Today at the Papa Ratzinger Forum, Teresa posts translations of two editorials from Avvenire – the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference. Both take the perspective that in the execution, justice was done, after a fashion:
Was justice done? No. The mothers, wives and families of those 300,000 victims will not be recompensed for their loss by the execution. But in Baghdad, the story of mankind, ‘beastly as ever,’ as Eliot would say, has once more made an accounting.
Pity for Saddam, yes, but – without allowing ourselves to be distracted by the media clamor over the death sentence and seeing the execution on TV – let us think of all his victims. The unknown, the faceless, dust now in the desert, whose names are known only to God.
The other editorial:
And so, Saddam Hussein has left the stage: hanged in the first light of dawn as the ruthless dictator that he was. It would have been preferable to leave him in a prison cell to live out what remained of his days, forgotten by a society that is finally free, psychically and physically, of his grim presence.
But the circumstances in Iraq today probably would not have allowed that. The overwhelming majority of Iraqis would never have understood. In this sense, Saddam received political justice, consistent with the choices he made himself. It is rare in history that dictators manage to escape with their lives.
His death will not put an end to the violence which is tearing up Baghdad. And someone will surely celebrate it by adding yet another victim to the many whose blood is shed daily in Baghdad these days.
But keeping him alive would not have helped in any way towards that ‘national pacification’ that we all wish for Iraq but which still seems very remote.
Indeed, the reason that might have led to clemency for Saddam would have been exclusively the fact that the life of a man is an inalienable right. And that reason remains valid.
Now, however, we are sure that Saddam can no longer escape. No one will attempt to free him, and in the process, subject the Iraqi government to odious demands reinforced by kidnapping hostages and bombing schools. Dead or alive, Saddam is divisive for Iraqis: the minority that mourn him as a martyr, and those who celebrate his death.
AsiaNews runs a piece by its editor and founder, Bernardo Cervellera, about the hypocricy on the part of some who are decrying the execution:
So far we have always believed that militarism, wars, tanks, atomic and nuclear bombs were the killers of peace. And they are. All offensive weapons are the fruit of ideologies that view suppression of the other as an indispensable condition to the triumph of one’s ideas. But in this year’s message, the pontiff pointed a finger at those relativistic concepts of the person that deprive human rights and the value of the human being of their universal meaning.
For years, in the UN, European parliament and other international organizations, there has been a push towards a vision of this type, which does not hold the rights of a Chinese or man as equal to those of a European or American. The result – recorded frequently by AsiaNews – is always of indifference about the fate of millions of people who are killed, tortured and suffocated in their expression while the boat of national and economic interests sails over calm waters. Some months ago, in the lead-up to talks between
China
and
Europe
, Antti Kuosmanen, the Finish ambassador to
Beijing
, said candidly that “human rights” were not a “dominant point” of the report.
If we consider that the same organizations – the UN, European parliament – are fighting a war for “freedom” of gender definitions (male, female, lesbian, gay, and so on), of de facto couples, of abortion as a “reproductive right”, of the manipulation of embryos, then we understand that this relativism is none other than a serious form of schizophrenia. We saw it in action with the death of Saddam Hussein too.
Another view from Carol Iannone, at NRO:
In a film of this low level, looking like something that could have been done in the depths of the gulag, we do not see the cruel dictator who committed crimes against against humanity being executed honorably and in a dignified way—in a manner of death more humane than he inflicted on others—in order to serve justice, but a poor helpless human being having his God-given life taken away by ordinary men who have somehow been given power over him, some of whom taunted him in his last moments. And his executioners being hooded did not carry the idea that they were personifications of abstract justice, but suggested in that context the primitive, hooded, faceless murderousness of the Middle East that we often see in parades and funerals. Terrible, terrible, terrible, and another sign that Iraq is nowhere on the rule of law and that we have been utter fools to think that this society even understands the meaning of those words at this point. And the execution being done around the time of a Sunni holiday, that makes it even more of a transgression and an embarrassment.
Read Previous Post
