On death penalty

Saddam Hussein was hanged, and the liberals (especially in Europe) howled with outrage, because "civilized societies do not condone death penalty."  (I have a strong feeling that, had it been George W. Bush who were hanged, it would have been met with silence, if not outright approval by the very same people...) Aside from the many attrocities carried out on orders from one of the most ruthless dictators in recent history, here's a list of penalties that were metered out by Saddam's "justice system":

• Cutting off ears for desertion


• Cutting off hands for theft (fingers for less valuable goods)


• Breaking the spines of liars (in a very literal sense: with a cement block dropped on people's backs)


• Pushing homosexuals off of tall buildings


• Beheading with a sword (al-Bashar) for espionage, treason, and smuggling

To the mind of a European "sophisticate" hanging this monster was an act of barbarity...  Hearing this I can't help but feel Shadenfreude at the decline of Europe - a civilization this wimpy does not deserve to survive. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended". This applies to human societies as well. I just finished reading Mark Steyn's "America Alone", a very witty and very depressing book that points out the demography-driven inevitability of the transformation of Eutopia into Eurabia within a few decades. When the islamic masters take over the liberal institutions of Western Europe - after their population will have become majorities in their European host countries - they will not display the same squeamishness about harsh punishment for offenses far more benign than those  of Saddam.

I do feel somewhat conflicted about the death penalty, but for very different reasons: the way it is administered in countries such as the US, it is far too delicate a procedure, with the opponents now arguing that even the sanitized execution by lethal injection is too "cruel", as it does not kill instantenuously, letting the condemned feel a little bit of the agony of dying. And why shouldn't they? Why should we be so timid about inflicting pain on people like Cary Steiner, who in February 1999 in a Yosemite Park lodge sodomised for hours the 15-year-old Juli Sund, after having strangled her mother and a 16-year-old Argentinian girlfriend, and then drove her (and the two bodies) to a secluded spot in the park, and slit her throat? Or the Belgian electrician Marc Dutroux, who kindapped and sexually molested several young girls, whom he kept in a concrete-lined, sound-proof dungeon in one of his houses. Two of those girls, both 8-years-old, starved to death in this dungeon between February and March 1995, when Dutroux was held in jail for car theft. These "people" deserve much worse fates than a few minutes of "agony" after a lethal injection or a quick, nearly painless death by hanging. It seems that a life imprisonment might be a tougher penalty than this. We don't allow terminally-ill patients to end their lives and suffering, and yet we're offering an easy way out to "people" whose cruelty makes your blood curl. It makes no sense at all.