Like the Devil’s Kitchen, I won’t be shedding any tears over the demise of Saddam Hussein today.
The former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, has been hanged in northern Baghdad for crimes against humanity.
Iraqi state TV showed images of Saddam Hussein going to the gallows before dawn in a building his intelligence services once used for executions.
However the moment of his execution was not shown. Pictures of his body wrapped in a shroud were later broadcast on TV.
Like DK, I do not approve of capital punishment. Frankly, the images on the BBC’s website do not fill me with satisfaction that this tyrant received an ignominious end – although, it seems he may have died better than he lived. No, my reaction was one of repugnance, revulsion and horror. In the 21st century we still have societies that brutally end the life of a condemned prisoner at the end of a rope. Deserved? Maybe. But appropriate? No. Never, absolutely not. If society – the state, if you like as society’s persona – is to deliver justice; to express horror at the crimes perpetrated, then to emulate those crimes with state sponsored murder merely reduces that state to the level of the condemned prisoner. The state that decides who shall live and who shall die is as barbaric as the prisoner it dispatches. This is not justice, this is revenge and revenge has no place in justice. By now, we should have evolved beyond such behaviour. We have not, it seems. Mankind proved conclusively this morning that he is as barbaric and primitive as when he dropped down from the trees.
Will this solve anything? Nope. Will the quagmire that is the new Vietnam be any the better for it? Doubtful. Has a martyr been created? Possibly.
Happy New Year.
A truly ghastly spectactle of cold blooded state killing. And there still remain many unanswered questions as to Saddam’s dealings with the USA and Britain. The trial was farcical to the point of pure injustice. Nothing has been achieved by this grotesque sham of a ‘judicial process’.
Worse, the daily slaughter of innocent civilians continues unabated.
Is this ‘mission accomplished’?