On the Butcher from Tikrit

The other night on You Tube I had the opportunity to watch Saddam Hussein being hanged. I started watching one of the offered videos (I wonder if any are fake?) but stopped just as the noose was being fixed around his neck.

Like the Nazis at the Nuremburg trials who were striking in their ordinariness, so Saddam didn’t look like an embodiment of evil at all, but a tired, confused, disoriented old man who under his unpanicking, proud exterior was no doubt terrified.

I have never seen a dead body, except the outline of a burning one at a Hindu ghat in Nepal in 2005. I have seen lots of simulated, fake deaths on TV, and maybe some real ones too (not sure), but I’ve never seen on TV anyone die close up and for real. I thought I’d keep that track record afloat. Death, despite its stubborn, rude impositions into existence, is not something I am particularly favourable to…well, not at all, if the truth be told.

I also abhor capital punishment for these reasons:

1) It is cold blooded, conscious murder, inflicted after the calm deliberations of many reputedly sound minds, representing the State. Individual murders are often warm blooded, and even when cold, one mind cannot be as calmly deliberate as many.

2) The State represents the ultimate depository and focus of power and coercive authority in any nation (though the multinationals might like it otherwise). Those who choose to wield power should set an example, since the esteem they demand from those over whom they rule should lead them to expect to be imitated by those looking for an example. By killing people in cold blood, the state is sanctioning murder. It should not be surprised if the lesson it teaches is learned.

3) As statistics I believe show it rarely acts as a deterrent, principally because when people commit murder, presuming they don’t do it in a passionate frenzy and so don’t think at all, they are not actually expecting to be caught. A lot of murderers, I suspect, are also self-hating masochists who might tell themselves that they wouldn’t mind execution anyway. Maybe some murderers would also agree that they deserve the death penalty; but they hope, as I’ve said, to evade justice and believe, nevertheless, in the overriding righteousness of the cause of their murdering who they murder.

4) You might end up killing innocent people. Considering our ridiculous charade regarding the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, and others, this would look very lpossible.


As to what should be done with murderers, this is another topic, but if they have had the indignity and affront to insult human society by killing people, they injure us in one way. Why then allow them to injure us even further by providing us with an excuse to bring ourselves down to their level?

Though I reluctantly accept the need for imprisonment to protect the public, I oppose, as I have already written elsewhere, all ideologies of punishment since they augment self-righteousness and justify denials of the evil that lurks inside us all. None are clean enough to throw stones, so none should.

People like Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler, people like Peter Sutcliffe and Charles Manson, do not arise ex nihilo (out of nothing). Like bad weeds in a garden, they are the result of something wrong with the gardening. They emerge embodying and expressing the darkness that surrounds them, like a mirror showing the world its own face.