In The Manson Secret, Peter Levanda explains the deeper significance of political assassinations and the need for the “crazed, lone assassin” stereotype:
The established ruling class of a country cannot accept a sane, reasonable assassin any more than they can accept the points of view of their political or military enemies. Assassins are, by definition, insane or somehow racially or ethnically “other,” if not inferior. They do not come from the body politic. They are outsiders, and their outsider status is what causes them to commit these crimes. We cannot afford to give these assassins a soap box from which to convince us of the rightness of their actions, because we may be swayed by a person who is so consumed by political conviction that he picks up a gun and rids the country of someone we may be tempted to realize was a tyrant, and by extension therefore to question the present government altogether.
So, we eventually accept a subliminal message every time an assassin is murdered or otherwise silenced before he or she can stand trial: to attack the king is insanity. (emphasis in original)
Notes
Peter Levenda, The Manson Secret, p. 14
Fenton Bresler, Who Killed John Lennon?
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