Macbeth Does Murder Sleep

John Batchelor’s series of conversations with historian Michael Vlahos about civil war continues this week with a discussion of regicide.

Readers may recall a post here last June describing a tripartite taxonomy of civil war. Professor Vlahos suggests a similar classification of regicides: those that seek to replace not just the nation’s leader, but also its system of government; those that merely seek to take over the existing system; and those assassinations that seek merely to destroy and disrupt.

He points out also that regicide as a means of political change never gives a good result: if nothing else, it produces a permanent and bitterly divisive grievance in that part of the nation that was loyal to the murdered leader.

The conversation is in two parts (about twenty minutes in all), here and here.

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