State Murder, USA
In sixteenth-century Geneva a deranged character by the name of Jacques Chapellaz confessed to cursing God and trying to eat the devil, though finding it hard to swallow his horns. The poor man was condemned to having his tongue cut out. That was then: dark, ignorant, religiously confused times. Panorama (BBC1, 9.30 pm, 3 August) was about how the USA claims to be a rational society which has surpassed the excesses of Old Testament morality. The programme showed how false is such a claim. In the cells of Death Row in Huntsville, Texas there are 358 men who have been sentenced to be murdered by the state. That is just one of the waiting rooms for death in the 50 states of the USA. Amongst those awaiting the legalised murder which “justice" has condemned them to are several who are clearly so mentally deranged as to have little control over their actions. For example, one condemned prisoner was interviewed who was described by a psychologist as having a mental age of ten and as compulsively agreeing with whatever is asked of him in order to please people. Obtaining a confession of murder from such a pathetic person was hardly difficult.
A new and highly conspicuous pressure group is called VOCAL: Victims of Crime and Leniency, comprising people who want courts to sentence more "wrongdoers" to death. Many of these advocates of callous vengeance were themselves bereaved as a result of murder. They have become bitter and irrational. But now they have won the right for victims' families to testify in courts in order to explain to juries how only an eye for an eye will satisfy them. The unreasonableness of expecting just responses to emanate from angry, vengeful relatives of those who have been murdered is obvious; their inclusion into the US “justice" system is proof that the objective of criminal punishment is largely revenge.
The reverse side of this thirst for revenge in the form of dead bodies, which turns “justice" into organised murder to show the murderers the validity of violence as the highest ethic, is fear. The reason for disgusting pressure groups like VOCAL, made up of wretched, hurt workers, is that they live in a society where almost everyone is scared. The victims are afraid, and their relatives are afraid that the criminals will be punished too little, and the criminals are made afraid by the threat of state murder. What way of running a society is such mutual fear? How dare the US leaders preach of new world orders and civilised values and human rights. In a socialist society, where anti-social behaviour will no longer be stimulated by the relationships of property, we shall not seek to solve problems (and problems there surely will be) by threats, either of confinement or murder.
The members of of VOCAL shown on Panorama would do well to read William Morris's News From Nowhere wherein Old Hammond, speaking from the vantage of a moneyless, propertyless, stateless socialist society, explains how the response to anti-social acts has changed:
'The punishment of which men used to talk wisely and act so foolishly, what was it hut the expression of their fear, since they - i.e. the rulers of society - were dwelling like an armed band in a hostile country. But we who live amongst our friends need neither fear nor punish. Surely if we, in dread of an occasional rare homicide, an occasional rough blow, were solemnly and legally to commit homicide and violence, we would only be a society of ferocious cowards."
In the USA today 80 per cent of people polled favour state murder; a decade ago less than half did. More fear, more cowardly revenge and more prisoners condemned to lives waiting for execution. Surely there is a wiser course for humanity.
Who is the savage?
Early Travellers in North America (BBC2, 9.10pm, 6 August) presented a series of accounts from nineteenth-century travellers who encountered the North American Indians. European orthodoxy at the time was that these people were savages, racially sub-human. In fact, visitors such as Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope and Robert Louis Stevenson were impressed by the dignity of the co-operative native Americans and horrified by the way in which they were cast into prison-like reservations and often killed. Coming only a few days after the Panorama documentary two points emerged forcefully: Firstly, there were no eases of native American Indian Death Rows; secondly, how many of the current "justice" officials owe their power to those before them whose prestige and wealth was obtained by organising the violent attacks upon and killings of defenceless Indians? If justice was about revenge - and both are terms from the vocabulary of capitalism - might not some of the great capitalist families of the Land of the Free be rotting in death cells instead of hopeless wage slaves, many of whom will be killed for crimes that they did not even commit but lack the money or the wit to prove their innocence?
Steve Coleman
No comments:
Post a Comment