We’re replaying the old “Would you kill Hitler or study him” dilemma so fondly beloved of those who are quite relativistic.

You know if I had been Lenin I might have had the Royal family shot as well. Nothing personal or monstrous about it (unlike stalin’s murders).

The possibility of factions and armies of liberation struggles and violent reviionism forming around such people would have been very real.

One of my great heros is Primo Levi who never failed to chart the swamping of an individuals remaining humanity with compassion and tender insight.

He also had no moral objections to the execution of such people, and in a way i cannot disagree with him in absolute terms.

But it is not cowardice or guilt that leads me to the conviction that the state should not willingly deprive a person of their life in the phoney and spurious claim that it is enacting the collectives will or acting on behalf of the mass murderer’s victims.

I am surprised that such an anti-statist as you would fall for that.

No I have come to the reasoned conviction that when the state acts in such way it must do so with the gretest propriety.

it must remove, by force if necessary, from people the power to arbitarily take the life of another because it is in that individuals power to do so.

Thus in excercising this absolute power it cannot itself deprive people of their life.

I see no way to otherwise end the cycle of violence. many people obey the law because they do, through habit or conviction or conditioning or even moral choice.

Some only obey the law because of fear of the consequences.

Why do you think that Karadic would fear a firing squad or a lynching, even if he peed his pants before a baying mob and it was downloaded onto playground mobile phones, what would that show and what would be learned by those who love violence.

Every dictator for all time has been running scared, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mugabe, they live in daily terror and suffer paranoid ravings.

But if they fear death, there is one thing that they fear more than anything as the nature of heir crimes show.

They fear being small and insignificant, deprived of the rage and power of their tin pot throne room.

They fear being shaved and washed and put in a romper suit and a cell with no sharp corners and no dangling flexes, in foam shoes with no laces.

They fear being locked down and put to bed, so that their ‘fiercness’ is seen as no more threatening than a puma in a zoo.

These are the things that criminal sociopaths fear, not violence that confirms their sense of their own brutal ferocity, but extruded foam containement and their pitiful withering away.

In our TV reality show world Karadic will not become a martyr he will become last years big brother contestent.

If a web cam were placed on him in perpetuity, his viewers would eventually be reduced to a pitiful few, engaged by a morbid fascination like the need to watch documentaries on extreme makeover surgery.

Karadic is now nothing, this is the anti-climax of his life and he knows it, don’t big him up and demand his brutal execution like the Bull fight attender who projects all their fears onto a macho Toro that is nothing but a terrified beast trying reflexively to avoid pain.

Even if you were to watch a close up of his mortal agony as the ‘coup de grace’ is dealt, you would learn nothing of the man, you would not hold his life and power in your hand as every torturor and psychopathic murderer imagines they will find (but never does).

We would learn something about you but nothing about Karadic.

he should cease to exist but his passing cannot now be with a bang but must be a whimper.

I don’t, that’s my point. What I am suggesting that it is ego that drives opposition to the death penalty – the ego that anti-death penalty types consider their own feelings to be superior to that of the direct victims of Karadicz.

He will not be released and he knows it and he knows know and he fears absolutely the awesome power of his liberal detention.

But there is no evidence that this is the case. The psychological profile of the likes of Karadicz is hardly succeptable to as little things as liberal detention avec conjugal visits and spa sessions.

He will be kept with all the inhuman detachment of an alien specimen in an examining jar.

Except we both know that won’t be the case. He knows the results of imprisonment in this fashion can far outweigh, in terms of notoriety and the spread of his ideas, his remaining underground. He may fear to a small degree any temporary cessation of his liberties, sure but we’re not dealing with a normal, or even probably sane person here. He’s a demagogue, at the very least, and experience has shown that rules have to be different for them.

You would have us undo the fabric of our society for a moments vegeance?

Vengeance, or rather, the need for it, is at the heart of a properly functioning society. It is part of our DNA. The fault is with those who seek to deny our nature and remove it and its sibling, punishment, from our psychological makeup.

hey its not like I am injecting anyone with 10,000 times the correct dose of anti-genocidal vaccine or anything (see multiple choice thread below)

(awful: the bathtub didn’t work and the bedsheets were not clean… I am still on therapy because of that -but not on alternative medical therapy)

I am not a pacifist and know that in extremis will act with extreme violence to preserve those I love and am responsible for.

But where do you think the ability of a state to deliver justice comes from?

It is from authority which is nought but power with its violence tamed by legitimacy.

(this is straight Weberian sttuff but quite insightful and relevant as ever)

You know of the left path and you know that my Orisha is ougum the Afro-latin American god of iron and weapons and war.

When tamed he is the god of technology and progress and Justice, the deliverer of fair judgement.

From war and armies must come security and an end to chaos and legitimate rule, but from the same source can come the collapse of order and civilisation.

I have had a pistol held to my head on the Albanian border in the Montenegran mountains, apparently the man did it because he could and it was a laugh and my look of what I imagine was terror caused much amusement to his gang.

If I had had a flamethrower I would cheerfully of roasted them all alive, and not probably felt much remorse.

