Saddam Hussein: May the universe piss on your eyeballs.

I am not a proponent of the death penalty. It isn't that I don't believe that the ultimate sanction is inappropriate for criminals who murder their victims I would happily see them all boiled in oil in the ways of my ancestors but rather that my reasoning for opposing the death penalty lies outside the overt world of crime and punishment. I don't believe that the State should have the right to murder its citizens.


My reasoning is thus in the same field of concern as that which prompted the famous American second amendment: the right to bear arms which has taken on a special poignancy as its 'Taliban' president has motivated the rapid post 9/11 drift to a form of Taliban America. The organised State functioning as oppressor is the greatest enemy of individual liberty- the seed for development- and therefore we can never allow the State to kill anyone other than in active self-defence.

Nonetheless I found myself taking the view common to many other of my class of wishy washy liberals, i.e: Thank goodness someone has the death penalty for that arch scumbag Saddam Hussein. For him I make-a-da exception. As the public leading representative of the State he committed untold acts of misery against the common citizen and was the source of premature death for, conceivably, millions.

He gave us an opportunity to remove him when he made his general threats of mass murder [again, after again and again] against his neighbours and other citizens of more remote regions and it was in his case apposite that he should experience that which he so gratuitously meted out to others.

I suspect I would make a similar exception for Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong il, Pol Pot and any other semi-human being who abuses their governance mandate and violates the rights of their citizens in pursuit of some or other ideological, self-serving mission resulting in misery, death and destruction for, again, untold millions.

Notwithstanding this impulse and desire however I do not believe that Saddam Hussein should have been dealt with the way he has been, although I can appreciate the need for expediency. As a casual reader following the trial reports in our local press [as well as being bathed in counter propaganda from the global mass media who increasingly seem to be acting in some outlandish form of concert for such overtly competitive institutions] I wouldn't say that the Iraqi justice system inspired me.

On one level we could all say that he was lucky to get any trial. There were flaws it's true and if we set aside our near fanatical pickiness approach over points of law, to rationalise anything we deem not to our liking, then even that simulated 'kangaroo' court was better than a bullet to the brain at three am in a dark place with no opportunity to discover why.

On the other hand we can see it as an opportunity lost. I have pondered for some years on this conundrum. How do we give apt punishment for acts of supreme evil- the unwarranted killing of human beings being one- while at the same time denying the organised State the right to exact retribution through use of the ultimate sanction, to exact what is most often a political revenge.

My preference under these circumstances would be for what I have called [elsewhere] the 'Socratic solution'. You may recollect that Socrates was charged with 'Impiety'- that is, he was charged with teaching the young how to protest against the excesses of the ruling classes- not something that should ever be a crime; since those who govern must accept that reasoned and sometimes vociferous opposition to their governance is a right. In one of those bizarre quirks of human behaviour Socrates was apparently found guilty by a small minority of the Athenian Senate [plus minus 2500 years ago], but was subsequently sentenced to death by an overwhelming majority of the Senate, indicating, to Robert Heller in particular, that human beings behave in a most peculiar way.

There are those who argue that the composition of the Senate was not the same on the second occasion when the form of sentence was voted; but nonetheless it has always seemed an ironic record that people who may not have found him guilty on the first round of voting, should nonetheless have subsequently voted for his death. There are others who argue that the speech he made in his 'defence' prior to the vote on sentencing, so enraged even the most docile members of the Senate that they were bound to vote for the death penalty.

In the event the condemned person [in the ancient Athenian State] was always given an option: they could choose exile and life banishment, which by the standards of the time was tantamount to death or they could choose suicide, by poison [hemlock]. Socrates chose death by poisoning, and thereby gained a level of immortality.

By choosing to die at his own hand the State was thus absolved of any guilt, and therefore no person's hands are washed in blood, and the State does not get an unhealthy taste for it. In our contempory sense the law would suggest that the requirement that a human should choose to self immolate could construe cruel and unusual punishment and I would agree with this possibility, and therefore would suggest, as the Athenians did, that a 'banishment' option would be expedient.

