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On December 3rd, the United States military will publicly livestream the execution by firing squad of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.
I’ve made my strong support of the death penalty — and specifically of public executions — abundantly clear over the years. (For a primer, you can listen to this episode of the now-defunct Motte-adjacent Bailey Podcast, my first and to date only podcast appearance.) My initial reaction to this news was jubilant: talk about getting what I voted for! While my preferred method of execution here would be hanging, a firing squad is certainly a step in the right direction in terms of de-medicalizing capital punishment and emphasizing its fundamentally violent and retributive nature.
My observation of the discourse around it has given me pause, though. The apoplectic relationship from the political left has been predictable, and was unfortunately always priced in; the reaction from some on the right, though, has been sobering. Professionally Christian commenters have lamented what they see as the barbarity and vulgarity of the live-streaming aspect. (“This makes us no better than Al Qaeda! We aren’t some third-world dictatorship! This isn’t Who We Are™️!”) Many have warned that this will generate photogenic martyrdom propaganda that will inspire and energize future jihadists. (We’re giving Hasan exactly the attention and validation he always wanted!”)
These arguments give me pause not because I agree with them, but because they highlight the way that this is a rubber-meets-the-road moment for my ideology. To what extent have I allowed myself to become so radicalized by hermetically-sealed online discourse, such that I imagine my beliefs to be far more popular than they are in reality? Is what I imagine to be a broadly common-sense perspective actually going to prove deeply unpopular and massively polarizing once implemented publicly? Scott Greer, generally a reliable barometer for where the normal Middle American opinion sits, thinks so.
Personally, I am concerned that the Trump administration will, yet again, find some way to botch the aesthetics of the occasion, reveling in low-class pandering and/or ostentatious cruelty. (There is also the possibility of visible corruption: perhaps viewers will need to pay for a bespoke streaming platform which will put revenue in the pockets of Trump, Trump’s family, or a consortium of Trump donors.) There is a part of me that wishes that the first public execution in America since 1937 should be postponed until it can be overseen by an administration that is less inherently polarizing than this one. To some extent, about a third of the country is fully committed to hating whatever Trump does, no matter what it is; perhaps under a future administration with a higher baseline level of public trust, this event could serve as an opportunity for genuinely restrained public discourse about capital punishment, rather than an opportunity for retrenchment of existing political fault lines. If done incorrectly, this event has the potential to set back the political hopes of death penalty maximalists such as myself for a generation or more.
I’m still planning on tuning in to watch this execution. As someone who discovered the snuff film parts of the internet at a relatively young age, I’m pretty thoroughly desensitized to images of death. (And frankly, having seen a number of videos of firing squad executions, they’re a lot more mild than you might think.) I hope that perhaps there will be some small number of individuals who might find it inspiring — and that there may be others who are in some way deterred, even marginally, from future criminality. The executioners need to strike a delicate balance during the proceedings: solemnity and restraint, acknowledging the humanity of the condemned while also not getting bogged down by mawkish faux-contrition about having to end his miserable wasted life. Keeping the proceedings focused primarily on the victims, including testimony by survivors such as this guy may help to quell any instinctive sympathy for the condemned that viewers could otherwise experience.
America has no collective moral standard. So what else can one expect than complete chaos?
To put things in perspective, the eugenic argument for killing violent criminals is simple and straightforward. The argument for reveling in their death is different. As someone who has always been vary of group pathologies, this event and the surrounding characters make it feel like we are skirting the line.
As an example, killing a child rapist is just. But making a spectacle of the event where the intent is to invoke some emotional gratification or celebration goes beyond chasing the mere utility of ending a bad life. Good people don't enjoy suffering. The true celebration of ending the lives of criminals comes in the form of safe and happy societies that are free from the terror of living with bad people who allow themselves to cause undue suffering.
This should be especially obvious to those of the 'Christian' persuasion. Of which, one has to conclude, most Red Tribe Americans are not. If you feel anger or hatred for someone, the 'Christian' thing to do is for you to forgive them, if only to save yourself and those around you. Wrath is a sin. And if your conception of these events differs greatly from this Christian framework, you're probably not 'western'. That does not mean letting criminals go free, you should still seek justice. But beyond that justice you have a life to live.
