[NYTr] Fisk: In the Colosseum, Thoughts Turn to Death

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Independent via Common Dreamsa - Sep 15, 2007
no URL provided by rick kissel

In the Colosseum, Thoughts Turn to Death

by Robert Fisk

At midnight on Thursday, I lay on my back in the Colosseum and looked
at a pageant of stars above Rome. Where the lions tore into gladiators,
and only a few metres from the cross marking the place of Saint Paul's 
crucifixion - "martyrdom", of course, has become an uneasy word in this 
age of the suicide bomber - I could only reflect on how a centre of 
cruelty could become one of the greatest tourist attractions of our 
time. An Italian television station had asked me to talk about capital 
punishment in the Middle East for a series on American executions and 
death row prisoners. Two generators had melted down in an attempt to 
flood the ancient arena with light. Hence, the moment of reflection.

Readers with serious money may also like to know that it costs £75,000 
to hire the Colosseum for 24 hours, a cool £10,500 just for our little 
night under the stars. Yet who could not think of capital punishment in 
the Colosseum?

Watching the first episode of the Italian television series - which 
recounted the visits of an Italian man and woman to two Americans who 
had spent years on death row in Texas - I was struck by how both 
prisoners, who may or may not have remembered amid their drug-induced 
comas whether or not they murdered anyone, had clearly "reformed". Both 
deeply regretted their crimes, both prayed that one day they could 
return to live good lives, to care for their children, to go shopping, 
walk the dog. In other words, they were no longer the criminals they 
were when they were sentenced.

Given their predicament, I guess anyone would reform. But I suspect
that guilt or innocence is not what the death sentence is about. My Dad
was perfectly aware that the young Australian soldier he was ordered to 
execute in the First World War had killed a British military policeman 
in Paris, but the Australian promised to live "an upright and 
straightforward life" if pardoned. My father refused to kill the 
Australian. Someone else shot him instead. Capital punishment, for
those who believe in it, is almost a passion. I rather think it is
close to an addiction, something - like smoking or alcohol - which can
be cured only by total abstinence. And no excuses for secret Japanese
executions or lethal injections in Texas or head-chopping outside Saudi
Arabian mosques. But how do you reach this stage when humanity is so
obsessed with death in so barbaric a form?

Whenever the Iranians string up drug-dealers or rapists - and who knows 
their guilt or innocence - the cranes which hoist these unfortunates 
into the sky like dead thrushes are always surrounded by thousands of 
men and women, often chanting "God is Great". They did this even when a 
young woman was hanged.

Surely some of these people are against such terrible punishment. But 
there is, it seems, something primal in our desire for judicial 
killings. George Bernard Shaw once wrote that if Christians were thrown 
to the lions in the Royal Albert Hall, there would be a packed house 
every night. I'm sure he was right. Did not those thousands of Romans 
pack this very same, sinister Colosseum in which I was lying to watch 
just such carnage? Was not Saddam Hussein's execution part of our own 
attempt to distract the Iraqis with bread and circuses, the shrieking 
executioners on the mobile phone video the Baghdad equivalent of the 
gladiators putting their enemies to the sword? Nor, let us remember, is 
execution only the prerogative of states and presidents. The IRA 
practised capital punishment. The Taliban practises execution and so 
does al-Qa'ida. Osama bin Laden - and I heard this from him in person - 
believes in the "Islamic" punishment of head chopping.

I remember the crowds who lynched three Palestinian collaborators in 
Hebron in 2001, their near-naked bodies later swinging from electric 
pylons while small children threw stones at their torsos, the thousands 
who cheered when their carcasses were tossed with a roar of laughter 
into a garbage truck. I was so appalled that I could not write in my 
notebook and instead drew pictures of this obscenity. They are still in 
the pages of my notebook today, hanging upside down like Saint Paul, 
legs askew above their heads, their bodies punctured by cigarette burns.

The leading antagonists in the preposterous "war on terror" which we
are all supposed to be fighting - Messrs Bush and bin Laden - are
always talking about death and sacrifice although, in his latest
videotape, the latter showed a touching faith in American democracy
when he claimed the American people had voted for Bush's first
presidency.

For bin Laden, 11 September 2001 was "punishment" for America's 
bloodshed in the Muslim world; indeed, more and more attacks by both 
guerrillas and orthodox soldiers are turning into revenge operations. 
Was not the first siege of Fallujah revenge for the killing and 
desecration of the bodies of American mercenaries? Wasn't Abu Ghraib 
part of "our" revenge for 11 September and for our failures in Iraq?

Many of the suicide attacks in the Middle East - in "Palestine", in 
Afghanistan, in Iraq - are specifically named after "martyrs" killed in 
previous operations. Al-Qa'ida in Iraq stated quite explicitly that it 
had "executed" US troops in retaliation for the rape and murder of an 
Iraqi girl south of Baghdad.

Yet I fear the real problem goes beyond the individual act of killing, 
judicial or otherwise. In a weird, frightening way, we believe in 
violent death. We regard it as a policy option, as much to do with 
self-preservation on a national scale as punishment for named and 
individual wrongdoers. We believe in war. For what is aggression - the 
invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example - except capital punishment on a 
mass scale? We "civilised" nations - like the dark armies we believe we 
are fighting - are convinced that the infliction of death on an awesome 
scale can be morally justified.

And that's the problem, I'm afraid. When we go to war, we are all 
putting on hoods and pulling the hangman's lever. And as long as we
send our armies on the rampage - whatever the justification - we will
go on stringing up and shooting and chopping off the heads of our
"criminals" and "murderers" with the same enthusiasm as the Romans
cheered on the men of blood in the Colosseum 2,000 years ago.