Why is a bloody tyrant getting his just deserts generating so many official grimaces and shocked swooning amongst the professional political classes? That Saddam Hussain’s executioners visited upon him a tiny measure of the degradation and horror Saddam’s own busy hangmen inflicted on so many others when he was in power is a trivial matter. Tyrants should have neither consideration nor dignity, deserving only to reap the harvest of hatred from the fields of skulls they have themselves planted, ideally at the hands of their victims or suitable representatives.
Tyrants are killed as punishment for unspeakable evil acts and as a warning to other would-be tyrants. Puncturing their vanity and disrespecting them is not ‘inappropriate’, it is justice and a small measure of revenge for against a person towards whom the most appropriated emotion is hatred. That such a person controlled a state makes their debasement all the more important, though quite possibly that very fact lies at the heart of why so object to what happened to him.
Sic semper tyrannis.
Perry writes:
Because it’s easier than thinking about any of our real problems!
Best regards
Hah! I had to comment because this is *exactly* what I said to my girlfriend this morning when the news was all about Tony Blair being “under pressure to comment” and Gordon Brown speaking out about how “unacceptable” it all is. “Who cares?” I yelled. “They’re just saying what they think people want to hear. Nobody cares what happens to Saddam.”
My girlfriend laughed, as she is wont to do when I’m ranting at the news, and then suggested that I should read the news and interject my own comments. Interesting idea for a vlog, I thought…
I thought the ‘outrage’ was because the taunting might aggravate his supporters and cause yet more violence?
Though I think his supporters would have taken any excuse to up the violence.
I apologise profusely in advance for spamming my own blog, but I attended a very saddening, as well as enlightening, event last night in Oxford celebrating not so much Saddam Hussein’s execution but remembering his victims and particularly one families’ experiences of that man.
I’m just a humble Samizdata reader, of course, but no complaints from me for spamming your blog, Julian. That was a very interesting read, and one I trust I couldn’t have gotten from elsewhere anyway. Thanks!
Aegir, but clearly it is the case that as you indicate it would be hard to see what worse violence his supporters could be pushed into by this that they were not already doing.
This is indicitive of a serious flaw in contemporary thinking on morality. there are, roughly, a trillion gazillion things worth more consideration in the world today than whether Saddam felt discomfited in his final hours. Half of Zimbabwe’s population is starving, 100,000s of thioousands are dying in Darfur, hell 4 people were executed in Japan and, while they probably deserved it, they deserved it far less than he did.
Something is genuinely sick in our society, the future is bleak.
If the last few years have taught us anything it is that there is no reasonable basis for what Muslims do and don’t get het up about. Why did Hamas shoot three Palestinian children in the head? Why did Somalis shoot a nun in the back? Why did millions erupt over a fewcartoons in an obsucre paper from a country they’d never heard of?
Because, basically, they just enjoy being violent.
Unfortunately, I must disagree. We’re supposed to be better than that. One doesn’t beat the bastards by becoming one of them. The sight of my country’s (America) military presiding over what amounted to a lynching sickened me. We should have shot him ourselves. While I do feel a measure of sympathy for the victims of that evil bastard, he was their problem – not ours.
Nothing was at stake in Iraq that was worth the life of a single American soldier or marine. If you’d like to take issue with that, be my guest, but you’re going to have one helluva hard time changing my mind. The only thing that this fools’ errand in Mesopotamia has accomplished is to cause us to take our eyes off the ball and divert assets away from countering genuine threats to our genuine interests.
Bear in mind that I’m not being contrarian simply for the sake of doing so. I simply fail to see how the interests of my country are being furthered by sending our military into a quagmire that was foreseeable and avoidable. Finally, I have a real problem with those who are so eager to send someone else’s sons go and die for that which they themselves are unwilling to fight. When you decide to lace on the boots, strap on the ruck and pick up the rifle, give me a call. I’ll meet you at the recruiting station (be the second time around for me, anyhow).
‘Sic semper tyrannis’, eh. What an utterly appropriate comparison . . .
Deo Vindice.
Trav.
(No offense intended, BTW . . .)
