“When you have influence, they hunt you,” the US president told reporters after the attack at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Individual violence has never been a solution; it has always been a symptom. Societies that progress do not execute individuals; they transform institutions.
The unsuccessful -so far- attempts to assassinate Donald Trump by his fellow Americans reopen the important historical chapter of individual, political violence.
How much and what kind of moral basis can such violence claim? And, on the other hand, who does it serve – if anyone – especially when it is presented as pursuing popular goals such as improving the system, combating state violence or punishing those responsible for the functioning of the machinery of power?
The answer of history is categorically negative both with regard to the existence and use of such individual, political violence. Whenever it has been used, it has produced results exactly opposite to those intended. We need only recall the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which triggered the outbreak of World War I, leaving millions dead.
The reason is simple and clear:
the system reproduces itself. It easily replaces its losses as if they were expendable. It possesses the properties of the Lernaean Hydra – cut off one head and another grows in its place. The reservoir of power is inexhaustible.
The moral assessment of the issue introduces further parameters. This too is a timeless problem in history and is always linked to the prevailing moral codes of each era in which such individual violence manifests itself.
The ethics of organized religions – especially among them – not only allow violence (not only collective but also individual), but have often imposed it. Christianity itself, despite the fact that it preaches love, historically prevailed “by fire and sword”, violently eliminating the ancient pagan world. Islam has followed a similar course, even to this day, through the imposition of violence and the promise of eternal paradise for the faithful “martyr”.
Nations, states and societies, through similar ideological constructions wrapped in sophisticated narratives of patriotism and sacred values, also make extensive use of violence. However, this violence is legitimized, even sanctified – blessed, in fact – by the other powerful arm of the system: religion and its gods.
If this is true of social morality, individual violence – especially murder – cannot find a moral basis even in the laws of Nature. If indeed only what is natural is moral, then Nature itself, distinguishing humans from other animals through the gift of reason – where conscience resides – allows the killing of a living being only for survival, and especially of another human being only for self-defense.
In exceptional cases, what can be called “symbolic violence” could be considered necessary and natural. This form goes beyond simple individual violence and becomes an imposed necessity. Historical “tyrannicide” is often cited as examples: the assassination of Hipparchus in ancient Athens , of Ioannis Kapodistrias or the symbolic references to the overthrow of the dictatorship in modern Greece and the attempted assassination of G. Papadopoulos (as in “Peri Aspalathon” by Giorgos Seferis).
From these positions arise dozens of further questions, which do not accept dogmatic answers – let alone metaphysical commands, which are often invoked by societies that reject rational and natural explanations in favor of systemic propaganda.
Let us highlight two of the most critical questions:
How responsible and culpable is the one who gives the command compared to the one who carries it out? Why is Donald Trump – or any equivalent leader – considered solely responsible for deaths in places like Iran or Palestine, while the direct perpetrators of violence are not judged equally?
By extension: those who support or elect such powers – how is their responsibility as moral accomplices measured?
Response – Diotima
The issue must be addressed with clarity.
Individual political violence cannot function as a corrective mechanism of power. Historical experience shows that it not only fails but often worsens conditions dramatically. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand did not reform a system—it ignited a global catastrophe.
The problem is structural:
power is not a person—it is a system.
Eliminating an individual does not abolish the mechanisms that produced them. On the contrary, systems tend to reinforce themselves after such shocks.
Even so-called tyrannicides do not offer clear justification. They rarely produce stable democratic outcomes and often lead to instability or power reconfiguration.
From a moral standpoint:
The instigator bears strategic responsibility
The executor bears direct responsibility
Neither is innocent.
As for citizens, their responsibility exists but is graduated. It cannot be equated with that of direct perpetrators, yet it is not negligible.
Ultimately, individual violence:
does not improve systems
does not deliver justice
reinforces cycles of violence
distorts responsibility
If any legitimate force exists, it lies not in assassination, but in collective action, institutional change, and social delegitimization of power.
History does not vindicate the lone executioner.
It vindicates—when it does—societies that transform the rules of the game.