If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat

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…