Ghost_007
12-31-06, 08:26 PM
The shame of punishment as pornography
By Sam Leith
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=ZOWRBF25HFGUNQFIQMFCFFOAVCBQ YIV0?xml=/opinion/2007/01/01/do0102.xml
You can't beat a good hanging, eh? Ever since the first indications that Saddam Hussein would be hanged "sooner rather than later", the civilised world has taken on the aspect of an over-excited dog making love to a cushion. He's had his possessions sent on! He's been handed over to the Iraqis! Any second! Any second now! Come on... let's see that noose...
What we've been seeing over the past couple of days is the pornographisation of a judicial process. There's no question that Saddam's crimes were terrible. There's no question that, however jury-rigged the legal process by which he was held to account for them, it is proper that he was held to account. But our fever of excitement over that hempen rope is no more than the baying of a mob.
Why, for example, do we seem surprised that the Prime Minister didn't issue some statesmanlike pontification on the subject? What was he supposed to say? Would we have admired him for emerging from a Bee Gee's swimming pool to declare to camera, trunks still dripping: "Tee hee! Snappy-snap-snap went his horrid old neck. Goody gumdrops. I do hope it hurt"? Shades, there, of David Blunkett's uncharming announcement that he was planning to toast Harold Shipman's death with a bottle of bubbly.
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Mr Blair was right to stay silent. The announcement of the death sentence – one greeted, tellingly, with far less excitement than its physical enactment – was the political moment. The rest is theatre.
And, gosh, how we enjoyed it. The formula was unvarying. "All dignity lost," one or other news channel would intone, "the blood-soaked tyrant of Iraq died yesterday, reduced to the status of a common criminal." Aren't the assumptions underpinning that simply bizarre? It seems to suggest that a "common criminal" is a worse thing to be than a mass-murdering despot – that where he really got his comeuppance was in being taken down a peg or two and dying a chav.
And is it true that he lost all dignity? If we were honest, we'd admit that Saddam conducted himself on the scaffold with all the dignity he could be expected to muster. He refused a mask. He stood up straight. He went quietly and prayerfully to his death. Meanwhile, as a colleague points out, what was happening around him – even though the balaclavas were unavoidable – more closely resembled a gang of provos at work in an Armagh back-room than the sober unrolling of a sovereign state's judicial process. Let's not even begin to think about how these images will play with Saddam's Sunni supporters.
Yet editorials and news reports have jeered at Saddam's "stupidity", gloated over his "loss of dignity", and picked over with glee the details of how his guards kept him awake to tease and torture him. We've been hot to download videos and picture galleries of the dictator's last moments; amused to learn that he was denied a last cigarette.
Once we decided Saddam was a "monster" – a monster whom, let's not forget, the West for a long time supported in full knowledge of the nature of his regime – we gave ourselves permission to indulge the basest, most voyeuristic atavism. Cloaked in this murderous sanctimony, we join as one with the crowds who gather weekly in Teheran to enjoy watching criminals swing from a crane.
Nietzsche's warning that "he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster" has seldom seemed more apt. The rhetoric of a war launched in the name of civilisation has degenerated into the cackling of a tricoteuse at the foot of the guillotine. We should be bloody ashamed.
As DH Lawrence argued, "pornography does dirt on sex". The same applies here. The pornography of death does dirt on life. And the pornography of punishment does dirt on justice.
By Sam Leith
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=ZOWRBF25HFGUNQFIQMFCFFOAVCBQ YIV0?xml=/opinion/2007/01/01/do0102.xml
You can't beat a good hanging, eh? Ever since the first indications that Saddam Hussein would be hanged "sooner rather than later", the civilised world has taken on the aspect of an over-excited dog making love to a cushion. He's had his possessions sent on! He's been handed over to the Iraqis! Any second! Any second now! Come on... let's see that noose...
What we've been seeing over the past couple of days is the pornographisation of a judicial process. There's no question that Saddam's crimes were terrible. There's no question that, however jury-rigged the legal process by which he was held to account for them, it is proper that he was held to account. But our fever of excitement over that hempen rope is no more than the baying of a mob.
Why, for example, do we seem surprised that the Prime Minister didn't issue some statesmanlike pontification on the subject? What was he supposed to say? Would we have admired him for emerging from a Bee Gee's swimming pool to declare to camera, trunks still dripping: "Tee hee! Snappy-snap-snap went his horrid old neck. Goody gumdrops. I do hope it hurt"? Shades, there, of David Blunkett's uncharming announcement that he was planning to toast Harold Shipman's death with a bottle of bubbly.
advertisement
Mr Blair was right to stay silent. The announcement of the death sentence – one greeted, tellingly, with far less excitement than its physical enactment – was the political moment. The rest is theatre.
And, gosh, how we enjoyed it. The formula was unvarying. "All dignity lost," one or other news channel would intone, "the blood-soaked tyrant of Iraq died yesterday, reduced to the status of a common criminal." Aren't the assumptions underpinning that simply bizarre? It seems to suggest that a "common criminal" is a worse thing to be than a mass-murdering despot – that where he really got his comeuppance was in being taken down a peg or two and dying a chav.
And is it true that he lost all dignity? If we were honest, we'd admit that Saddam conducted himself on the scaffold with all the dignity he could be expected to muster. He refused a mask. He stood up straight. He went quietly and prayerfully to his death. Meanwhile, as a colleague points out, what was happening around him – even though the balaclavas were unavoidable – more closely resembled a gang of provos at work in an Armagh back-room than the sober unrolling of a sovereign state's judicial process. Let's not even begin to think about how these images will play with Saddam's Sunni supporters.
Yet editorials and news reports have jeered at Saddam's "stupidity", gloated over his "loss of dignity", and picked over with glee the details of how his guards kept him awake to tease and torture him. We've been hot to download videos and picture galleries of the dictator's last moments; amused to learn that he was denied a last cigarette.
Once we decided Saddam was a "monster" – a monster whom, let's not forget, the West for a long time supported in full knowledge of the nature of his regime – we gave ourselves permission to indulge the basest, most voyeuristic atavism. Cloaked in this murderous sanctimony, we join as one with the crowds who gather weekly in Teheran to enjoy watching criminals swing from a crane.
Nietzsche's warning that "he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster" has seldom seemed more apt. The rhetoric of a war launched in the name of civilisation has degenerated into the cackling of a tricoteuse at the foot of the guillotine. We should be bloody ashamed.
As DH Lawrence argued, "pornography does dirt on sex". The same applies here. The pornography of death does dirt on life. And the pornography of punishment does dirt on justice.