It might be the case that the modern western person is simply too sheltered and cowardly to face the reality of what the third world necessitates. And that the 'spectacle' of the act is necessary in some way. But until such arguments are made, this feels like another slip towards barbarity. If this guy was to be executed, walk into his jailcell in the middle of the night and end him. Everything else is degenerate. I mean, he is paralyzed from the waist down, no? Are you going to shoot a guy in a wheelchair?
And as has been overviewed, the third worlder is no stranger to public executions. And dying a martyr for your cause is not something you should fear. So the only people not understanding what is going on from any angle are the 'westerners'
Listening to this person made me sympathize with the soon to be martyr. It could only be deduced from this interview that some Americans are incapable of understanding the suffering of others.
An American saying this about a middle Eastern terrorist is beyond a joke. America has no moral currency in that part of the world. It was all spent on the graves of children. 'They should not shoot our soldiers when they are not prepared' is laughable, and further serves to highlight just how morally lost America is.
This is true inasmuch as "wrath" is, when used technically, the sinful version of anger, but anger is not itself sinful in the Christian tradition.
Doing this is how the Soviets did it. Secret executions are the tool of repressive governments everywhere, and breed secrecy and fear. The Western tradition is one of public executions. The condemned also has, in the Western tradition, certain last rights that would be abrogated by executing him in his cell while he slept. As far as I know it is routine for other executions in the United States allow outside witnesses to attend.
You can argue that these are outdated ideas but understand that in the Western tradition you reference shooting someone in the back of the head in their cell block pattern-matches onto totalitarian regimes, whereas a public execution is pretty much the staple Anglo-American tradition.
Now you can also argue, I think, that livestreaming it is a bad idea. But it seems to me that we can address the question of if executions should be public and if they should be livestreamed separately.
Why? He killed a pregnant woman who was his comrade-in-arms.
Nidal Hasan is not a Middle Eastern terrorist, he is an American citizen and soldier, born in Virginia, who shot his fellow soldiers to death when they were unarmed in a place of trust.
I think the fact that this sentence exists demonstrates the weakness of the 'American citizen' bit in being the sole definition of who is (or should be) an American.
Clearly, calling this man is a terrorist, that's not a partisan statement. And clearly he is Middle Eastern (which is why his parents called him Nidal instead of James). His attack was motivated by his Middle Eastern religion and his attachment to his fellow Middle Easterners. He may have had American paperwork, and even an American accent, but he clearly did not consider himself American in a meaningful sense of the word.
Excellent point. Real Americans have names like 'Running Bear' or 'Flying Eagle'.
People who call their children names like that tend to identify primarily as members of their (pre-American) tribe, and not primarily as Americans, which kind of proves my point.
Oh, when you said 'American', you meant 'UnitedStates-ian'.
I'm not sure I've made my point clear. As far as I am aware, there is no coherent ideological framework that justifies giving those of English extraction a special claim to the territories of both the United Kingdom and the United States.
One can either:
claim that particular areas of land belong immutably to certain ancestral groups, which would endorse the Daily-Mail reading gammons' calls for remigration of the London-born children and grandchildren of South Asians from England, but also demand the remigration of white people form North America (and possibly the English from Scotland and Wales);
reject ancestral blood-and-soil claims, and judge individuals not by their ethnicity or the etymology of their names but by their personal actions, drawing no distinction between Mr Hasan and a hypothetical alternate-timeline perpetrator born James Anglesax, whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower or the Susan Constant and who converted to an extremist form of Islam and committed a similar massacre; or
recognise land as belonging to whichever group is capable of seizing it by force, which would dissolve any ethical high ground between 'a descendant of Englishmen killing a descendant of Arabs to maintain the status quo' and 'a descendant of Arabs killing a descendant of Englishmen to overturn the status quo', and incentivise a metric arse-load of bloodshed until partisans of option 2 manage to establish a claim on behalf of All the descendants of the last common ancestor of all humans to the third planet from a ~two octillion tonne yellow dwarf star in the Orion-Cygnus arm, for now.
All three are logically coherent, but as someone who would greatly prefer that violence be kept to a minimum, I favour the second option.
I didn't say there was. I said that both Hasan and his parents identified primarily as Muslim Arabs and not as Americans. Which seems pretty obvious to me. Some ethnic groups in America do chose to identify as Americans, which is why, for example, Chinese Americans give their children names like Andrew, Amy and Jenny instead of Wei and Fang.
Did you mean to respond to somebody else?
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