Hanging Saddam - another surrender to barbarity

[No DUplicitous DUpe]

Hanging Saddam

By Paul Andersen (Paul gave me permission to post his whole column here)
The Aspen Times
January 8, 2007

The hanging of Saddam was yet another surrender to barbarity. The chief barbarian was hanged by the victorious barbarians, and we're supposed to feel righteous about it. How futile to atone for a series of atrocities by enacting yet another. The human mind knows no end to final solutions.

A spokesman for the Catholic clergy, Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican's Justice and Peace department, asked for last-minute clemency for Saddam. "You can't think of compensating for one crime with another one," he reasoned. But that's exactly what we do, heaping fuel on the fire of vengeance.

It was reported that Martino also criticized U.S. authorities at the time of Saddam's capture in December 2003 for releasing pictures of U.S. soldiers checking his teeth "as if he were a cow," images that he said needlessly humiliated the man.

The humiliation goes beyond Saddam. It infects all of humanity. Capital punishment isn't simply aimed at the condemned; it is a ritualistic purge for the society that judges, condemns and executes.

Saddam's crimes against humanity, as enacted upon the Kurds, were widely considered deserving of the death penalty. His gruesome hanging was to provide redemption and a final vindication for the invasion of Iraq.

But if Saddam must swing, then what of other heads of states who have violated human rights? Are they also deserving of the gallows? Which cultural norms should prevail in assigning death as the ultimate payback for crimes against humanity?

The advocacy of the Catholic Church on Saddam's behalf was based upon the ecclesiastically assigned value of life - or at least human life. The scope of moral judgment needs to expand to a universal embrace.

Weighing in on the sanctity of all life is for moralists with a far broader reach than those who speak for the church or assign death sentences to vanquished foes. Charles Darwin wrote that such empathy must come from conscience, an evolutionary trait that develops from human reflection on moral qualms.

We must exercise conscience more than ever as population pressures increase, ethnic conflicts spread, resource competition grows, and the widespread technology of killing produces a global tragedy. We need conscience in our approach to nature, or we risk losing the source of all life.

As E.O. Wilson points out: "Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do ... Thus, our place in nature is to think about the creation and to protect the living planet."

Killing things, whether fellow human beings in spurious wars, genocide and ritualistic hangings, or in the natural world through gluttony, sport and ignorance, demands moral reasoning and an ethical response. Rather than cheering the dominance of the victor or the supremacy of man, our conscience must bear on our acts.

"All ethics rest upon a single premise," wrote Aldo Leopold, "that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts." Conscience and ethics determine the value of our membership and the quality of our members in both nature and society.

Hanging Saddam was no victory, but rather a moral defeat. A life sentence serving in Kurdish refugee camps, caring for children, would have seemed a more rational and humane means of atonement.

Instead, we are all dehumanized by the spectacle of the noose and the taunting. There is no healing, just another wound. There is no forgiveness, just vindictiveness. There is no conscience, just revenge. There is no progress, only evolutionary stagnation.

http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20070108/COLUMN/101080030 (free registration required)

Great Column, Paul! Thank you.

[Uncle Joe]

1. Thanks for the post No DUplicitous DUpe

Kicked and recommended

[Proud Liberal Dem]

2. Our desire for revenge has tarnished us.

One of my biggest concerns about this so-called "war on terror" is how it has opened the door for our government (Bush Administration) to begin openly and blatantly engaging in morally reprehensible behavior supposedly justified by this misguided and irrelevant notion that the people we are "at war with" are "savage animals" whom would be doing everything we are doing (and worse) to us if they could. I was raised to believe that America was always supposed to be "better" than countries/groups that employ tactics like torture, "extraordinarily rendition," and indefinite detention and that WE were supposed to set an example for the rest of the world in terms of standing for (real) freedom, justice, and the rule of law even if nobody else on the planet did. Now, supposedly because of 9/11, people like Bush/Cheney and their supporters seem to believe that in order to beat the "terrorists" and their followers, we MUST change the rules and adopt similar methods of dealing with them even if it means abandoning or finding ways around years of adherence to international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, our Constitution, and even our own collective moral conscience that USED TO prevent us from engaging in tactics like those employed by totalitarian regimes such as Saddam's Iraq. While it is clear that we must always remain engaged in developing ways to combat new and/or growing threats to our country and the rest of the world, I believe that there are plenty of other ways that Bush/Cheney, et. al COULD HAVE responded to 9/11 that would've accomplished (whatever it is we've actually accomplished) without blackening our own souls and trashing our "moral authority" in the process. The old adage, "Two wrongs don't make a right" has never been more true than it is now and will become even more true when faced with the prospect of more attacks on our troops in Iraq and elsewhere not to mention the fact that our troops/civilians when captured might face a far more uncertain and dangerous future since our enemies have now seen that we no longer plan on playing "fair" with them.