I never met my grandfather on my father's side, as he died well before I was born. However, back in Malaysia he worked as a postmaster, a post office manager in their Malaccan town, and during Japanese occupied times of World War 2, he was part of a network and handled correspondence to organise safe passage for escaped POWs from the region. Their neighbours, a Chinese family were also part of the network performing some other function and their son was my father's best friend, both seven years of age. Unfortunately, the family next door were caught be the Japanese and the whole village was forced into the town square to watch them being beheaded by an officer with a sword. My father, at the age of seven, saw his best friends head roll into the dirt.
What kind of people would make execution public?
Over the last couple decades especially, we have seen this happening a lot with hostages of Islamic terror groups, where they behead people on camera to use as both part of their terror campaign, and as recruiting material. It is advertising for them and pretty much the entire world has been outspoken on the heinous nature of it. And in more recent years, there have been multiple cases of livestream mass shootings, which again falls into the category of self-promotion, as attention is what those people want for themselves and whatever deranged "cause" they have attached to.
And the advertising has worked, as advertising so often does, because it has desensitised people to public killings to the point that in the US, they are planning to publicly execute a mass shooter by firing squad. Not are they going to only publicly do it, they are planning on broadcasting the execution live. Perhaps it will be a new pay-per-view model the government can use to raise more money for family pockets.
While death by firing squad might actually be a better way to go than the messed up lethal injection or electric chair options on the table, it is still a disgusting move to broadcast it live. To me at least, it doesn't seem like the actions of a developed nation at all and the extremist groups and countries like Iran, would be dancing around with glee - if dancing was permitted. I find it incredible that anyone is backing this, let alone a sitting president.
But this is just one event and there will be knock-on consequences and the advertising mechanism will further normalise broadcast killings and create an environment that will even more resemble The Running Man movie in the future. As a society, we are failing, and a clear indicator of that is how normalised violence has become, after centuries f moving away from normalised violence. The US is evermore resembling the regimes that it has fought against over the last few decades. The Russias, the Irans, the Venezuelas. They are making a spectacle and entertainment out of the worst activities of humanity. Though, even Russia just pushes its political enemies quietly over the balcony.
It is not a question about whether the condemned deserve death, but does the public deserve to have killing normalised in society? Because that is what is happening and it is not only government sanctioned, it is government enacted. Perhaps it is too late for the US, since the normalisation of public violence has been happening for decades now and perhaps it harks back to the racism and segregation in the US, where people were routinely killed publicly through lynching and other forms of violence.
Maybe killing is just part of the American culture.
It is not that killing and violence doesn't happen in every other country, but there are few countries that celebrate it like the US, where people even prepare for events so that they can defend against violence. And I think that the current government and the trajectory over the last couple decades anyway, has pushed violence into the spotlight and created a social acceptance of it from the very top levels of the government, all the way down. And this of course is going to impact on the mindset and behaviours of everyone in the system, including those globally - which we can see as more and more countries start to resemble the rhetoric of US politics.
I feel it is sad that we live in a world where the most advanced countries, no longer even pretend that they are moral. It is all about garnering power, wealth and control. The "right thing" is always superseded by the thing that makes the most money or gets the votes. The war in Iran pushed fuel prices up, so sanctions are lifted and deals are done with Russia to supply diesel. Just one of the recent acts of having no moral standing and evidence that profit and control, instead of the right thing and wellbeing. And what's the bet, that if the public broadcast goes through, there will be people revelling in the experience.
My dad was a pacifist throughout his life, because he saw things that no child should ever see. But, there was a difference between then and now, because public killing wasn't normalised in his young world and only became a feature of shock and terror during Japanese occupation. And it worked, because of the lack of normalisation. Today though, would it have the same effect, or would it instead excite an ever-growing cohort of people who desire to see more violence and bloodshed.
If we aren't disgusted by intentional killing, what does that say?
Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]
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