When I was still quite young, and Her Majesty's Government were still in the habit of officially-sanctioned murder (the last ones happened a few days after my 10th birthday), I wasted an awful lot of time musing on judicial executions and wondering, if somebody who killed another person deserved to die, then who hanged the hangman.
Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and a killer, though no worse than other tyrants and certainly rather benevolent in comparison to some who have conducted their reigns of terror with the blessing of the CIA - the names of Anastasio Somoza (
père et fils) and Augusto Pinochet (so recently permitted to die a dignified death in old age) spring rapidly to mind and there are many others. Though I am of the school of thought that the invasion of Iraq was a monstrous blunder (rather than an act of unmitigated evil as some maintain), I did not shed tears over the fall of Saddam from power. Nor do I particularly mourn his death today, although inside I feel outrage at the manner of its coming about.
In his tenure as Governor of Texas, George W Bush sent 168 people to their deaths. Maybe they killed others, most of them probably did. Not many of them got a fair trial; most were black, and dirt poor, generally of very limited intelligence, and were saddled with a public defender who, as like as not, got the job because they didn't pass muster for a reputable law firm, and didn't give atoss. Many were mentally ill. Some had kicked back after years of appalling abuse. Reading their case histories (a useful resource is Rick Halperin's
Death Penalty News & Updates) makes it clear that these people were pathetic rather than evil. Perhaps evil is as evil does.
After all, I maintain strongly that no state can be called civilised that practices capital punishment.
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