On suffering

There is something intolerable in the suffering of humans... for it is evil and that the person who causes it is a criminal.
Romain Rolland

Like many people, I was disgusted by the state murder of Akmal Shaikh in China. I am, have been, and will remain a passionate opponent of capital punishment and no amount of debate or argument will shift my position. I am against it viscerally and mentally. There is not enough space to go into it here, but one day maybe.

Today, three years ago, the dictator Saddam Hussein was hanged in a mockery of justice. This is in no way to condone his behaviour of over three decades in power, or the horrific crimes his regime perpetrated both on his own peoples and those in neighbouring countries, after all he did invade the land of birth Iran and fought a wasteful 8-year war to stalemate.

But there was something grotesque in the snatched mobile phone footage of him swinging stupidly as life left his body.

Twenty years back this week, the Ceauşescus, Nicolae and Elena, were summarily shot by a frightened firing squad after a hastily put together after a kangaroo court had found them guilty of crimes against the people.
Again it was a macabre scene of an old man and woman who suddenly realised that their end was imminent. It was horrible!What these state sanctioned murders (I refuse to call them executions, because it seeks to sanitise what is being done, they are pre-meditated murder pure and simple) do is to desensitise people to the value of human life and there is nothing more precious.

That is why the government is right to condemn the Chinese regime, not because they did not carry out the trial of Mr Shaikh properly and according to their penal code, but that that code still maintains the death penalty, and China kills more people officially than the rest of the world combined.

I can do no better than finish with some words of George Orwell's, telling the story of an execution that he witnessed whilst serving in the police in Burma in the 1920s.
"Until that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man... was alive just as we were alive..."

Have a look at http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty