Lots and lots — and lots! — of email came in in response to my bleg yesterday asking for the source/details of the oft-repeated sentiment that if you’re going to try to kill the king, you’d better succeed. ( It’s all somewhat moot now in that the column I wanted it for has already been written.) So far nothing definitive. I think — thanks to the permanence of the human condition and the political realities that generate therefrom — the idea is in fact ancient and universal (damnable metaxy!). Indeed, Derb shot me a note: “Jonah: It’s a Chinese idiom drawn from the story of Jing Ke.”
Several readers wanted to credit Sidney Hook. For example:
Dear Mr. Goldberg,
That was somewhat obsessive of me, but once I started looking I had to find it. It is from Sidney Hook’s Hero’s in History, published in 1955, on page 206.
The context was Lenin’s trying to restrain some of his more enthusiastic followers. Here is a longer part to get it in context:
“It was not easy to restrain the Bolshevik rank and file, its periphery and sympathizers, from precipitating matters prematurely. If one shoots at a king, one must not miss. And if an insurrection is begun, it is death to fail.”
Does this make me your obscure quote finding guy?
As I noted yesterday a great many credited Emerson, though I think he’d be an odd author for such a realpolitik sentiment. A better guess would be Machiavelli and many said he’d said as much. Lots of folks sent me a quote “Never strike a prince unless you kill him” they attributed to Machiavelli, but I’m not convinced (from very quick googling) that he said it. Then again, I’d be surprised if he didn’t say something like this.
I really liked this email:
There are probably dozens of variations, but here are two more.
1- The oldest variation that I know of comes from Alessandro Farnese, Duke
of Parma and Piacenza (1545–1592), attributed with saying, “He who draws his
sword against the prince needs to throw away his scabbard.”
2- The coolest version comes from the character Omar from HBO’s “The Wire.”
After successfully ambushing two gunmen (who were themselves trying to “run
up” on Omar), the one surviving gunman, shot in the leg, hides behind a car.
After a chilling whistle of “A Hunting We Will Go” emanates from the
shadows and echoes across the empty streets, Omar’s detached voice cooly
explains — “Listen hear, babe. You come at the king, you best not miss.”
YouTube clip (around the 1:35 mark).
One reader went straight to my heart by noting that Edmund Burke once said:
“A king is not to be deposed by halves.”-Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
But then that was displaced by this:
Jonah,
I doubt it’s the primary source, but the way I always phrase that
particular sentiment is by quoting “The Good The Bad and The Ugly”.
Do you remember the scene where Tuco (“The Ugly” – Eli Wallach) is
taking a bath when the one-armed man bursts in and points a loaded
gun at his head? While he’s gloating about having caught Tuco after
tracking him for so long, Tuco blithely kills him with a gun hidden
beneath the bubbles in his bath. He looks at the corpse and shrugs,
saying, “If you’re going to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”
I’m pretty sure that most of Life’s Big Questions are answered in
either “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” or “The Godfather”. The
rest will no doubt be addressed in the upcoming “Iraqi Casablanca
II: Electric Boogaloo”.