Absolutely, but now by condemning the taunting, our blessed leaders have distanced themselves from the cause. That makes me wonder whether the whole thing was set up to provide an obvious pretext for the violence and the PM can say that it was this ‘disgraceful behaviour’ by ‘rogue elements’ (perhaps) that caused it.
How curious. Actually a genuine lynching by Iraqi people is exactly what I would have suggested as appropriate. If you think giving a dignified death to a mass murderer, torturer and rapist is being ‘better’ than ‘them’ then perhaps I should ask why is not expressing hatred for a person utterly deserving of hatred and letting him know he is hated not an appropriated thing to do? This is about extracting vengeance for the sake of those left behind as well as those in the mass graves. As he can only be killed once regardless of the vast number he killed, letting him know he died reviled seem the very least he deserved.
They why do you have a problem with the people who suffered most under him being the ones to extract their vengeance?
Many folks who comment here have ‘done their war’ and even those who have not end up paying for the volunteers who go there. We have had (to my knowledge) three people who have been there leave comments broadly in favour of the war in Iraq.
And BTW, no offence taken, your views are entirely reasonable and well expressed.
But from what I hear, the manner of his execution allowed Saddam to demonstrate courage and more dignity than his executioners. They managed to make a mass-murderer look good.
One doesn’t beat the bastards by becoming one of them.
Precisely
Ian and TDH,
I’m afraid you are 100% wrong. It is ONLY by becoming like them that we can beat them.
Then afterwards, the threat having been dealt with, we can go back to living our civilized lives.
You see, for us here in the West, civilization is not a veneer: it’s woven deep into our collective psyche, and we are perfectly capable of becoming savages, and then becoming model citizens again.
I cite the WWI veterans as sterling proof of that, and could cite many more.
“After you, Claude” and similar Marquis of Queensberry stuff is misplaced when you’re dealing with utter bastards like Hussein.
Taunted? My only regret is that the heartless prick wasn’t flogged first, if only to repay him in some tiny measure for the unspeakable pain he visited on so many.
Yeah, I’m a barbarian. People like Saddam Hussein turn me into one.
Normally, I’m a complete gentleman.
Yes they did. But the operative word, as you correctly state, is indeed ‘mass-murderer’ and as mass-murderers go … he most certainly did.
“They managed to make a mass-murderer look good.”
Or actually in some sick way there are people who saw some good in Saddam and are trying to blame others for their own perverted thoughts.
The loudest critics of Saddam’s execution are the same chattering lot who try and characterize any occurrence as yet more evidence for the evil intentions of G.W. Bush.
There are of course those who object to capital punishment on moral grounds, but their more considered criticisms (see posts above) are easily separated from the usual vacuous blather of the BDS set.
The Americans (as Saddam’s custodians) were in a tough spot with this one. On the one hand, they’ve made great efforts to support formation of a viable Iraqi government, with the moral authority to make its own decisions. On the other hand, there was quite a rush on the part of Iraqi decision makers, who seemed to be playing fast and loose with their own laws.
The decision to turn over Saddam seems to have been made, reluctantly, to avoid undermining the fledgling Iraqi government. Refusal would have seriously damaged the Maliki government’s credibility among the Iraqi people and foreign regimes.
The same critics that now lay the cruelty and “rush to judgment” charges at the feet of G.W. Bush would have used the refusal to release Saddam to the Iraqis as proof that Maliki was just an American puppet.
End result: why undermine Maliki when there was obviously no way to win this one in the Press? Saddam was a rat that deserved what he got (and more). Let the local people deal with him in their own manner.
As for Saddam, good riddance to bad rubbish.
Sic Semper Tyrannis. Deo Vindice. Both under one topic. I love it!
Whilst I don’t mourn Saddam’s execution – as Gabriel mentioned above, there are far more important transgressions going on in the world to worry about – I condemn a state’s ability to take the lives of its own citizens via the judicial process, and this applies even in the case of a heinous villain like Saddam. I believe a St Helena solution for him would have been more appropriate. If that’s too much of an administrative pain in the arse, how about simply chucking him in with the general prison population in the States? The Murderous Dictator v. The Aryan Brotherhood – quite an entertaining show.
