Revised edition was published in 1975 under title : Assassination and terrorism.

Ford's exploration of calculated, personalized assassination draws on history, literature, law, philosophy, sociology, and religion. Addressing the vast array of cases and combing thousands of years of history, he asks most of all whether assassination works.

‘Written with Burleigh’s characteristic brio, with pithy summaries of historical moments (he is brilliant on the Americans in Vietnam, for example) and full of surprising vignettes’ – The Times ’Book of the Week’ In Day of the Assassins, acclaimed historian Michael Burleigh examines assassination as a special category of political violence and asks whether, like a contagious disease, it can be catching. Focusing chiefly on the last century and a half, Burleigh takes readers from Europe, Russia, Israel and the United States to the Congo, India, Iran, Laos, Rwanda, South Africa and Vietnam. And, as we travel, we revisit notable assassinations, among them Leon Trotsky, Hendrik Verwoerd, Juvénal Habyarimana, Indira Gandhi, Yitzhak Rabin and Jamal Khashoggi. Combining human drama, questions of political morality and the sheer randomness of events, Day of the Assassins is a riveting insight into the politics of violence. ‘Brilliant and timely . . . Our world today is as dangerous and mixed-up as it has ever been. Luckily we have Michael Burleigh to help us make sense of it.’ – Mail on Sunday

HERE IS THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PATRIOTIC MURDER SOCIETIES, THE ARMY GANGSTERS, THE ARMY’S IDEA OF JAPAN’S DESTINY, AND THE STRANGE ROLE OF THE EMPEROR. In Japan the army possesses a kind of autonomy which immunizes it from control by any other agency. Long ago, Mr. Byas saw that the intoxication of this immunity would lead to war, and so he spent many years ferreting out from the secretive Japanese how the militarists gained their fantastic power. His book therefore is to Japan what Rauschning’s Revolution of Nihilism was to Germany. Starting from the grass-roots of Japanese politics, it moves steadily toward the amazing disclosure of principles. At bottom, the Japanese Army is closely allied with gangsterism. The so-called patriotic societies which do its dirty work are nothing more than leagues of murderers, blackmailers, and thieves. Byas shows how these terrorists made contact years ago with certain groups of appreciative younger officers, and how consequently almost every civilian leader who curbed the army’s power was assassinated. Mr. Byas then asks what the basic program and philosophy of such a power group can be; and shows that it is aggression abroad and reaction at home. Japan was to become a war machine. 80% of its product was to go to the army, and the people were to live on the balance. The efficient planning and centralization of Marxism were to be used, but stripped of the hated component of democracy. Japan, like Germany, believes that it is a nation with a destiny, and that war pays. The furious Japanese egomania is centered in the Emperor and the notion of his divine descent. Mr. Byas therefore devotes several chapters to the hocus-pocus that surrounds this personage. He ends with a powerful and clear-headed discussion about the future.

Ben-Yehuda presents an in-depth inquiry into the nature and patterns of political assassinations and executions by Jews in Palestine and Israel. Extensive empirical evidence is used to analyze the social construction of violent and aggressive human behavior, using a sociology of deviance perspective. Political assassinations and executions are placed within their particular cultural matrix to describe how this specific form of killing has been conceptualized as part of an alternative system of justice. "The taking of a human life is generally regarded as the ultimate evil. Given this fact, it is important to examine and understand how it is explained, justified, and cloaked in a 'vocabulary of motives.' Such acts are, in the author's words, 'socially constructed and interpreted,' dependent on the observer's location in a specific 'symbolic-moral universe.'Moreover, such acts (political assassination specifically) are manifestations of struggles that represent attempts to legitimate these world-views, rhetorical devices that serve to define 'boundary-markers' between such universes — moral crusades that attempt to validate one view vis-a-vis another. This general approach to political assassinations is original. Its application to assassinations by Israelis is original. The fact that the book is empirical marks it off from many speculations on the subject. A number of the author's findings make a distinct contribution.

Developing the theory of cultural trauma in regard to the shattering potential effects of political assassinations, Eyerman examines political and social life in three different national contexts: Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and Harvey Milk in the U.S.; Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands; and Olof Palme and Anna Lindh in Sweden