An undignified end
Saddam is dead, and cameraphones and internet video come into their own. The jerky style of footage you’d normally associate with bad dancing at weddings will now become synonymous with the rather undignified end of a dictator.
Bush described Saddam’s execution as a milestone. That’s not how it looked. It looked and sounded rather shambolic – shouts of ‘Allahu Akhbar’, someone helpfully suggesting Hussein ‘Go to hell’, and the flashing of several cameras as Hussein hung crumpled, his head at an incongruous angle. In the end, there is little satisfaction to be had from this. I’m not quite sure what kind of person relishes the sight of a human being being killed. I didn’t feel like justice had been done, I felt a little sick. All of the executioners wore ski masks – this was probably for fear of reprisals by Saddam’s supporters, but it mainly brought to mind images of the masked executioner from TV and movies. Much as firing squads never knew whose gun contained live rounds, apparently for executioners, anonymity is still essential. Someone has to pull the trigger, flip the switch or open the trapdoor – we’d just rather not know who.
Justice is defined as “the administration of law or some other authority according to the principles of just behaviour and treatment”. Just therefore requires definition in order to understand justice. Just is “morally right and fair, or appropriate and deserved”. Did Saddam get what he deserved? Yes, almost certainly. Few will miss Saddam, and he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. Still, does it make you feel good to see him hanging? Not me.
I’m not quite sure why I put his photo here. Probably some morbid fascination with what happened. The fact that the photo of his dead body is on the front page of the BBC website suggests that this morbid fascination is shared by at least a few other people, the kind of fascination that sees the crowds gather at public executions. What Bush describes as a milestone seems more like a sad anti-climax. It might give a few people a little satisfaction to see him dead, but it won’t now make the slightest difference in Iraq or anywhere else. Saddam was a spent force when they pulled him out of his bunker, so all we got was a good ole’ hanging.
Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
