture
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Which was probably best for everyone involved.
"This is where modern media may refer to it as assassination, because that makes headlines which bring in money. It's a shorthand that everyone understands for 'important person dead and not by accident or natural causes.' That does not make the label accurate, but it is a useful shorthand for explaining the relative importance of the victim."
"Now, say, if you were to inherit their political seat as their widow, either by endowment or campaigning on their memory... that I would put under the banner of assassination."
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"I mean, if I'm able to take over their political seat after murdering my spouse, we either need to change the laws or relook at whether or not if counted as murder," Arden snorted. "Because if that many people are able to come out and say, 'Well, she killed her husband, but I can overlook that,' there might be more at play here than just him being a serial cheater or whatever."
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"You presuppose two things: first, that you or your agent were caught, and you were implicated," Ghanima pointed out, "--second, that you are in a culture that does not acknowledge assassination as a legitimate tool of statecraft."
"For instance, in my universe, I could declare what we call kanly against Trebor's father tomorrow, have him assassinated half an hour after the paperwork is filed, and no one would blink an eye." It was said with fondness
which perhaps made it more disturbing. "One member of a royal house removing another member of the same house to take their seat? It's just politics, nothing to get upset about.""But assuming an Earth-based morality in politics -- if you were smart and clever and did not get caught, then there would be no reason you could not turn the death to your political favor after the fact, despite the initiating circumstances."
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But it gave Arden a new question, one that she weighed a long time before quietly asking, "How do you deal with it?" Her words were soft and more vulnerable than she really wanted to admit. "Knowing that someone could be coming to kill you at any moment? That unless you're super careful all of the time, you're toast?"
She looked at Trebor. You didn't put a forcefield around a fancy pack-and-play unless you were worried someone was gonna try to murder your baby. And she just seemed so chill about that.
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"My name means spoil of war in my mother's language. I am a precious thing, gained through conflict," she replied. "I am a person who should not exist, according to many, and before the first time someone tried to assassinate me, they assassinated my grandfather, and attempted to assassinate my father and grandmother."
"My father's family was almost wiped from the face of the entire galaxy, because an old emperor was jealous that more people respected Grand Duke Leto Atreides more than they feared him. On one hand, when you grow up with it, it becomes normal. True, some nobles turn inward, become xenophobic and paranoid. Some of us make it a game, 'who do we think sent this week's assassins?' because that's the only way to cope. Others simply strike back, and it becomes a chess game, an intellectual exercise, of moving around poisons and knives, until it loses all real meaning."
"But my mother was not of a Great House. She was a native to a planet with an ecology more dangerous than the politics of the Empire. A planet where water is in such short supply, that our funeral rites revolve around placing the deceased in what we call a deathstill, to reclaim their body's water. In such a culture, death is not something to be feared, but to be faced every day. It simply is, and that is how I came to terms with it."
"I was lucky. I had my brother, who is the second half of my soul. I had my mother's uncle, and my step-mother. If she wasn't busy acting as regent--" or losing her mind, "--when we were very young, we sometimes had my aunt and her consort."
"And, of course, the Litany." Ghanima smiled and closed her eyes.
"I must not fear," she recited. "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing."
"Only I will remain."
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Though, it was probably also triflingly easy to spot the flash of pain that skittered across Arden's face when Ghanima was explaining her name and its meaning, the way she briefly found and held something beneath her shirt before making herself let go.
"Gotcha," she said, when Ghanima finished her answer. "And that litany helps? Like...meditation or whatever?"
Because it sounded like Ghanima'd had the benefit of culture, family, and these words to get her used to it. And Arden had already been locked out of two of the three.
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"Though some successful spies have been famous, as a way to gain access. Josephine Baker, for one."
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If you were a pleb it was just sparkling murder.Re: Discussion!
"If they are 'important' enough that their death causes an instability in the fabric of society or politics, then we can safely call it an assassination."
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She smiled wryly. "You might assassinate a rival. If you're killing your entire noble class, I'd call that murder. Also stupid, but people doing that rarely ask anyone else's opinion."
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Seriously. It was a Thing.
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"Heh, yeah," Arden said with an awkward little...well, not laugh. Verbal cringe, maybe? "Probably best not to mix that in here."
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"I'm going to do my very best to live my life in as genocide-free a fashion as possible," Arden said a little fervently.
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She shrugged. "Not to mention that sanity is a matter of debate at the best of times."
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Talk to Ghanima & Trebor
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