As an aside, the guards taunting Saddam at the gallows with the name of Muqtada al-Sadr doesn’t exactly represent a promising harbinger for Iraq’s future. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
“One doesn’t beat the bastards by becoming one of them”?
-What utter tosh.
One doesn’t become one of the bastards merely by beating them.
Goodbye and good riddance, Saddam. I would have made it a thousand times more slow and painful for the bastard. And broadcast it all, too. And if you think that would make me no better than him, then you’re lost in the oblivion of moral relativism, end of.
James,
“I condemn a state’s ability to take the lives of its own citizens via the judicial process . . . ”
Speaking as one who intensely distrusts State power, I sympathize with your view. Especially if I imagine myself or someone close to me in front of a firing squad due to a case of mistaken identity.
However, since you mention St. Helena, consider how differently events would have developed had Napoleon been shot on Elba. True, 1815 might have been rather dull for Wellington, but dull would have been quite an improvement for who-knows-how-many Russians, British, Belgians, and yes, French. Had the Weimar government shot Hitler following the 1923 putsch, something over 50 million people would not have had their lives cut short.
I think those what-ifs are relevant because there are a large number of Saddam loyalists running loose who would have continued their depredations in the hope, no matter how slim, of his eventual return to power.
To take a life, even with full judicial support, can never be taken lightly. But part of the calculation must necessarily consider the possible consequence, to unknown innocents, of allowing a stinker like Saddam (or Hitler, or Napoleon) to live, and continue to command the loyalty of bitter-enders.
One of the (few) legitimate functions of the State is to maintain a certain order, and to protect the citizenry from violence on the part of criminal elements – and once-and-future despots. Where a legitimate (loaded term) government holds sway, the fault for the tragedy of a State killing belongs directly with the perpetrator of the crime(s). By his own actions, he has forced civilized men to kill him to protect their fellows.
Due to his own crimes, and by the continuing crimes of his supporters, Saddam Hussein was the definitive candidate for a State execution.
As for the bleating of the “professional political classes” mentioned in the Topic, I still think these characters are merely trying to score some rhetorical points with the public. I’ve not heard one of them take a moral stance as you have. They just want to make themselves look good by criticizing the behavior of the Iraqi executioners, and implying the American administration had a hand in, or approved of, that behavior. I don’t think they really give a rat’s ass about Saddam being “humiliated”.
Yes, Aryan Nations. That would doubtless be quite a show. Film at 11.
Kim wrote< and I think it's worth a repeat:
Best regards
I see that Boris Johnson lost the plot almost totally last week in the Telegraph, on Thursday. He wrote that Blair should “speak out” about the fwightfully vulgar nature of Saddam’s execution, said this had turned the mass killer of Kurds etc into a sort of martyr, and of course it would have been much better and so jolly civilised to have sent the ogre to a nice gaol, or perhaps a rather gentle execution involving sleeping pills and some Mozart backing music.
Truly cringemaking.
And the comment, which I seemed to have lost.
Agreed. War is savagery (“diplomacy by other means” puts it mildly). War should surely be pursued with savagery (that is all warlike vigour), to get it over with sooner, so that no generation of our youth, or that of our enemy, suffers under the misapprehension of war as normality.
Best regards
I have to say watching the video of his execution I was not appalled. I still think he got let off lightly. He should have been hung, drawn & quartered with his bits devided up in different places so nothing could be a shrine to him. Or better yet drop him off in Kurdistan and let them deal with him as they would.
Undignified would be to execute him and stick him in unmarked grave in the middle of desert.
You notice those who want us out of Iraq for imperialism are the same ones bleating that Iraq is executing former members of Saddams regime?
I wonder how many of the anti-war crowd would have been less appalled by Saddam’s execution if they’d shot him at point blank range along with his family, doctor, nanny, and dog and flung their bodies down a mineshaft in Yekaterinburg?
Perry: keep up the good work.
“…would have used the refusal to release Saddam to the Iraqis as proof that Maliki was just an American puppet.”
But there was a dubious American intervention: they refused to let Maliki do the hanging the Iraqi way – in the main square in Baghdad. There we would have seen some real abuse….
