Saddam Hussein Laughs at Death
- Category: Governance
- Date 07-01-2007
- 623 views
The year 2006 was the worst in the brief history of my life, because it ended with all media houses relaying awful images of a human body, dangling in a rope that had been loosened round Saddam Hussein’s neck, wringing him to death.
The portrait of the flaccid corpse was a terrible sight, and Peering Eye considers that whoever committed this blooper is nothing but a terrorist!
Shockingly, once Saddam had been hanged, an American politician called the act a “milestone in the history of Iraq".
What a folly! Some people even held street celebrations! Well, it is not strange that human beings can rejoice at the murder of a fellow human. Yet, how that sort of ‘joy’ comes about, only psychiatrists can explain!
Reflecting on this incident, Peering Eye concluded that, as the killers celebrated and thumped their chests, the victim must have laughed at their impudence, knowing that soon or later, they too would follow him as he followed those he was accused of having killed.
Peering Eye would never have participated in such a heartless dance. I would rather have urged my executioner to hang me than become so bestial. The slaughter of Saddam Hussein was a pointless deed; cursed be its architects.
Man can never be a total devil or a pure angel, and thus Saddam must have been as good as he was bad: probably like this reader and this writer. Far from imputing that Saddam was innocent, Peering Eye asks the reader to remember that he was not a gang leader being showered with bullets as he shot back from his hide-out. He was not on the run either.
Guilty as he was, handcuffed, Saddam Hussein was led to the gallows, a noose placed around his neck and he was left to hang. Need one say that Saddam’s death further illustrates the vainness of death as a punishment? True, many people lost their loved ones during the dictator’s reign! Yet, if we are to look for what Iraq and humanity would benefit from the execution of this criminal, there is absolutely nothing, apart from emotional satisfaction to the families he wronged and the politicians he opposed.
Sheer revenge!
Once upon a time in 1945, Italy’s dictator Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini attempted to escape the advancing Allied Army but he was captured and executed along with fifteen leading Fascists on April 29, 1945. Their bodies were hung vengefully: - also as a lesson to future dictators. But alas and alack, Europe has since produced Slobodan Milosevic and brutal dictators lurk in almost every continent till this day.
The moral is that the death penalty is neither a form of justice nor a solution to crime. It might not be strange to realise that the crime of misgoverning a nation cannot possibly have been limited to Saddam Hussein. All world presidents commit it often in diverse styles; which is why many presidents strive to keep in power too long. If death was the most appropriate penalty, then every defeated President would deserve hanging.
The hanging of Saddam might also show that Shakespeare was absolutely right. He said, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is interred with their bones; … men have lost their reason!” (Julius Caesar Act 3, Scene 2, line 75 – 100).
Peering Eye knows well that to mourn Saddam is unacceptable, even punishable in some places. The folly, though, is that suppose he was not hanged, still he would have to die some day. He was always destined to die like any other human being.
The only shock about his death is that he looked his executioners squarely in the eye and appeared to persuade them to fulfil their mission (to hang him) with ease. Besides, he has died as one among hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who continue to die consequent upon the invasion of their country by the Coalition Forces. He is another victim of a military misadventure.
To mourn his death is fitting, whereas to rejoice could only amuse him like those he killed must have chuckled when he joined them.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen