Sermon: Saddam's Execution: A talk back

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Saddam's Execution: A talk back

By Charles Rush

January 21, 2007

ve shared with some of you that I periodically take a break from the newspapers. It is not that I need to escape reality but my sense is that we live in an over-exposed world. We get a couple dozen magazines at home, cable TV, and are ever-connected to the internet. Sometimes, you need to unplug because the negativity of the news cycle can also be spiritually poisonous if that is all you live on.

I was unplugged over the holidays when my brother-in-law called me over to his lap top one morning before my first cup of coffee, just the two of us awake in the family. "I'm sorry" he said, "But you have to see this." There were the headlines with the execution of Saddam and the link to the video with what appeared to be a bad Arabic Saturday Night Live tape with religious fascists taunting a secular fascist, followed by a ludicrous violent end.

Both of us just said, "Oh my God" and looked at each other in complete disbelief that this was the real paper on the internet. I sat there with a deep spiritual disgust such as I rarely have these days thank God. It was such an unfulfilling end to an involvement with a Madman that had already taken up way more attention in my lifetime than was warranted.

It struck me that this was a moment that got away from us somehow. The final disposition with Saddam Hussein should have been a moment when collectively all Iraqi's and all of the free world could come together and say, 'the nightmare is over' and 'a new day is dawning'. Instead it felt like 'systematic violence is over' but 'anarchic chaos continues'. It felt like that because, of course, it is like that with 36,000 Iraqi's dying last year, round after round after round.

There were many levels that warrant discussion. Why was there such a rush to the execution? Why was it done in the middle of the night so that it came across more like a lynching than the administration of law? The taunting… I was just incredulous that this was allowed to take place? This raises the broader question of the role of procedure when such a thing must take place: How is this to be done and what is the moral meaning that we are trying to convey?

The video itself- a whole other discussion, important in it's own right. [I happened to see the Political cartoon in the New York Times that had three kids sitting on a couch, watching videos on their cell phones, with that blank expression that adolescent boys get with videos. The first one said, "You see the Saddam video". The second one said, "O Man he is soooooo Dead". The third one says 'Let's see Brittney Spears with no underwear again." This is the world our children are growing up in]. I maintain that this is but one instance of a broader mainstreaming of porno in our world. Technologically, almost everything is available, now we have to figure out the harder moral question of whether it is all good for us. It is definitely shaping us and what kind of people are we becoming?

There is a question of the moral status of retributive justice or honor killing which is so characteristic of the Middle East or so it appears? This approach lifts up revenge as a moral virtue, and in some traditions it is also a spiritual virtue. Most certainly the men in the video thought that what they were doing was virtuous. I would only comment that this is exactly the moral and spiritual environment in which Jesus lived and taught. For me, events like this, throw his teachings into brighter light- a kind of bas relief- and you realize the profundity, as well as the difficulty, of his teaching on reconciliation and forgiveness.

I've asked Michael Radutsky to be present. Michael produced a very important piece for "60 Minutes" a couple years ago on the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the bomber of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, 19 of them children. Michael interviewed the families of the victims the week prior to his execution. Does capital punishment bring closure to the pain that victims feel from their loss? Is capital punishment effective in bringing healing?

There is the question of the death penalty itself? Is it really effective in achieving what it is supposed to achieve?

This case got right to the heart of the issue on that point. There was no question of Mr. Hussein's guilt or innocence. He admitted that he ordered the mass murder of tens of thousands of people using gas. He showed no remorse. He did not plead any qualifications for his case. In the words of a writer for the Wall Street Journal, 'He is a man for whom there need be no human pity whatsoever.'

Curiously, this writer went on to note, Mr. Hussein got the last word as a victim. In turning the camera on him, he was able to give a speech of defiance, because the shame in that moment was on us, perpetrating this execution. The writer actually made the point that in that moment, it wasn't just the haphazard way that it was applied, it was really the death penalty itself that was shame filled. The video just made that transparent for all to see. It shouldn't have been filmed at all. True. It shouldn't have been administered by partisans interested in inflicting retribution as they did it. True. But more than that, this author suggested that the death penalty itself undermines the moral fabric, the very values that we are trying to instantiate.

Finally, I will tell you that my mind has evolved on this subject twice. As a young man, I was opposed to the death penalty, largely because of the actual way that is was applied in the South when I was a child. Writing my dissertation with the Holocaust and World War 2 in the background of my thesis, I came to the conviction that there are certain times and there are certain crimes for which people simply must die. Now, while I still affirm that in principle, the actual instances for which that is true are sufficiently small that, for all intensive purposes, I oppose it.

