If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat

2026-06-25

Had there been a time in the history of the United States when political assassinations - assassinations of public officials - were running at the rate of more than one and a half thousand per annum, as was the case in Russia in 1906, I rather shudder to think what would have been the reaction of the official establishment here.

– George F Kennan, The breakdown of the Tsarist Autocracy.

When seeing incredible numbers such as those, it's worth asking why? How does a society breakdown to the point where there are 1.5 thousand political assassinations per year?

I think the simple answer is; similar to Freud's theories of repression in an individual, there's an analogous process in a body politic. When the people cannot express their will, the repressed desires bubble up elsewhere - in the worst case as political violence. In 1906 Russia, there was no way for citizens to have any input on politics, until mid-1906 there wasn't even a completely ineffective, useless Duma. Perhaps even worse, after April, there was. Even the Zemstvos meant to give some local self-determination were weakened by Alexander III and further restricted under Nicholas II.

Kennan's (throwaway) point is now worth considering. The violence led the state to act even worse such that whichever side you were on at the time, the situation was worse. For a monarchist, 1500 of your people were killed, for a reformer or revolutionary, the state now bore down on you cruelly and more forcefully than before. Unless the revolutionaries got their revolution, the conditions were strictly worse (As it turns out, the revolution was worse too).

All this is to say the king himself should have given the people more power for his own good. To make explicit the analogy to modern politics, you should be happy when your opponent wins an election. When there's a rising tide of a new political sentiment; do not crush it. If it loses fairly, its proponents will not feel disenfranchised but if you play shenanigans so the peoples will does not materialize or if you get elected because of that new sentiment, you must do something to calm the crowds by doing what they want.

This applies to everything from immigration in Europe, to the power balance between the DSA and the establishment in the Democrat party, to special interest groups of all kinds using their money to repress what a majority want. When your enemy is hungry, give him a piece of bread or you will regret it.