I have a great deal of time for Kim’s position. For generations we in the West have only managed to maintain our civilisation because we have the capacity, when needed, to astonish with our violence. Lest we forget, the firestorms of Hamburg and Hiroshima were the products of deeply civilised societies at the end of their tether.
Except…
What sickened me about the execution of Saddam was that the baying crowd was chanting the name of Moqtada Al-Sadr. We have replaced a brutal collectivist with a Shia theocracy in all but name. Con-fucking-gratualitions. Over three thousand NATO troops should never have been died for that.
And what is Afghanistan but a theocracy? Seeing as most of the commentariat here are European or American and are therefore from states which embraced secularism as the only alternative to interminable wars of religion (take that you papist, transubstaniating bastard et-fucking-cetera) the idea that we have expended huge quantities of blood and treasure on establishing theocracies is beyond me.
Now, I can almost understand the UK under that prick Blair doing this but what I utterly fail to compute is that the USA lead this farcical children’s crusade. For God’s sake (and I mean that almost literally) couldn’t they have realised that the new Iraq had to be a secular state, especially considering the historical fact that the aggressively secular USA constitution has enabled that country to be the most religious state in the entire developed world?
This would be almost an amusing oddity if it wasn’t for the fact that Iraq is heading for a vicious Sunni/Shia civil war which might just have been avoided if we’d forced a secular constitution on them. Of course we didn’t feel that was the right thing to do because Iraq is overwhelmingly Islamic (and this is absolutely not a war against the Religion of Peace) so instead we allow them to enshrine Islam at the heart of their constitution. Great, whatever, except we never considered that the Sunni and the Shia have 1300 years of animus against each other. Brilliant!
Saddam should have been lynched. He should have died without the dignity that he conspicously failed to afford hundreds of thousands of his victims. Sic Semper Tyrannis and all that. But he should not have been executed by what, to all the world, looks like the gentlemen of hench of Moqtada Al-Sadr. That was very wrong and will only accelerate Iraq’s slide into anarchy and civil war.
I find myself thinking that American soldier (or was it a Marine?) would have saved a lot of grief if he’d just chucked his grenade into Saddam’s “spider-hole” and blown him and his flat Pepsi and Bounty bars to kibbles and bits.
“Why is a bloody tyrant getting his just deserts generating so many official grimaces and shocked swooning amongst the professional political classes?”
Because it is a memento mori,they start to feel to chill wind of th graveyard,none of our “leaders” like to see one of their own go down.
I fear that a large part of the chattering classes thought Saddam was a thoroughly good bloke, but daren’t say so.
Archie is abolutely correct, I am afraid. The journalist and historian Paul Johnson, in his books such as Intellectuals, has observed the weakness of certain types of “radicals” for violent men, hence the penchant for characters such as Castro, Saddam, Yasser Arafat, Milosovic, numerous African thugs, etc, etc. Of course, this is not a strictly left-right issue, given that rightwing writers and intellectuals have fallen prey to the supposed charms of Franco in Spain or Mussolini in the 1930s, or even Hitler.
Maybe it is the moustache thing, the dressing up in uniforms, or whatever. There is a whole PhD thesis waiting to be written on it.
I disagree. I wear a uniform about 46 hours out of the week, and oppress the masses, and once had a mustache, and even my wife wanted very little to do with me.
Jon the only price of admission to their little club is a hatred of all things American, Jewish &/or English.
Jonathan,
I almost buy you & Paul Johnson’s thesis.
Except…
How can anybody in even the semblance of a right mind hero-worship Yasser Arafat. My Gran didn’t like him and it had nothing to do with Middle-East politics. She just didn’t like him because he was an ugly little fucker with a tea-towel on his gulliver. I mean he wasn’t exactly Clint Eastwood now was he? In fact, if memory serves, my Gran was of the opinion that he looked like he had “hatched out of a dickie’s egg”. My Grandmother had strong, instinctual beliefs and by and large they were right.
Personally, I would put Saddam and Slobbo into the same category. I mean, forget their politics, the torture, the “crimes against humanity” they were just utterly repulsive.
