Not the Kind of Facts We Expected

Under President Bush, executions reach lowest levels in decades.

and

The European Union needs to learn from the US in order to stop its over-reliance on trucks.

Iraq's Charles I Moment

There has been much discussion about the execution of Saddam not exemplifying the properly impartial and majestic operations of blind justice. To the contrary, this whole debate is an illustration of blindness -- the blindness of us Americans as to what we have wrought in Iraq.

We have two models for what the execution should have been: 1) A routine execution of a serial killer, kind of like giving Jeffrey Dahmer a lethal injection; 2) A Nuremberg trial where the international community exercises the impartial standards of international human rights law.

But of course the execution was not and could not have been either of these things.

Let's just dispose of the second fantasy first. Door no.2 ignores the obvious, overwhelming fact that the "international community" never wanted to try Saddam Hussein in the first place, indeed they never wanted to overthrow him; in fact, if it was up to human rights lawyers and the United Nations, he would still be in power. And even when he was overthrown, the international human rights community washed their hands of the trial from the beginning. So a trial and execution was not conducted in ways that those who would sooner die than participate in it preferred. Hardly news.

But why could not the execution have been a neo-liberal/neo-conservative "exercise in democratic values"? Because it was an expression not of democratic values, but of REVOLUTIONARY values: like King Charles on the scaffold, Marie Antoinette on the guillotine, Nicholas II and his wife and children up against the wall in the Ekaterinburg cellar, Jezebel's blood being licked by the dogs.

The whole idea between an autocratic system is that the head of state is responsible only to God. The King may not be above the law in a theoretical sense, but he is most certainly above an earthly judge and jury, as Charles I rightly point out to the kangaroo court that tried him. See A Coffin for King Charles.

And a king rules by means of a nobility, a privileged class. What was Saddam's nobility? His Tikrit landsmen. And what was Saddam's gentry? The Sunni Arabs as a whole. An attack on the king is an attack on the whole system of hereditary privilege. And such an attack cannot be conducted legally, because law flows from the constitution and in a revolution the constitution itself is in dispute.

Revolutions are by nature illegal, partisan, and undecorous. The enemy must be tarred and feathered and dispatched to Nova Scotia, slaughtered in Drogheda, guillotined, banished to Siberia, or butchered in the temple of Baal. Only when the opponents have been purged then may it happen that the new political community sees the wisdom of routinizing their rule and protect the rights of all the remaining citizens. If the country is lucky, then they will then see the wisdom of creating the impartial laws of state machinery that can dispatch serial killers and other malefactors with the impartiality. Until that day, however, like God in relation to His creation, the head of state is never and nowhere subject to those laws.

Judging from the written descriptions (I have not seen the video and certainly have no plans to), Saddam's Shi'ite execution seem to have been no more vengeful and rude than the Puritans, Jacobins, and Bolshevik executioners before them. And the Sunni demonstrators seem no less blind and hardened in obstinacy than the Cavaliers and Irish, aristocrats and Catholics of Vendee, and Kolchakists and kulaks before them. Make no mistake, the Sunni demonstrators are not offended by the nature of the execution -- at most that's an insult topping up the already unforgivable injury -- but they are offended that the vulgar Shi'ite mob has laid its hands on God's annointed, and in doing violence to his person dared make it clear that they will no longer accept that they are inferior.

"I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it" -- Oliver Cromwell

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" -- Thomas Jefferson

"One cannot reign innocently" -- St. Juste

"Pick him up and throw him on the field that belonged to Naboth the Jezreelite" -- Jehu

"Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!" -- Shi'ite militiamen

And another unvarying part of the script is the quiet and devout prayers and serene confidence in divine favor shown on the day of execution by Charles I, Louis XVI and his queen, Nicholas II and his whole family, and Saddam Hussein. And the shock and outrage of the emigres exiled by a ugly, vengeful, and vulgar revolutionary regime.

It is certainly consistent and legitimate to be revolted by all four executions -- or to support them all as the rising up of people unquestionably oppressed for centuries. It is also legitimate to pick and chose based on your ideology which one you support and which one you oppose. (Although why all the supporters of Cromwell and Robespierre's revolutions, not to speak of Lenin's, have suddenly acquired an interest in canonizing the saintly martyr, the pious tyrant of Sunni Arab revanchism is a mystery to me.) But all are an illustration of the same fact that revolutions are not dinner parties, nor are they objective trials and impartial applications of law, but in their nature they are an exercise of raw dictatorship by one formerly subjugated part of society over their ci-devant subjugators, a dictatorship that lasts until the formally ruling class accepts its dispossession. (Which as the Iraq events show, is not going to happen there anytime soon.)

But it is unlikely that the Americans will be around for when civil peace is reestablished in Arab Iraq. We don't understand the Iraqi events, because we no longer understand revolutions, and like all post-revolutionary people assume that a revolution is just an election, albeit a rather bitterly contested one, kind of like Florida 2000. And the American policy makers are now trying to work up the courage to use our forces to suppress (legally and constitutionally, of course) the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Independents and keep in charge the Girondins, the Kerenskyites and Cadets, and the anxious Presbyterians of the Shi'ite Islamic Revolution. But they, and the rest of world public opinion will be suprised to discover that having had his name chanted in Saddam's face by his executioners, and thus in the face of the revanchist suicide bombers killing them by the scores every day, is a recommendation of Moqtada al-Sadr to the harried and terrified Shi'ites of Iraq, not an embarrassment. (Abdul Aziz Hakim is undoubtedly this moment wishing they had chanted "Hakim, Hakim, Hakim!".)

