![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Executions
Dec. 29th, 2006 10:46 pmMy stand against the death penalty is visceral.
If society is willing to kill an individual, how can society take the moral high ground and say the individuals within it are forbidden to kill?
Tonight Saddam Hussein was executed. Few doubt he was guilty of the crimes. There are more trials that will not be held on other charges -- including Kurdish genocide -- because he has already paid the ultimate price.
This may or may not make him into a martyr to the Sunni Muslims of Iraq. His trial may or may not have been fair -- though any appearance of impropriety didn't have any chance to be investigated.
I have no doubt in my mind that this man inflicted his own death penalty on thousands of people.
And yet my gorge rose when the Special Report broke in on Jeopardy. The only (whatever atheists call it) prayer that I offered was for his soul to be treated appropriately in any afterlife that may come.
But as a human being, I can't help feeling that this was the wrong thing to do.
If this country is trying to demonstrate that representative democracy and the rule of law are better than dictatorship, then how is killing the dictator going to prove it?
If society is willing to kill an individual, how can society take the moral high ground and say the individuals within it are forbidden to kill?
Tonight Saddam Hussein was executed. Few doubt he was guilty of the crimes. There are more trials that will not be held on other charges -- including Kurdish genocide -- because he has already paid the ultimate price.
This may or may not make him into a martyr to the Sunni Muslims of Iraq. His trial may or may not have been fair -- though any appearance of impropriety didn't have any chance to be investigated.
I have no doubt in my mind that this man inflicted his own death penalty on thousands of people.
And yet my gorge rose when the Special Report broke in on Jeopardy. The only (whatever atheists call it) prayer that I offered was for his soul to be treated appropriately in any afterlife that may come.
But as a human being, I can't help feeling that this was the wrong thing to do.
If this country is trying to demonstrate that representative democracy and the rule of law are better than dictatorship, then how is killing the dictator going to prove it?
