​Four Wrongs of

a Public Execution

Psychological, Historical, Political, and Ethical

 

 

We as Americans are being invited by the Secretary of Defense to view an execution by firing squad over the internet. This is wrong in at least four ways. In the video I explain, and here I summarize.

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It is wrong psychologically. It looks like revenge. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has chosen and lost a war against Iran. Given the extraordinary degree of self-promoting bombast by which he described this military adventure, this sorry result is a personal humiliation. It is undisputed that the defendant, Nidal Hasan, committed a horrible crime, and that he deserves punishment. But to rejoice exuberantly in the prospect of the public shooting of a Muslim, as Mr. Hegseth is doing day after day, is to turn personal defeat into a summons for all of us to live inside his personal need for vengeance.

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​It is wrong historically. As Mr. Hegseth will know, public executions in the United States have a particular racial lineage. The lynchings of African Americans were meant to demonstrate that one group is always innocent and another group is always guilty. Lynchings were designed

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​It is wrong historically. As Mr. Hegseth will know, public executions in the United States have a particular racial lineage. The lynchings of African Americans were meant to demonstrate that one group is always innocent and another group is always guilty. Lynchings were designed to humiliate the African American who was killed and to terrorize and stigmatize the group to which he belonged. Black men (and women) who were lynched were not (unlike Nidal Hasan) tried before a court of any kind; they were victims of racial terror organized by mobs. The purpose, as in Mr. Hegseth’s planned spectacle, was to involve large numbers of people, young and old, and to normalize a sense of enmity. Although the circumstances are different, to recommence public executions is to invoke a very specific history, and to summon some Americans to a sense of righteous innocence meant to prepare them to kill other Americans.

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It is wrong ethically. IIt will not be hard to find external authorities who can help us to see this. The United Nations human rights office can remind us that a public execution is a form of torture. The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops can tell us that a livestreamed public execution is a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” But we, all of us, all Americans, are being invited to observe and thus participate; the ethics of this are accessible to each of us, personally, as living human beings. The end of life is a mystery, one which arises from the dignity of life. No matter what an individual has done, the end of each life should be respected, for the sake of the dignity of life itself.

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