So, this is not bad enough to put someone to death or consider it evil. If this guy hadn’t mentioned that he had kids, I would have thought he was a teenager.

I have just read that Saddam Hussein is dead. Hung by the neck until dead ” isn’t that the phrase they always use on television? And I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness. Everybody has to start by saying that it isn’t bad that Saddam Hussein is dead ” he was an evil man. But what is evil? It is a religious denunciation, a way to set a person apart from humanity. We need to do this I suppose. And if we say that Saddam Hussein is an evil man, don’t we then have to say that other men are good? Who is good I wonder? Where do we find these men of goodness? To say Saddam Hussein was evil is too easy, it lets us off the hook. Saddam Hussein was a cruel man, a selfish man, a desperate man, a sad man.

He was a bully I think. He was a man who never knew happiness I think. He rationalized his actions I’m sure by saying that he did what had to be done. He called his own enemies evil, and tortured them completely. Saddam Hussein was all too human. He walked among us. In this moment of spiritual limbo between Christmas and the start of a new year I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness.

I feel sadness because we repaid cruelty with cruelty. We did it because we allowed an emotionally disturbed man to lead us, to direct our actions. We destroyed Saddam Hussein’s life. This was perhaps justified. Do we destroy every cruel man’s life? Is it our duty to destroy every cruel man’s life? Still, it was not less than he deserved. Take away his livelihood. What will we do to the war profiteers who had a hand in murdering our own children for a few dollars? Will we be as angry, as cruel?

We killed his children while he was still alive. We hunted them down like animals and slaughtered them without dignity. As a father I will say no human deserves this. Once we have reached this level of cruelty it has gone beyond repayment. It has become something visceral, something deep within our souls that we usually try to hide, even from ourselves. But we felt no shame. We celebrated this cruelty, cheered it and broadcast it to the world. Who gave us this lisence I wonder? Now that this Pandora’s box is open, will we be able to close it?

What is evil? Maybe this guy would think it evil if his kids were killed. I think that it should be safe to say that the murder of innocent men, women and children is evil.
And of his adult sons, here is a list of the atrocities committed by his son (warning: there is a picture of this corpse).