wpu.nu

Sida:Pol-2007-05-05 OKÄND UPPSLAGSKOD ann-Why Kill Politicians? iewwp324.pdf/14

Från wpu.nu

Den här sidan har inte korrekturlästs


At least in the beginning years of his dictatorship, the security precautions were quite

weak (see Hoffmann 1980 for an extensive account). Over the course of time they

were stepped up, especially after the 20th of July 1944 when Count Stauffenberg tried

to kill him at his headquarters at the Wolfschanze near Rastenburg. The marginal

costs for an attacker (especially if he or she was ready to commit suicide) were

relatively low in the early period.

According to our model, the combination of expected very high marginal benefits,

and relatively low costs for an attacker suggests that at the beginning of his rule, many

assassination attempts were undertaken against Hitler. Indeed, there were around forty

of them19. In many cases he narrowly escaped not because the security forces

prevented the attacks but because of other reasons, such as inaptitude or pure chance.

Thus, Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff was prepared to blow himself up together

with Hitler when inspecting an armory but Hitler left much earlier than anyone

predicted. Major-General Henning von Tresckow planted a bomb in Hitler’s plane but

it did not explode. Colonel Count Stauffenberg put a bomb below the table at a

meeting of the General Staff but Hitler was only slightly wounded (while four

bystanding general staff officers were killed).

Olof Palme was a prominent Prime Minister of a well-established and stable

democracy, Sweden, with a classical division of power, a strong civil society and a

largely homogenous population (except for recent immigrants). The marginal benefits

of killing Palme were therefore low. Consequently, an assassination was not seriously

considered. In many instances, Palme had no bodyguard protecting him. The marginal

cost of killing him was correspondingly low.

Our model predicts a low probability of being killed. The two most important factors

contributing to his murder are his prominence and the lack of security measures. His

assassination on 28 February 1996 after having visited a cinema came as a total

surprise and remains a great mystery to this day (Bondeson 2005, Cooper and

Redlinger 2004)20. Palme’s murder was the first of its kind in modern Swedish history

and had an impact across Sweden similar to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in

the United States .It may well have been an unpredictable random event possibly by a

deranged person21. A model based on the desire to change policy is unable to explain

this murder. More convincing is a “demand” by a madman attracted by the celebrity

status of the Prime Minister.

19 See footnote 6.

20 More than USD 45 million have been expended, and 700,000 pages written, to

investigate the assassination (as of February 25, 2006; “Olof Palme assassination”,

wikipedia.

21 It is interesting to note that Swedish politicians seem to share this interpretation.

Anna Lindh, the Swedish foreign minister, while shopping in the Ladies department

of the Nordiska Kompaniet was stabbed to death in 2003 by Mihjailo Mijailovic who

by an appeals court was determined to have suffered from a mental illness at the time

of the killing. The attacker does not seem to have been aware that she was a well-

known politician, but much speaks to an interpretation of the attack as a random event

(Christensen 2004, Cooper and Redlinger 2004).

2. Sweden and Olof Palme