We have made a revolution in Iraq, one which we cannot control and should not try. It is a day of the oppressed masses rising up against centuries of deprivation and humilition, of drowning Pharoah and his chariots in the Red Sea, and so of course we are therefore terrified and perplexed by a phenomenon which we insist has never had any place in our sanitized faith and history. By all means get out now while we still have time.

Of course in the short run it will look pretty ghastly. Revolutions almost always do. As Jezebel quietly reminded the arrogant new master sporting his prophetic commission to wreck vengeance on the wicked: "Did Zimri have peace, who murdered his master?" And if the Shiite revolution does win, a spell of (cautious, limited) counter-revolution will still be necessary if Iraq is to get any kind of decent government. But all those deploring the ugly, vengeful, and vulgar death of Saddam had better start getting used to the fact that in the end they will have to make a "regicide peace" with Iraq's new masters who will no more repudiate this deed than Putin will rebury Lenin in a common grave. When Saddam was sent to the gallows, one name was entered into the pantheon of Iraq, and I fear it was "Moqtada!"

Why Two Common Biblical Arguments against the Death Penalty Don't Work

John H has recently posted his rethinking of the death penalty, stressing the importance of the passages in Genesis 4 and John 8, where God/Jesus foregoes applying the death penalty to a person definitely guilty of a capital crime.

I made some snarky comment in his comment box, and now I feel I should pay for it by doing him the courtesy of a reasoned argument why I believe his exegetical case doesn't stand up.

Now, I'm not going to try to convince anybody one way or the other about the death penalty, but I do think both of his Biblical arguments are flawed.

For Genesis 4, I would argue for a more dispensational reading. (Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day, right?) .

In Genesis 4, Cain is worried about being killed by a passer-by (not by the state, which doesn't exist). God gives him a mark of immunity. In fact God was simply letting Cain get away with murder. In Genesis 3-6 we have a situation in which God has not given anyone the right to shed blood -- blood of animals or blood of men. Yet the world is divided into those righteous in their generation, who obey God (the line of Seth to Enoch to Noah), and the wicked (all the rest).

So we have a world in which violence and righteousness are completely sundered. Those who obey won't kill, those who don't obey -- will. The only form of killing is murder, and only the righteous are subject to it. We see the result -- the Flood.

After the Flood, the broken post-paradisiacal situation is explicitly revoked and reversed by Genesis 9, and men -- even those righteous in their generation, who obey God -- are given the right to kill: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man." And they are also given the right to kill animals: "The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything." The two go together, blood vengeance and meat eating.

Together these commandments establish a world in which violence and righteousness are no longer completely sundered -- and hence God will preserve the world from any future Flood.

About John 8, I think it is completely irrelevant to any question of the death penalty -- not for it or against it, but just irrelevant. Too little attention is paid to verse 6:

The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

The bolded verse should instantly recall for the reader the other episodes of the Pharisees violating their very own laws in order to attack Jesus. For example, in Mark 3:4-6, Jesus heals on the Sabbath, asks the Pharisees "Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?" and they respond by breaking the Sabbath rest themselves -- to do evil!: Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.

So is there anything in the context that suggests this whole thing is a set up, that the Pharisees and scribes are not even obeying the letter of the Mosaic law, that the whole thing is a stupid, odious trap? Yes, there is. They "brought in a woman caught in adultery." Caught in the act. Alright, so where's the man? By definition, if she was caught in the act, a man was caught with her. The law of Moses is clear: If a man commits adultery with another man's wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death (Lev. 20:10). No exceptions for the adulterer allowed. So where is he? And how convenient that someone was caught in adultery just when the Pharisees need a cleft stick to put Jesus in. One would almost think that the adulterer might have been one of them who arranged the convenient "caught in the act" deal with some po' Judean trash he'd been seeing since who knows when to give them one.

If He says "Let her go" He's breaking the Law of Moses, if He says "Stone her" He's party to what the people know is an injustice -- that's the basis for the accusation they want to make against him.

Without the adulterer the whole thing stinks of a set-up. It's a politically motivated prosecution, prosecutorial misconduct, pulling a Nifong, using the justice system as a partisan plaything -- call it what you will. What it is obviously not is a good-faith effort to apply the law of Moses fairly. And just as when Jesus is presented with other "heads I win, tails you lose" accusations, he turns it around on them.

"If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her": this is not some generalized statement about "judge not lest ye be judged" -- this is a specific reading of the hearts of the Pharisees who couldn't give a d**** about the Law of Moses and are simply trying to find a way to do in Jesus and don't care how much damage they do to everyone around them in the process.

If I was on a jury, and a Republican prosecutor brought in a case alleging that some Democratic politician was caught in a kickback scheme, and then it come out in the course of the trial that another, Republican, politician was just as deep or deeper in on the crime, and the prosecutor declined to charge him because, well after all, he's on our side -- well, I would vote to acquit no matter how plain the evidence against the Democratic politician was. And my doing so would say nothing about what I feel is the proper legal penalty for taking bribes.