Undoubtedly in a globalising world banishment becomes a problematic issue short of
shooting the fellow off into space. In my story, the Azanian Konfederacy- the
history of Corinth Starr, the Elder, I invented the 'Virtuality game'
as my preferred solution to the problem of banishing or exiling the kind of scumbags
typified by the late Saddam [aka SHHhhh] [see 'The Azanian Konfederacy' in
Google.] I think this Virtuality Game will become the place into which the
condemmed will be strapped for eternity unless they choose death by self immolation.
There would be intervention points for those who chose the Game: at six months,
sixty months, six hundred months or so on- with a quicker death option at each
point.

In the case of the late Saddam since this preferred solution was not available and the court as representative of an enraged populace chose to execute him then I fail to understand why it had to be done in such a secretive and apparently inhumane way- a way guaranteed to create enemies of the State- not only of some groups within the State. .

In their furtive, almost superstitious, dread of the Evil powers of SHHH-. They rushed to stamp him out: filled with fear and loathing; and they missed the point-. It would have been a wonderful salutary lesson, to have him publicly excoriated; With careful attention to detail and the attention of the world's media with advertising rights to Freedom and Human Rights his despatch could have been made a far more salutary lesson to the other scumbags out there terrorising their citizens before the cameras of an impotent world.

The late Rumanian dictator with the Emelda Marcos clone wife, both with unspellable names, was furtively knocked off in an even more secretive execution, and it didn't do anything to deter more of these pestilential maniacs from seizing control of at least a dozen countries now.

His death could have been far more efficiently used for instance than the humiliating end to Mussolini who you will remember was captured by Italian citizens and summarily executed and hung upside down in a village square: where all and sundry pissed on him- but alas there were no naughty cell phone records of that time for all the world to see and chortle over and for despots to cringe over. The release of dishonourable footage of the entire event regarding Saddam's despatch, only serves to reinforce all the reasons why the State should never have the right to kill anyone. When a despot is despatched then it should be for the people themselves to see to the despatch in public and on the Internet.

I do feel therefore that a case for the public stoning to death [a barbaric Islamic favourite for such, as adulterous wives.] by an assemblage of widows could have been made for Saddam Hussein since it was deemed necessary to use the death sentence. [and don't write in and tell me that hanging is/was the only legal method. The man/monster was tried under laws that didn't exist when he was the dictator and were controversially, made retrospective according to some commentators. If they could do that they could also have altered the form of the execution.] Hanging is for ordinary decent criminals not for those who more resembled Dracula than a human.

So if we had to have this scurrilous execution[and I repeat that I do not support the use of a death penalty] they could have had him running stark naked around a well-guarded town square while a hail of stones whacked into him, starting with little stones and working up to bigger stones and then to cannonball sized lumps of rock and full-on boulders to smash and crush and ultimately stamp him out of life while we the planetary audience could have been watching the whole thing on close up reversible slo mo.. Thereafter the entire assemblage of aggrieved women could have gone and pissed on him to the extent of justifying a final verdict of death by drowning as was customary amongst the Ndebele for rape convictions. Thus he could have been both simultaneously eliminated from decent society and justly humiliated for his crimes against our entire species. That was the opportunity we missed since it was necessary to martyr the man through what reeks of underhand chicanery.

I would have preferred to wrap him into a virtual reality nightmare fed on a constant drip and locked on constant replay with variations like an endless eternal groundhog day that always ends in terror and horror and then starts again, for the next forty or fifty years. Perhaps for his executioners the true punishment is to end the game altogether.

May his soul [assuming there is such a thing and that he had one] rot in eternal hell [assuming there is such a place]. May the universe piss on his eyeballs- or in the immortal words of the great Bard- Fuck him.