Monday, December 07, 2009

DEATH PENALTY IN DENMARK AND IRAN

If you want to save somebody from death penalty, your favourite strategy should not be to criticize death penalty as such – because that means criticizing the whole system, thereby provoking its self defence. Rather you should try to plead for the innocence or at least the mitigating circumstances on behalf of the defendant. Likewise if the system is religious, you should invoke its own god in your plead rather than criticize their religion. This is the case with Iranian Kurd Ms Zeinab Jalalian, sentenced to death just for expressing her view.

There is also another reason not always criticizing death penalty. If you defend even real criminals, you will soon use up your whole “quota” of mercy, so you should be aware of the risk of inflation. Rather then work with dedication for truly innocent defendants on a full scale, involving also higher levels of diplomacy etc. That way the risk of insulting and provoking our opponent is limited. Because we must remember that what really insults us is the full truth, so we should never tell the whole truth until we have no more options.

There is even a third and more contemplative reason for some idealistic reservation. Most people in Denmark as well as in Iran and everywhere else want the death of quite a few of their contemporaries without themselves knowing it: For most “cultivated” minds of honour and some education know only what they are socially rewarded for reading and repeating. However we will or dare seldom pay the price for effectuating our secret death wishes, even in cases when it is within our realistic range of possibility. For even in the realm of destructive acts self confidence is a factor of importance.

Considering this fact it is not convincing to defend all kinds of outright criminals and psychopaths, because they never interfered with your own interests, and to forgive them on behalf of victims without any use for your own purposes. Your idealistic goodness will then at best express complete indifference, at worst pure unlimited vanity.

Rather I would take the opposite position and claim, that any good person faced with imminent departure from this earth, no matter the reason, ought to kill a number of well disguised psychopaths first and even make it official for reasons of prevention. This would have special preventive effect, since quite a few otherwise untouchable bastards would be stopped; and it would have general preventive effect as well, as it might make some people in power think twice, at least sometimes.

Killing psychopaths however should not be legalized, since such license would be abused by psychopaths killing innocent people, claiming that their victims were psychopaths: Because the ability to turn things completely upside down when convenient is something that psychopaths have in common with incurably normal characters... Also innocent but partially unhealthy or very unhappy minds could be expected to kill reasonably innocent adversaries for completely irrational reasons, were such “just” executions legalized as some kind of civic right or even a virtue. The fact thus is that some things can certainly be morally justified, yet it would be either a mistake or a moral error to legalize them.

Even so, some people ought certainly to be killed for preventive reasons, and the sooner the better. And there is no principal difference between wanting somebody dead in privacy, maybe invoking God or some occult spirits, and physically killing him oneself. The reason why you don’t kill people with your own hands is not that you are too moral, but that you don’t want to pay the price, and that you would not be able to hide or destroy the evidence. Such inhibitory complications are not present when you want God to kill your enemy: And although nobody can prove it, your death wishes on behalf of your enemy are certainly as clean and strong as in the case of physical murder. If God really should fulfil your wish, you would thus not be able to get away morally by accusing God for committing the murder. But legally it is without risk, and that is why your true character is best expressed in what you privately wish your God to do for you.

As for Raskolnikow, I guess he must have been somewhat on the sensitive side - anyway, in such matters you cannot allow yourself to be prudish...

As for holy men it is the same everywhere. The people enjoying most respect in society – no matter if they are priests, politicians, professors or “progressive” journalists – are often the most unforgiving, because they cannot tolerate persons of less official honour showing that they are morally conceited. The only reason why we don’t hang people in Denmark – unfortunately not even the worst of true criminals – is that we have no legislative basis for such verdicts nowadays.

For the official Danish elite is neither more intelligent, nor better educated or more humane than the priests of Iran or any other country for that matter. Yes indeed: It is universal that when insulted by the truth or by better human examples, the progressive elite of society hate nobody more than the innocent and the pure of heart. That is why law is really there to protect us against our own nature. Denmark is not a better country, and the Danes are no better people; but in this particular respect our law is better, since it prevents hanging of innocent people of good and honest intentions.

Anyway it is good that our death wishes are seldom effective, since most death wishes in this world are not legally warranted, not even in countries with death penalty. A lot of “civilized” bastards would certainly like to strangulate their adversaries outright in greed and jealousy, and their reason for not doing so is certainly not idealistic. And this is why we cannot take their official rhetoric against death penalty for the most callous criminals seriously – even though some of us may take the same point of view.

At last we can tell our readers, that as for the right place to publish these thoughts I never even tried to publish anything in philosophical magazines, since I have some auto-biographical bias against such artificial communities in the humanities. The humanities are universal, belong to everybody and are not the territory of a conceited pagan priesthood with no God. In the sciences it is a different story.

As for death wishes you can console yourself with the thought that the higher status of those who wish you were dead, the higher status you have yourself in their eyes -which might be a good reason not to wish you had higher status. Merry Christmas!

.