More whining from the left

From The American Spectator:

After World War II, Winston Churchill initially opposed war crimes tribunals. He believed hearings would afford Nazi leaders dignity they didn't deserve. Instead, the losers should be dispatched without benefit of trial: Why not just hang the bastards?

Time marches on, I guess. Current British PM Tony Blair spoke out against Saddam Hussein's death sentence when it was handed down in November after the two-year trial. Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema used outrage over the former leader's hanging Saturday to urge the United Nations to enact a worldwide death penalty moratorium.

The two statesmen represent elite European consensus on the subject. The death penalty is thought beyond the pale -- abolishing it is a prerequisite for membership in the European Union. The London Economist recently editorialized, "capital punishment [is] wrong in itself, however wicked the guilty party," even the very wicked Hussein.

It's also sort of gauche. James Fallows is a former Carter speechwriter and an old hand at the Atlantic whose writing represents the leading edge of respectable opinion in the U.S. His thoughts on Hussein's capture and hanging are interesting because, like so many Baby Boomers, he couches these judgments in the experiences of his generation.

Fallows tells us that he is okay with "[d]eadly force as necessary in military or police campaigns." (Made peace with Vietnam? Check.) He is even satisfied with the bloody way the U.S. military dispatched Hussein's two sons. However, "calmly-administered death, via the guillotine or the noose"? That is very clearly "something else."

"[A]t this stage of life I am flatly against capital punishment, even for the worst of humanity," Fallows admits. When he was a younger liberal he may have "listened respectfully to arguments about 'deterrence'" -- note the scare quotes -- "and the importance of society's being able to administer the gravest of penalties for the gravest of offenses," but he's put away such childish notions: "I'm in my 50s now, and I think: this is barbaric."

When the Eurotrash leftists and former Carter Administration hack leftists are united against something that itself amounts to an almost airtight prima facie argument that the thing, whatever it is, is in fact good.

The argument against capital punishment is an argument against the concept of basic human dignity. If we are truly responsible, self-aware, free moral agents then we may act is a way which causes us to forfeit our right to continue existing.

To deny this is to deny the essential moral responsibility, and by that I mean the ability and duty to act responsibly, which lies at the heart of our concept of ourselves as sentient and free individuals. If we do not bear individual responsibility for our choices then we are, each of us, just one more ant in the hill and we have no business thinking of ourselves as anything more.

The argument that we elevate ourselves by showing compassion on even the most evil among us fails because the "compassion" we show the monster only devalues the lives of the monster's victims. This is why the most strident opponents of capital punishment become resentful when mention is made of the victims. A sane person (and when I say "sane" I mean a very minimal definition such as a person who can dress themselves, feed themselves and hold a job out in the community) cannot believe two diametrically opposed ideas at the same time.

And make no mistake a genuine appreciation of the suffering of the victims cannot coexist with a weepy determination to protect the cause of the suffering. In other words you cannot simultaneously want to spare the life of the beast known as Mumia Abu Jamal and give a rat's ass about the suffering of Daniel Faulkner as he lay on the pavement begging for his life while Jamal calmly executed him. A heinous crime, and cold blooded murder is a heinous crime, forces us to choose between the killer and the killed.

I will always side with the innocent.