I could say a great deal more, but I want to also hear from you. We don't have a place to discuss important social issues publicly and the Church seems like a pretty good place to start. You can address any of these levels, or something else that struck you living through this and reading our editorial responses to it. What is on your mind.

Christian tradition does not have an explicit teaching against the death penalty. Neither Jesus nor Paul say anything directly about it. But, our commitment to the sanctity of life, combined with the dramatic unjust and tortured death that Jesus suffered, Christian tradition has long opposed the death penalty. I believe every Mainline Protestant denomination, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Catholics all oppose it.

I came to part company with the vast majority of my colleagues writing my dissertation with the Holocaust in the background. I came to the conviction that there exist certain exceptional social situations where the amount of violence and damage that is inflicted upon society is so great, that for the re-establishment of the social order going forward, some people just have to die. The end of World War 2 was one of those occasions.

In the briefest terms, it had to do with the need to re-establish a society of law in Europe. In her early analysis of that period, Hannah Arendt noted that Fascism and Bolshevism, despite being bitter enemies, fascism from the far right of the political spectrum and Bolshevism being from the far left, had many similarities of structure, one of them being a disdain for existing law and the body politic founded on law.

Both of them were movements. They both described themselves this way. Communism was based on the inexorable laws of class conflict and fascism was dedicated to racial purification. Lenin and Trotsky believed that the inexorable destiny of class conflict could be speeded up by dedicated leaders who had conscientization. So rather than wait for Russia to slowly evolve from a feudal economy to an industrial economy and then to a socialist economy as Marx argued is the inevitable path of development, the argued that they could jump Russia past industrialism straight to socialist paradise if they were led by the 'vanguard of the Proleteriat.' Force had to be applied in an uncompromising manner. And that is what they did. Joseph Stalin was only more consistent and completely merciless. But what they were interested in was the progress of this eternal movement.

Hitler also believed that he and the elite Nazi leaders embodied the pure essence of the movement of racial purification that was the secret to restoring health to the sick body of German society. He unleashed a never ending movement to purification that was simply stopped early on. But to see the full scope of his plans was simply astonishing. He was interviewed in the late 30's and a reporter asked him who would take over the movement is he died and he gave an answer that Lenin or Stalin could have easily given themselves. He said, "I am the movement."

This movement had an open disdain for not only existing laws but the concept of constitutional law itself. In both societies, but let's just use Germany, the Nazi's established dual institutions throughout society. You had the police and the Nazi police. You had the army and the Nazi army. At all levels of government, you had regular bureaucrats and you had Nazi minders that could over-ride, re-implement, just simply change what the regular legal system was about. Over the course of many years, they were able to duplicate almost everything and they would have done much more but they lost the war. The function of this was to replace the legal society with the movement and eventually they planned to completely displace the legal society altogether.

So at the end of World War 2, there was a crying political need to re-establish law, not only because of the regular anarchy that war causes, not only because Germany was shattered economically, but because Naziism systematically sought to eradicate those very foundations. Add to this, the unprecedented reckoning with the destruction of 6 million Jews, a depth of genocide and an organization of genocide simply unparalleled in 10,000 years of civilization.

We had no organization, we didn't even have concepts to deal with it. Out of this we invented the concept 'crime against humanity', recognizing that genocide is not simply a threat to the legal authority of a given society, it was a threat to the legal authority of society itself. And we invented the Nurenberg trials, an international tribunal, the precursor to the World Court because the scope of justice transcended Nation States.

They knew very well that they were making history, evident in the care with which everything was recorded in volume after volume. It was evident in the care with which they chose Justices and established a system of justice to ensure that they could 'mitigate the revenge of the victors' as much as was humanly possible given the fact that the victors were setting the rules and sitting in judgment. They picked justices with impeccable reputations from across Europe, a great number coming from smaller nations. The trials themselves gave all of Europe the opportunity to hold up the mirror and to understand exactly what had just happened to them and to develop a collective moral resolve going forward.

They had just been through a period of organized inhumanity such as they had never known and what they needed to restore was sanctity for life, respect for law, and a basic respect for other people.

I came to conclude that the leaders of Nazism, defiant and contemptuous as they were throughout the trials at Nuremberg, had to be judged, sentenced, reprimanded in unconditional terms even if it was done in absentia, and killed without fanfare that law and order might be unquestionably re-established.