Simon Ball's "Death to Order"

Simon Ball is professor of international history and politics at the University of Leeds. He is the author of a number of acclaimed books, including Secret History, The Bitter Sea, and The Guardsmen.

Ball applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination, with the following results:

Death to Order passes the Page 99 Test with flying colours. All the key elements of the book are to be found on the page.

Page 99 is devoted to the assassination of Zhang Zuolin, the Old Marshal, who had ruled Manchuria for nearly two decades at the time of his murder in 1928. The account of this particular assassination encapsulates the central argument of Death to Order: the state is at the centre of modern assassination, indeed that centrality is the core feature of the “modern”. This does not mean that powerful states are always behind assassination but it is their actions that shapes the importance of assassination for international politics. In the particular case of the Zhang Zuolin assassination, part of the Japanese state was most certainly behind the assassination. The killing was organised by Japanese military intelligence and carried out by a regular engineer unit of the Imperial Japanese Army using their high explosive munitions to blow up a train. The state reaction was such that the assassination was one of the most consequential, if now little remembered, assassinations of the twentieth century, responsible for the destabilisation of both Japan and China.

Page 99 also neatly illustrates Death to Order’s method of untangling assassinations. Death to Order argues that the analyst should pay attention to four aspects: the procurer, the assassins, the tools of the trade and the cover up. The cover up for the Zhang assassination was particularly rich, as it moved from Japanese military deception to a whole state effort, ‘an amalgam,’ as page 99 puts it, ‘of nearly every cock-and-bull story told: the assassination was a Japanese–Chinese conspiracy (false); the actual assassins were Chinese (false); the Japanese behind the assassination were the Secret Service Organisation (false); the chief Chinese conspirator was the Old Marshal’s chief of staff (false), subsequently murdered by the Young Marshal (true).’

Learn more about Death to Order at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue