by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n I<\/span>n Mark Twain\u2019s\u00a0Tom Sawyer<\/i>, a “committee of sappy women” petition the governor to pardon the murderous Injun Joe.“If he had been Satan himself,\u201d Twain snorts, \u201cthere would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky waterworks.”<\/p>\n I thought of this passage as I read with disgust the international reaction to the hanging of Saddam Hussein. People who shrugged at Hussein\u2019s torture, mutilation, murder, and genocide are now shocked, shocked that his victims sent him off to Hell with a few humiliating barbs. What do you expect? These are the people whose fathers and brothers were slaughtered by Hussein and his minions. It strikes me as the epitome of restraint that they just hanged him rather than paying him back in cruel kind.<\/p>\n A lot of this uproar is merely the whine of ideological and political axes being ground. Europe\u2019s complaints in part reflect the knee-jerk, clich\u00e9d anti-Americanism that addles the brains of those presumably more sophisticated and nuanced thinkers across the Atlantic. Also, Europeans have fooled themselves into believing that they have evolved beyond such barbarous practices like capital punishment. They haven\u2019t caught on yet that their EUtopia is a transient luxury financed by American military power. They\u2019re idealists because they can afford to be. Let the conditions that have subsidized their idealism change, and we\u2019ll see how pacific and civilized is the continent that gave us two world wars and a genocide.<\/p>\n As for the Russians and Arabs, it takes monstrous shamelessness for them to make a peep. Russia has handled its jihad problem in Chechnya by killing tens of thousands and leaving Grozny looking like Berlin in 1945. As for the Arab regimes, torture and summary execution are as common as flies. And why would we pay any attention to the complaints of Iraqi Sunnis, many of whom still idolize the murderous Hussein and still torture and murder their fellow Iraqis?<\/p>\n B<\/span>ut in the West, larger cultural forces account for the bizarre sentimentalism that thinks feeling sorry for the deserved humiliation of a ruthless psychopath is somehow the sign of a superior moral sensibility. Maybe it is, if you are a person of faith, aware of his own sinful nature and believing in a God who will judge and to Whom the evil must answer. But most of the whining about Hussein has come not from the religious but from the liberal secularists who sneer at talk of good and evil. And that provides us the clue to this reaction.<\/p>\n Such concern for murderers and indifference to their victims reflect the therapeutic imperative dominating the affluent West:\u00a0any<\/i>\u00a0suffering, even of those who have earned it by their heinous acts, is an abomination to be clucked over and avoided. This attitude is in turn generated by the deterministic superstition that ultimately murderers are not responsible for their crimes. Since all causes are material (genes, lack of education, unjust social and economic institutions), free will is a chimera, and good and evil merely empty labels for the effects of these material causes.<\/p>\n Once moral responsibility has been stripped from actions, all suffering is equal and equally intolerable. Not that we should be unmoved by the suffering of even the evil. The tragic sensibility of the ancient Greeks could recognize and even pity the suffering of an enemy, as Aeschylus does in the\u00a0Persians<\/i>, but this recognition was never sundered from a moral judgment \u2014 \u201cthe doer suffers,\u201d Aeschylus says elsewhere. We should feel the suffering of the evil, but never apart from our consciousness of the crime that earned it, and never without the sobering lesson that we too are subject to the same punishment if we transgress the limits put upon our actions. That\u2019s how, as Aeschylus puts it, \u201csuffering teaches.\u201d<\/p>\n But for us therapeutic sentimentalists, all suffering is bad, even that of the guilty, and so we should eliminate it even for them. And we think this attitude is more \u201ccivilized,\u201d that the common humanity of the evil is more important than their evil deeds. But of course most evil people are still in many ways human like us. Most of the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust loved their wives and children, experienced joy, appreciated beauty, and feared pain and humiliation and death. So what? That\u2019s like saying they had two eyes and two legs. They were still evil and deserved to pay for the actions.<\/p>\n This sentimental indulgence of evildoers has encouraged more evil by ignoring the whole issue of responsibility and just payment for one\u2019s freely chosen actions. How is that \u201ccivilized\u201d? How is it a moral advance to allow those who despise the humanity of others to burden the earth with their presence, to enjoy the sun on their face and the food in their mouths, and all the other goods they stripped from others?