You confuse control and suppression of the ego with fear and guilt and a timidness to let my desires loose.

I came late to any agreement with the tennets of liberalism, and above all I defend a Liberal justice system from the forces of reaction of the left and right.

I do not believe that Seymour Payne supports and defends Karadic because he sees him as a victim of imperialism but because he lusts after his brutal power to oppose it in the most cruel and idiosyncratic and childish of weighs.

What Karadic’s supporters worship is his power, the thanhatos of being able to snuff out a human life casually because he can.

I care not that Karadic will not understand the reasons for his incarceration, or show remorse or atone.

He will not be released and he knows it and he knows know and he fears absolutely the awesome power of his liberal detention.

He will be treated with the forms of human dignity, as they are the unbreakable rules of our system, and by those rules he will be held without the substance of humanity (that a brutal treatment would ironically give back).

He will be kept with all the inhuman detachment of an alien specimen in an examining jar.

For those who are incapable of recognising his crimes (including him) who are incapable of seeing the higher social meaning of justice, they will not fail to see the lower meaning the awesome power (and controlled violence) to control a persons fate upon which justice lies.

They will not fail to see the overweening force upon which his incarceration rests even though they may deny its moral significance.

And they will laugably rant and rail about the ‘inhumanity’ and ‘injustice’ and illegitimate nature of it all.

And their rants will become whimpers as our laughs curl back on them as they quake impotently before the power of ‘imperialism’ as they see it.

And they will wither and die, and Seymour Payne shall accompany them, on the vine of hate.

And the reactionaries of right and left will condemn liberalism as weak while trembling at the very idea of Karadic’s fate.

You would have us undo the fabric of our society for a moments vegeance?

Surely we are not as weak as that?

*You* might (well, I know you *do*, and it is to your credit) and to *your* view, imagining *you* are Karadzic sitting watching videos of his victims, it would be a punishment to *you*, but we all know Karadizc won’t care. The classic example of this is what happened to Hitler whilst in jail – he produced the Mein Kampf. At the risk of coming all Neitchzean over this, incarceration will not have any adverse affect on the likes of Karadizc.

Furthermore, he won’t be compelled to face the consequences of his actions anyway will he? Too many human rights lawyers demanding that he gets conjugal visits and spa treatements for that to happen.

And furthermore, you may think the criminal system is all about justice, but you’re forgetting three important things: punishment, retribution and vengeance. And by keeping Karadizc alive to salve your own guilty conscience (which I think is at the basis of opposition to the death penalty), you’re elevating this over these three.

Now you are my favourite libertarian but I think that in your personal behaviour you do not speed, jumpr red lights and blow the brains out of sick fucks who deserve nothing better.

It has nothing to do with saintliness andnothing to so with a squeamish refusal to enact any degree of harshness in a punishment.

I imagine that you have never been incarcerated against your will.

If you imagine that being imprisoned and kept alive in clinical and contrived surroundings for the rest of your natural life, is the soft option compared to dying violently with at least victims sense of martyrdom feeling that there will be supporters or even a cult to follow you, then you don’t understand why these people will go to almost any length to die before they will be kept on ice.

They know that they will grow old and pathetic that they will not become martyrs that their support will waver, then drift before evaporating entirely.

In a real way my version of punishment, is far harsher, bleak and unyeilding, than anythinng you countenance.

My idea of exemplary confinement is pitiless, and is meant to be. I would be happy for him to be compelled to watch videos of his crimes in his final hours on life ssupport.

You don’t get it.

I am not talking about what my gut tells me to do with him, what I would even now feel obliged to do to him if left alone in a room with him and a carving knife.

I am talking about what must be done with him now that he is in the centre of the civilisation his depravity tried to destroy.

It is not my ego getting the better of me to convince myself that I am more liberal than he or more gentle than avictim of his crimes baying for his blood.

On the contrary, it is the subordination of my ego (against all my instincts) to the social and collective needs of justice (that thing that so terrifies your own ego that you would throw away all the personal discipline you have striven for rather than to give it up) for the sake of a desired better world where such barbarities as Karadic’s become less possible.

You know as well as I do that there is ultimately no better way (though it offers another kind of ‘injustice’) to end this than to hand him over to te impersonal mechanism of the machinary and all enveloping power of the judicial expression of the pooled political power of the international community.

You place your ego in the way of its writ because of personal and emotional reasons not I.

His radical evil must be contained in the purity of its darkness by the light of the cell in which he remains.

He will be shown the rational, sadism free practice of the harsh but fair machinary of justice, he will even be shown mercy, but not pity.

There is no place for this for such a pitiless individual, and he will grow old and frail and die knowing this.

Good grief. This is almost poetic in its utter vapidness.

Karadzic’s “radical evil” won’t care about mercy or pity. That capacity for “radical evil” by definition is beyond caring about mercy or pity or similar emotions.

As with most liberals, Metta’s objection to capital punishment is more about elevating their own selfish desires above justice, punishment, vengance and retribution. In short, Metta is saying his own degree of saintliness is more important than the consequnces of Karadzic’s crimes.