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BEHEADINGS
BY PETER KURTH (published 07.07.04)
I think it’s time we started
talking about the beheadings. In
fact, I think it’s past time.
Just now, the cutting off of
the heads of kidnapped victims in Iraq, where God knows how many civilians
have already been killed or maimed in Bush’s war, is depicted as a
uniquely barbaric and medieval form of punishment – just the kind of
thing you’d expect from the Infidel, who knows no compassion like the
electric chair, the hanging, or the murder by “lethal
injection.”
This is all wrong. Normally – although not,
apparently, in the case of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl -- beheading is
a quick and easy form of execution, like a bullet to the back of the
neck. It doesn’t fail; neither
does it light a man’s hair on fire and leave him burning alive, as
the electric chair sometimes does.
It doesn’t allow for the mistakes of hanging, where the wrong
kind of fall from the platform can leave the victim squirming in agony for
10 minutes or more.
As to lethal injection, the
supposedly humane and “peaceful” way many criminals are now put
to death in America,
there’s no breaking through the bullshit of newspapers to hear the testimony of
witnesses:
Execution by
lethal injection takes much longer from start to finish than any other
method, typically 30 - 45 minutes depending on the execution protocol and
ease or otherwise of locating a vein. … For the majority of this time
the condemned person is fully aware of what is happening to them and able
to experience their execution. They know that they will be dead at the end
of it and the fear of suffering (particularly in front of an audience) and
of the unknown is strong in most of us. It is difficult to see therefore
how it can be considered more humane, as the prisoner is subjected to far
more mental anguish over a longer period.
Or:
In the case
of Rickey Ray Rector, a retarded Arkansas murderer who was executed in 1992
[on the order of Bill Clinton, who left the campaign trail to witness it],
it took executioners 45 minutes to find a vein in which to insert the IV
tube. Eight medical workers tried to find a vein that would not collapse;
in the end Rector had to help his own executioners insert the IV.
Or (from CBS News):
The muscle
relaxant pancuronium bromide may render a person
helpless without dulling pain. Used in about 30 states in combination with
two other drugs that cause death, the drug may leave inmates wide awake as
other medications cause them to suffocate slowly.
So, let’s not scorn or
belittle the beheading. Fast, easy,
bloody – it provides everything people want to see in a
state-sanctioned murder.
“Arab terrorists”
have no monopoly on this. Beheading
is a method of execution the Germans used throughout the Second World War
(in cases of treason) and the French for much longer than that: France
didn’t give up the guillotine until 1977, four years after George W.
Bush evaded service in Vietnam
by pretending to work on an election campaign in Alabama.
In fact, for many centuries,
beheading was the preferred
method of execution among the condemned – far less awful than
burning, disemboweling, boiling in oil,
"pressing" or “quartering.” In England, when King Henry VIII decided
to get rid of her on trumped-up charges of sorcery and adultery, Queen Anne
Boleyn pleaded for a headsman from France, where the sword was used in
place of the axe. She got it, and
praised the King for his “justice.”
“Will it hurt?”
Anne wondered – and her killer replied, as politely as possible,
“They say not, Your Majesty.”
Her little head flew off in a second when he struck – a mercy,
when you think what they might have done to her.
It was the same two centuries
later, when Queen Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold in revolutionary Paris,
during what is still known as the Reign of Terror. Whereas her husband, Louis XVI, had been
escorted to the guillotine in a gilded coach with full regalia and honor to
his rank, Antoinette was taken in a wooden cart -- the tumbrel -- her hair
shorn in the way of all criminals, every last wish and favor denied her as
an enemy of the State. It is said
that she went gladly -- as she mounted the scaffold, she stepped on the
hand of “Samson,” the official executioner of the Revolutionary
Committees, and said, simply, “Pardon,
Monsieur.” Both her head and her body were afterward
“abused” by the crowd.
In 1976, when my father was
working for the US
government in Saudi Arabia,
the streets of Riyadh were
still unpaved, the sewers were still open to the air, and the punishments
in what we called “Chop Square”
were still going on every day. Not
just that, but the heads, hands, feet and other parts of the punished
"miscreants" were posted on pikes to warn the faithful away from
crime.
“Justice here is
hard,” I heard – “but it’s swift and it
works.” Throughout the months
I was there, I refrained from actually going down to watch somebody’s
head cut off, although it was something I guessed, at the time, I would
never have another chance to see. It
was a daily dither – “Should I?
Shouldn’t I?”
In the end, I never did. But I did see the heads, hands and feet
on pikes, after the fact. They just
looked like big cantaloupes left out in the sun.
It may still be the same in Riyadh
– I don’t know. In the
“war on terror,” don't forget, the Saudis are our allies, and
the Bush family, in particular, is bound by hoops of gold – black
gold, oil -- to the regime that rules there. At this writing, American foreign policy
is shaped entirely by the demands of Israel
and the bribes of Arabia. And the next time some innocent victim is
beheaded by Iraqi terrorists, think twice – it might be you, in
Kansas, Texas or Florida, dying much more slowly and painfully than that.
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