I suggest that it is a bad thing to rejoice when an evil person meets a brutal and bloody end?
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be glad that a specific situation is improved by their removal, neither am I saying that the desire for revenge on the part of individuals personally affected isn’t totally understandable.
Let’s take Hitler as an example, accepting (as I think most people do) that he was a bad and dangerous person, it is a good thing he was removed, however, I am concerned that for us to say (words to the effect) “I hope he really really suffered before he died” and to celebrate his actual demise (as distinct from his simple absence), does something bad within us.
I’m not entirely happy with the way I’ve expressed the above, but it is the best I can do for now; it stems from a bit of a heated argument I had with someone in the office this morning who could not understand that my “Although I recognise it as a necessity, I am not overjoyed that it was necessary to kill evil person X” does not in any way equate to “I wish evil person X were still alive and in a position to cause harm”.
Such is the nature of joy if you are a feeling human being. If people are potatoes tightly bound in a burlap sack and someone comes along and cuts the string…aaaaaaaaaahhhh…how do you spell relief?
Later, perhaps, we can discuss intricate niceties of moral philosophy but as for now let’s all sing and dance and celebrate the death of two evil tyrants. Didn’t you see the movie The Wizard of Oz?
:)** Ding Dong the witch is dead.
The wicked witch, the mean old witch.
Ding Dong the wicked witch is dead! ** :)
This is being argued in the pit but I am staying out of there. I think you are right. A few disjoined thoughts:
Hate the sin, not the sinner. As a society we punish people for the wrong they do and one of the reasons for this is to express our condemnation of those acts but we do not rejoice in the punishment, rather we are saddened that we are obligated to punish in whatever measure, big or small. We are glad justice was done but we are saddened that it had to be done.
We have outlawed cruel and unusual punishments and we have outlawed torture because we have recognised that those things diminish us as a whole, not the subject. No matter what evil a person does we recognise it is not acceptable in civilized society to torture them. Most civilized countries have abolished the death penalty.
If you have to punish your child do you rejoice in it? I think only a very sick person would. And yet you do it because you know it has to be done.
I would be sad that evil deeds made justice necessary. I would be glad that justice was done. But I would not rejoice at the death of anybody, not even my worst enemy. I think people who would rejoice in the killing of an enemy are much closer to Saddam Hussein than they would like to think. That kind of hateful thinking leads to a spiral of violence where groups are continually avenging prior acts from the other side.
One of the arguments is “Ah yes, but if you were one of the opressed victims of Evil Person X’s regime, you would think differently”.
Probably true, but Isn’t this just because brutality and abuse breaks people; rape victims hate rapists not because it is good to hate rapists and not because they enjoy hating, but because rape has damaged them psychologically.
>> if you were one of the opressed victims of Evil Person X’s regime, you would think differently
If one of the direct victims of Saddam’s Hussein was posting in the board about what he would like to do to Saddam, I would understand it but the people posting those things here are not.
It is understandable that people who feel wronged would want revenge. It is human nature (and not the best of it). Some people in America feel wronged and feel the system does not give them the justice they deserve so they take it into their own hands. It is understandable but not something acceptable. A civilized society does not allow a fired worker to go back and shoot his boss and a few co-workers or the mother of a raped girl to kill the rapist.
‘civilised society’ is the important term, I believe; the desire to parade the corpses of our fallen foes (not that I’m suggesting this is the purpose of current events, but it certainly is the mindset of some of the bystanders), the desire to torture our bitter enemies and the exuberant glee at their demise, these things add up (in my opinion) to a departure from civilised society, possibly in the direction of the very evil that we despise.
Uday and Qusay Hussein were going to die sooner or later. All humans are mortal. Their deaths, like everyone else’s, were inevitable. The issue is WHEN they were going to die, not if. Technically, it’s pointless to celebrate anyone’s death, since you’re celebrating an inevitable event; it’s celebrating that it happened sooner than it naturally would have, and celebrating the positive aspects of it happening sooner.
As
The world is a better place without them, and
They abandoned all entitlement to sympathy long ago,
I see no reason to feel bad about celebrating the fact that they died sooner rather than later.
And this from a guy who opposed the war. Good things can come out of bad decisions, and this was one of them. Two of them, actually. The U.S. has rendered a great public service here.
You are forgetting an important aspect: The issue is NOT when they were going to die. The issue is how they died. Had they quietly died of pneumonia in a damp cave, the US military would have hardly made a huge media campaign out of these photos. It is the “They are dead and we killed them” that led to these photos. If the US military enjoyed the full trust of both the Iraqi population and the world, and if the US government had the full trust of their own population on the issue of this war, we would have never seen these pictures. It would have been perfectly enough to show them, say, to the new Iraqi council. The fact that the US made them public has a reason: That they are dead, now, is not what matters. What matters is that it was the US who killed them.
Okay, RickJay, what about suffering? That’s not inevitable. What if Richard Tater got an impacted tooth and people were celebrating because of how much pain he was in.
I do think that it’s natural to rejoice in the pain and death of somebody you hate. I don’t think this excuses it, though. We should be above that. However, I understand that it’s hard, and I would be reluctant to chastise someone for it.
There are plenty of people who have lost their “humanity card” and fully deserve to have their life revoked. I would submit that I would, indeed, take pleasure in the grisly death of a monster, except for the fact that…they might not BE a monster, circumstances could be different from what is only known via second-hand information (including that available to a jury.)
Therefore, I am against capital punishment, and am against mindless slaughter of those one suspect of atrocities, but I do take glee in imagining quick deaths of those reasonably assured of being evil.
Getting all worked up about the death of evil scum likek the Husseins and Idi Amin and Strom Thurmond to my mind falls into the category of namby-pamby Ned Flandersism. Really, there’s bigger fish to fry. I’m completely comfortably with my enjoyment of their deaths. I only wish Strom had suffered more.
You guys DO understand there’s a difference between wishing and acting, don’t you?
In short, I’ll sum up my feelings and try and stay out of this since I’ve posted it 49 times in the pit thread.
I have no sympathy for Uday and Qusay, their lives met the violent end that was most expected. We reap what we sow. I am relieved that their terrifying tortures are over and perhaps it’s one more step in the road to rebuilding that country.
However, making JOKES about them and using their death pictures as your desktop (which someone mentioned in the pit) and raising a glass and pointing and basically saying “IN YOUR FACE UDAY!” seems sort of, less than civilized. they were monsters who didn’t see the humanity in their victims, they were damaged goods, like feral dogs who can’t be socialized or reformed. But to act like animals in return (dancing in the streets and making jokes) doesn’t seem right to me.
Like I said in that pit thread, when my cousin’s murderer (beat him to death with a bat) was sentenced to life in New York (I don’t think you can get death there, can you?), and FLIPPED OFF MY GRIEVING UNCLE in the court room, our family didn’t jump up and cheer and have a party that he’d been sentenced. They all cried. They collapsed into each others arms with a sort of exhaustion and relief. The sentencing brought closure, but would never wipe out what he’d done.
Rather than spend time spreading high fives about someones death (which is never cause for celebration), I am simply quietly relieved.
In almost every instance, the “evil” person in charge was far more a reflection of the culture and society they held dominion over as a singular cause of suffering which would not otherwise have occurred.
If a brutal and chaotic period in a region’s history necessitated a “strong” military leader to “restore order”, then the choice of who exactly becomes the tyrant is somewhat academic. It is shortsighted in the extreme to lay all the oppression and inhumanity directly at the feet of one personality.
This is not to deny that personality’s responsibility, merely to point out that celebrating their demise is somewhat moot.
Evil Captor, sure, but the possibility that just wishing upon someones death could in some way lessen us as human beings, I think is entirely there.
I always think of people like Osama bin Laden and the Husseins as people I don’t understand.
Something must have made them what they are, but I’ve never experienced it, so I can’t understand how they feel.
Therefore instead of just labeling them evil, I hope for them to realize one day, the uselessness of their actions, and maybe get a better life that doesn’t end with them getting a bomb on their heads.
But that’s never going to happen, and like so many people, they are doomed. i don’t grieve them, nor do I celebrate them, I simply reflect on the fact that they chose wrongly in life, and that maybe people can learn from it.
I have to agree with jarbabyj’s sentiments on this one. The ending of another human life strikes me as a repugnant thing, under any circumstances. I can believe that in some cases it is necessary, just as in some cases it is necessary to shoot a rabid dog. But to celebrate a death is exactly the opposite of what I feel we should be striving for as human beings.
I can’t agree with this. It implies they did not have a choice in the matter, like a rabid animal who by instinct bites an approaching human. We must remember that they were human (despite all appearances to the contrary), and had the choice to do what they did. They and they alone are responsible for the horrors they inflicted. If their deaths are celebrated, they still ended up much better off than the victims they willingly tortured to death.
In my opinion, both the atrocities these two men committed and the resultant celebration of their demise reflect the same unpleasant aspect of human nature.
I’ll try to make an analogy, although of the Iraq situation is orders of magnitude more repulsive due to the sheer numbers of innocent victims.
I went on a first date not long after Timothy McVeigh’s execution, and oddly enough for a first date, we ended up in a deep and heated conversation about the death penalty (among many,many other things). He asked me what I thought of the death penalty; I told him that I believed that a few human beings were truly and irredeemably evil to the core, but that I didn’t think that I, or any other mortal being, should have the right to decide whether they should continue living.
I feel pretty much the same way about the Husseins. Why would one even wast energy rejoicing in the death of anyone, no matter how evil? All I can manage to do is feel deeply sad about all the waste of human life that led up to this mess.
Am I sorry they’re dead? Nope. Am I sorry that these two particular little Iraqi boys grew up to be such monsters? Absolutely. Am I glad they’re dead? Only to the extent that I’m glad they won’t be inflicting any more suffering on innocent people. Use your joy, or whatever you want to call it, to invest in some thought, or even better in some action, about how to fix the evils they have wrought, and how to make the victims whole.
:)** Ding Dong the witch is dead.