Tuesday, August 12, 2003
Amrozi and the death penalty
This issue has been white hot in the opinion pages and on blogs for a few days now. Over which time I’ve become increasingly surprised that my own POV on the topic seems to be held by no one else. Oh well, here goes, anyway . . .
My views are this: there’s a WAR on, people. Even in wartime, there are, of course, lots of nice-sounding, supposed international “laws” saying what can and can’t be done. These were almost all drafted in the aftermath of WWII – an optimal time indeed, for coming up with high-minded statements of principle. Further, by making war so abstract and … well, reasonable, printing up hefty tomes of international laws may well have served a valuable innoculatory function, inasmuch as no one dared to (effectively) declare war on the West for almost six decades after the end of WWII. You know – “War? Isn’t that that dreary business we learnt about in between Organisational Effectiveness and Change Management?”
As a matter of nut’s’bolts, then, I reckon that the Amrozi argument is not even currently on the right spectrum (think AM vs FM). “The death penalty – ooh aah!” I always thought that the whole fucking point of war was to kill people – or be killed. I could kinda understand if the Amrozi argument was about torture – in addition, of course, to death. Torture is, I’m pretty sure, against The Rules – and probably quite correctly so. Nonetheless, I would be most happy to lend my hand, quite literally, to Amrozi’s torture should the opportunity arise – and I wouldn’t have a qualm in the world about doing so.
In case I’m shocking anyone here, I should add that there is absolutely no way that I would have said, or thought, anything like this before September 11. The greatest tragedy of all of that day, IMO, is that it would have “only” resulted in about 300 deaths, if the passengers on the first three planes that were hijacked had not been so reasonable about their plights. In other words, islamofascist terrorism can (and must) be beaten – but only once it is realised that there are no Rules whatsoever (their call, of course). It’s a fight to the death – and that’s it.
This issue has been white hot in the opinion pages and on blogs for a few days now. Over which time I’ve become increasingly surprised that my own POV on the topic seems to be held by no one else. Oh well, here goes, anyway . . .
My views are this: there’s a WAR on, people. Even in wartime, there are, of course, lots of nice-sounding, supposed international “laws” saying what can and can’t be done. These were almost all drafted in the aftermath of WWII – an optimal time indeed, for coming up with high-minded statements of principle. Further, by making war so abstract and … well, reasonable, printing up hefty tomes of international laws may well have served a valuable innoculatory function, inasmuch as no one dared to (effectively) declare war on the West for almost six decades after the end of WWII. You know – “War? Isn’t that that dreary business we learnt about in between Organisational Effectiveness and Change Management?”
As a matter of nut’s’bolts, then, I reckon that the Amrozi argument is not even currently on the right spectrum (think AM vs FM). “The death penalty – ooh aah!” I always thought that the whole fucking point of war was to kill people – or be killed. I could kinda understand if the Amrozi argument was about torture – in addition, of course, to death. Torture is, I’m pretty sure, against The Rules – and probably quite correctly so. Nonetheless, I would be most happy to lend my hand, quite literally, to Amrozi’s torture should the opportunity arise – and I wouldn’t have a qualm in the world about doing so.
In case I’m shocking anyone here, I should add that there is absolutely no way that I would have said, or thought, anything like this before September 11. The greatest tragedy of all of that day, IMO, is that it would have “only” resulted in about 300 deaths, if the passengers on the first three planes that were hijacked had not been so reasonable about their plights. In other words, islamofascist terrorism can (and must) be beaten – but only once it is realised that there are no Rules whatsoever (their call, of course). It’s a fight to the death – and that’s it.