<\/p>\n Ah, but that is mere revenge, some say, and we have evolved beyond revenge. Personal vengeance, taken apart from the community\u2019s laws and protocols, is indeed an evil. But the vengeance of the community, its institutionalized punishment of those who violate its collective values, is justice. If that punishment includes a few seconds of humiliation, it is still just, considering the crimes that earned the punishment. Instead of weeping, like Twain\u2019s biddies, over Hussein\u2019s sordid but richly earned end, we should be celebrating that the world has been disburdened of a monster, and that his evil has met its just deserts.<\/p>\n \u00a92007 Bruce Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Separating Hussein’s execution from therapy. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers In Mark Twain\u2019s\u00a0Tom Sawyer, a “committee of sappy women” petition the governor to pardon the murderous Injun Joe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,762],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1qW","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5313,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/deconstructing-kerrys-case-against-president-bush-part-one\/","url_meta":{"origin":5514,"position":0},"title":"Deconstructing Kerry’s Case Against President Bush: Part One","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 14, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Now that we've heard in two debates the Kerry-Edwards case against President Bush, we should look critically at the Democrats' position. Kerry's most important charge is that Bush mishandled the war in Iraq: that it was (and presumably still is) \"the wrong war at\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8421,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/were-still-dumbing-down-the-iraq-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":5514,"position":1},"title":"We\u2019re Still Dumbing Down the Iraq War","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 21, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"The truth about the danger of Saddam Hussein and why we went into Iraq. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Jeb Bush tangled himself up recently when he tried to answer a dumb question on the intelligence failures about Iraq\u2019s WMDs and their role in going to war with\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terrorism"","block_context":{"text":"Terrorism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war-on-terror\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/war-450x312.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6419,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bad-reasons-for-bombing-syria\/","url_meta":{"origin":5514,"position":2},"title":"Bad Reasons for Bombing Syria","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 3, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine President Obama Saturday laid out the\u00a0case\u00a0for a military strike on Syria. He evoked the same rationales Secretary of State\u00a0Kerry\u00a0and others, including some conservatives, have been articulating for the last week. We\u2019ve heard of \u201cinternational norms,\u201d \u201ccommon understandings of decency,\u201d the \u201cinternational community\u201d that codified\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5242,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/lo-the-u-n-by-what-name-do-we-call-thee\/","url_meta":{"origin":5514,"position":3},"title":"Lo, The U.N. By What Name Do We Call Thee?","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 9, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Failed, useless, dubious, impotent, pernicious, morally exhausted . . . by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Every crisis is an opportunity, a time when the fissures and cracks of received wisdom and worn-out habits of thought are exposed. The years since the terrorist attacks on 9\/11 have been such a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1985,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/defending-the-un\/","url_meta":{"origin":5514,"position":4},"title":"Defund the UN","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 1, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Defining Ideas Florida Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has introduced in the House of Representatives the UN Transparency, Accountability, and Reform Act. The purpose of this legislation is to allow the United States \u2014 which pays 22 percent of the UN\u2019s core budget, and 25 percent of its\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10115,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-tar-pits-abroad\/","url_meta":{"origin":5514,"position":5},"title":"The Tar Pits Abroad","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 24, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Defining Ideas \u00a0 As missiles fall on Syria in retaliation for Bashar Assad\u2019s medieval use of chemical weapons\u2014and as voices call for the use of some American ground troops to expedite his removal\u2014we might reflect upon American military interventions in the post-Vietnam era. America\u2019s major interventions\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bill Clinton"","block_context":{"text":"Bill Clinton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/bill-clinton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5514"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5515,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5514\/revisions\/5515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}