Post-Modern Savagery

...or this?

The latest images documenting the death of the latest tyrant to fall, in this case Libya’s Oadaffi, provide the most recent reminder of the savagery that has begun to dominate a process that has been touted as the path to democracy. In recent times, we have been treated to the public hanging of Sadaam Hussein, a Navy Seal ninja death squad assassinating Osama Bin Laden, and prior to the brutal killing of Muammar Qadaffi, the high-tech liquidation via a drone attack of an American citizen who had thrown in his lot with Al Qaeda, Anwar Al-Awlaki. The growing acceptance of the use of death squads can only be written down as a descent into an acceptance of vigilantism and state terror.

Extra-legal or quasi-legal assassination of political figures is, of course, far from a new phenomenon. The pages of history—both modern and ancient—are drenched with the blood of men, women and children killed for political motives. Yet, the recent spate of killings seems ominous. In the past, whether we consider and reflect upon the deaths in the 1960s of the two Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, etc., it seems that we were at least invited to look upon their murders as the work of dark forces, working outside of the realm of law and of due process. In the aftermath of World War II, the worst bloodbath in human history, with upwards of 70 million dying as combatants, innocent civilians or concentration camp victims, humanity seemed to reel back in horror and attempted to put in effect rules governing the punishment of those labeled as war criminals. (It is obviously the winners of a war who determine who will get tagged with that label. As James Bradley notes in his book, Flyboys, one U.S. general wrote, “We used to say in Tokyo that the U.S. had better not lose the next war, or our generals and admirals would all be shot at sunrise without a hearing of any sort.”) Since the “War on Terror” was initiated by the U.S. (after suffering its first attack by a foreign power since our cousins invaded in 1812, and after having had the luxury of participating in the second world war without a single American city being bombed), our nation has revealed a heretofore uncharacteristic (or, worse, dare we say) unacknowledged bloodthirstiness. There seem to be no rules to assure the humane treatment of our present enemy combatants, and, when they meet their grisly demise, we are all invited to celebrate the bloodbath. This is different. This is something new in our public behavior. And it is an ominous sign. Is this who we have become as a people? Let us hope that this behavior does not speak for all but a small percentage of the American people, and that the rule of law can be restored.