You know, what Emma says does set me to think. Evil is like a disease, it spreads like a virus. You don't kill evil by killing one of it's bodies. What happens when you want someone like Saddam to get back what he dished out? You'll be doing the same evil things that he did, and you'd justify it because of another evil.
And someone like Bin laden also does evil things because of evil things he sees in his opposition. And because of Saddam's actions, he takes good people and forces them to do evil some time later. Even if it is done to himself, his evil triumphs in all of us that way.
In that respect, maybe we really should forget about what he has done when we handle him. Because what would we do with a "normal" prisoner when we are in a normal state of mind? We'd be fair too. What gives us the right to be unfair? Whatever gave Saddam the right to be unfair?
We do get these emotional responses saying that he deserves to GET whatever he did to others. And my emotional judgment agrees too, he does deserve that. But WE don't have the right to dish it out, just like he didn't have the right to dish out all the things he did.
So in that respect, we should treat him fair and noble because that is what we stand for. He surrendered his freedom to us, as retribution for the things that he did. And according to law we have the right to detain him, and with it, isolate his evil from the rest of the world.
But when we go ahead and do more than we have the right to do, we copy his evil and essentially give his evil a victory.
These pictures don't kill anybody. But it is a violation of a law we want to enforce by keeping him detained. I don't feel any sympathy for this man, but betraying your own code doesn't feel right. Afterall, there is no such thing as an excuse for doing evil, no matter in what degree it is, right? |