I remember watching TV quite recently and being absolutely stunned to hear that in the 70s the Arafat was something of a Che Guevarra-style sex-symbol to radical left birds. I have heard some curious sexual fantasies in my time but that almost made me spill my tea.
Fortunately, my missus (or any of the girls that preceded her) have only ever held a candle for people I could kinda see the attraction of. On occasions credulity has been somewhat stretched but never to the depths the Arafish swam at.
I’m just pissed-off that evil turd died in a state of the art French Army hospital rather than face down in the gutter like he so richly deserved.
Though I fondly remember hearing of his passing on Samizdata. I think Perry posted something along the lines of “Yasser Arafat’s condition has improved – he’s dead”.
“Sic Semper Tyrannis” – “Thus ever be to tyrants”
John Wilkes Booth is supposed to have shouted this phrase as he jumped to stage of Ford’s Theater after shooting Abraham Lincoln…
The phrase is attributed to Brutus at the assassination of Julius Caesar…
The Nuremberg Trials have demonstrated that the best way to piss off tyrants who had committed crimes against humanity is to give them the fairest trial possible all the way.
That is if rightful side intends to highlight its moral supremacy over the defendants.
The way Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti had been executed not only shed light on his executioners being in no wise better than their victim and just as perverted and immoral. It made the tyrant in his final moments of life look firmly confident in his own right. In his own eyes Saddam emerged on that scaffold as a moral victor over foreign occupants along with their collaborators and in the eyes of his supporters a martyr and an icon of Iraq’s fighting for independence.
It is a tragic development for the Iraqi people and a firm founding ground for their future authoritarian leaders.
All is left for us is to sit back and enjoy the show – who will be the first to help Iraq get its next tyrant to establish political stability in the country for the next decade or so.
Your guess is as good as mine.
This is about extracting vengeance for the sake of those left behind as well as those in the mass graves. As he can only be killed once regardless of the vast number he killed, letting him know he died reviled seem the very least he deserved . . . Many folks who comment here have ‘done their war’ and even those who have not end up paying for the volunteers who go there. We have had (to my knowledge) three people who have been there leave comments broadly in favour of the war in Iraq.
OK, let’s define ‘vast number’, shall we? And, BTW, I’d like to be far more comfortable than I currently am that all of those ‘mass graves’ aren’t as absolutely fictional as the WMD’s. I’m certain that Hussein killed his fair share but he wa’n’t no Hitler (or Mao, or Stalin, or Pol Pot, or . . .) and I still fail to see that it’s God-given duties of the American and UK militaries and populations to avenge those killed in any case.
It seems to me as if those we are apparently doomed to serve very carefully ‘cherry-pick’ the bastards they deem worthy of retribution. Hussein’s dead – what about Mugabe and Kim Jong-il? I would argue that the potential return on investment is nowhere near high enough on the one hand and the costs devastating on the other – hence, ignorance of the former and negotiation with the latter. Rwanda? Burma? East Timor? Ceylon? If we are to start, where do we stop? Saddam was ‘just right’. Doable. 3K or so dead Americans and a few hundred or so dead Tommies – what the hell, there’re many more where they came from . . .
I seem to remember reading somewhere that the drums were being thumped over Belgian babes skewered on bayonets by the Kaiser’s hordes in 1914-15. The more things change . . .
Sorry if I seem more than a bit cynical when I consider the purity of our respective governing classes’ motives. I’ll get onboard with the latest fools’ errand when I’m convinced that the interests of their fellow citizens occupy a higher tier in their estimation than their own self-aggrandizement . . .
Perry, you argue well, but I’m a tough sell . . . Regards,
Trav.
“Sic Semper Tyrannis” – “Thus ever be to tyrants”
John Wilkes Booth is supposed to have shouted this phrase as he jumped to stage of Ford’s Theater after shooting Abraham Lincoln…
Booth was a Virginian. Sic semper tyrranus was and is the official motto of the State of Virginia. Things was differ’nt in them days, I reckon. If you were a citizen of the recently-subjugated Confederacy, Lincoln probably wasn’t high on your list of favorite people in 1865.
I’m not sure about the attribution to Brutus – although it would have been an appropriate statement coming from such as he. Regards,
Trav.