HOT POTATO

A couple of days ago I was supposed to attend a viewing of an old television documentary about capital punishment that was being given a special showing. I know. The things I do for “fun”, eh…? Anyway, for various reasons, in the end, I couldn’t go, which was a bit of a shame as any efforts being made to bring such things to a wider audience really should be supported. I had, of course, seen the original broadcast of “Fourteen Days in May” way back in 1987 when it was first shown, because even back then I was precisely the sort of  person who would watch such a programme, and I’m sure that it’s just as harrowing an experience now as it was back then, but also just as relevant, if not even more so.

Because these matters are once more currently much in our collective thoughts, and we now live in an era where former dictators can be bundled out of the holes in the ground they are hiding in and be mysteriously “accidentally” executed and it seems to bring on an outpouring of joy instead of the sadness that such a fate should befall any human being. No matter how wickedly he has been painted, I still find that to be fundamentally wrong. This is also an era where an admittedly grieving family can make statements stating that they really wish that there still was a death penalty available for the man who killed their daughter and our modern media culture seems to find this a perfectly acceptable thing for them to say, and refuses to question it.

Do not misunderstand me here, I can accept the bitterness and the anger and the sheer sense of frustration that having had such a terrible thing happen to someone you love, and can admire the quiet dignity being shown in the face of those dreadful circumstances which can suddenly draw a family, through no fault of its own, into the media spotlight, but I cannot accept that opportunists and others with vested interests should be allowed to seize yet another platform to bring this uncivilised topic back into the realms of public debate.

You see, no matter how convincing an argument is put in favour of state execution, and believe me when I say that I know fully well how strong and emotional and tempting those arguments can be, especially when it comes to the truly sick and depraved things that some human beings do to others, I simply cannot and will not accept that another human being can be taken away, albeit “to a place of lawful execution” and killed in my name. Because, ultimately that’s what it is. If we allow the state to legally do this, it is effectively our hand that is pulling the lever, pushing the plunger or activating whatever other system they choose, and I really don’t want that blood on my hands. I will never accept it, and I will never believe that it is a suitable solution for any civilised society to choose.

Not in my name.

Never.

I cannot honestly believe that as a society we are not better than that. I know that there is always an argument that we should consider the wishes of the victims in these cases, but survivors of such dreadful acts are honestly not the most unbiased judges, are they? Not only that but I honestly doubt that any real sense of what we like nowadays to call “closure” can ever truly be achieved by adding another death to the list of sadnesses attached to any crime.

Today, of course, we will gather around in groups and burn various effigies of a notorious plotter on many bonfires around the country, in our annual “celebration” of the ritual of state execution. It still seems odd to me that we find this image to be a source of “fun” when it’s really about the torture and public execution of a real living breathing human being just like ourselves, who found himself in an almost impossible position and found a rather extreme way of, in his mind, coming up with a solution to his difficulties.

If we try and look at the history dispassionately, Guido Fawkes was a desperate man living in desperate times who saw no other solution to his plight than to attempt an act of treason so devastating that it was inevitable that, if he were caught, the state would kill him for it, and yet he went ahead and attempted to do it anyway. The ends, of course, can never justify the means, and his decision was no doubt a very bad one to make, but, before we condemn him and his co-conspirators outright, how many of us can imagine the desperation of living in a society so divided upon religious grounds, and what lengths that desperation might have driven any of us to?

Whilst being publicly burnt to death was not the fate for which the real Guido Fawkes was destined, the actual method chosen for his execution was somehow even more barbaric. We should never underestimate the human capacity for finding new ways to inflict pain upon other human beings. The fact that he had already been tortured at length using the vilest of instruments of torture including the rack is bad enough, but the whole idea of being “hung, drawn and quartered” involves a brutal series of ritual humiliations that start with being dragged along upon a wicker hurdle towed behind a horse through a baying crowd towards the place of execution and with the soon-to-be victim’s head barely clearing the ground. They would then be suspended from a gallows by the neck until nearly dead, then their genitals would be cut off and burnt in front of them, they would be disemboweled, their hearts would be cut out and they would be decapitated and cut into four and the parts publicly displayed finally to be eaten by birds.

Guido Fawkes escaped experiencing the worst of these ordeals by managing to jump from the scaffold and breaking his neck, but it was traditionally only female traitors who were burnt to death, which does make me wonder what “celebratory” imagery we might have ended up having on our traditional “bonfire” nights if  we were going for a more realistic ritualised reminder. I suspect that all the kiddies happily eating their toffee apples and hot potatoes might be slightly traumatised if we were to take them to an annual disemboweling event on each and every November the fifth.

Obviously, as a society we like to think that we are now far more civilised than that culture of only 400 years and a handful of generations ago, but whenever the subject of state execution comes up for debate, I do begin to wonder.