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Shadow Government #54
Lethal injection
by John A. Jackson
Timothy McVeigh is scheduled to be killed Wednesday. Microsoft's online newsmagazine, Slate.com, has already posted political cartoons about the execution. One theme runs through them: the devil or devils await McVeigh eagerly; they have special plans for him.
Well they might. McVeigh killed 168 innocent people in Oklahoma City six years ago, supposedly because the federal government, for whom some of those people worked, had earlier used violence against cultists in Waco, Texas.
The 19 children killed in the bombing were incidental, "collateral damage," in McVeigh's abominable phrase. They had to die so McVeigh could make his point; he wrote his message in their blood. He had his vengeance.
The great monster of my adolescence, Adolf Eichmann, engineered the Nazis' murder of millions. In 1962, the State of Israel hanged him, the only person that nation has ever legally executed.
In a book published not long after the hanging, the philosopher Hannah Arendt tried to justify it. Eichmann's actions, she wrote, denied him the right to ask any other person to share the world with him. He had to be sent elsewhere, and was.
Arendt's rationale struck me at the time as apt and right. Now I am not so sure. Is it not just a form of words to make us easy with another murder? Eichmann had no right to live, but did Israel, did anyone, have the right to kill him?
No, I am not accusing the Israelis of any wrongdoing. Eichmann's postwar career showed conclusively that no one else would bring him to any kind of justice. The Israeli judicial procedures were scrupulously thorough and fair, as were McVeigh's trial and sentencing.
Neither man has any claim whatsoever to a presumption of guiltlessness. Israel and the U.S. courts behaved in a completely proper fashion. There can be no argument, and no moral comparison between what McVeigh and Eichmann did and the actions of their executioners.
But I am unsatisfied. As I am a U.S. citizen, McVeigh's death makes me an accessory to a cold-blooded killing. That is not a role I would choose for myself.
Morals are built on tough cases. As I would not be a victim, so I would equally not be an executioner -- not even for men such as these.
The poet W.H. Auden in a political poem called "Spain" used the phrase "necessary murder." George Orwell, my great intellectual hero, tore into him: no one who uses such language knows how to stop or what killing means; you start with one death, you imagine your hands to be clean, and soon the world is full of corpses.
"Mr. Auden's brand of amoralism," Orwell wrote, "is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled."
Simply to use the words makes you corrupt, and none of us will be "somewhere else" when McVeigh is killed.
Nor am I comfortable at all with the Slate cartoonists' imagery. Consider as an alternative to the conventional fires of Hell the afterlife depicted in D.M. Thomas's fine 1980's novel, "The White Hotel": Life injures and deforms us, as we injure and deform; after we die, we go through a process that heals and restores our spiritual bodies; that is, our souls.
Even for McVeigh, I would put healing in place of vengeance.
John A. Jackson may be reached at TomShadwell@cs.com. ER