The New Law

The past week has signified a reverse in the trend of the view of crime and punishment. Before it was said that the state doesn’t take lives, and when it does it’s a scandal and failure. Murder is unacceptable, and so is mutilation; there are courts for suspected criminals. One should, in other words, not behave like a terrorist. But now the CIA’s and the Wild West’s logic and morals have become ours. Objectionable persons should be summarily executed, preferably on foreign soil.

Our foreign minister declared that the world is a better place without Osama bin Laden. The prime minister didn’t disagree. It opens up undreamt possibilities. Can we kill anyone the world is a better place without? Who decides? Hard to know, since experts in international law had free reign to comment on the Wild West theme in the president’s new computer game but didn’t.

Osama bin Laden was directed by detestable ideology and practice. As many are. He has appallingly cruel crimes on his conscience. Unfortunately, so have many presidents, and likewise the pope, who inflicts suffering and death by exploiting people’s devoutness to forbid abortion and the use of condoms, aiding the spread of HIV. But bin Laden’s crimes feel most loathsome because they were so shocking and because they were probably committed with the additional ambition of creating a global prison.

When Barack gives the order to kill, it’s called war. States may defend themselves (retaliate) but not attack, we have decided. There is, however, no obligation to defend oneself. We have the right to rise above the primitive. Psychologically, even terrorists follow the rule to only defend themselves. Yes, really. There is something in our humanity which makes us feel that we may not attack without declaring ourselves afflicted. The perceived assault may be a figment of the imagination, sprung from a paranoid neurosis or a wish to drive through a brutal ideology, but a perceived injustice is created. Everyone seeks and finds a reason to equalize the balance with their opponent. Even terrorists. They simply make a different analysis of what is unacceptable and what requires their defense (retaliation). Whether an event looks like an attack or a defense depends on which moment one turns to look at it and if one has seen the preceding events or not.

Democracy and enlightenment are vastly better than Islamism. Of course this view isn’t shared by Islamists. They don’t consider an encroachment on their lifestyle any more legitimate than democrats find Shariah law. This doesn’t imply that these sets of values are equal. It simply says something about the experience of being attacked, having values threatened

That Sweden now — together with America and all of its sundry professional forces, technological toys and unpleasant nationalism — suddenly celebrates capital punishment and punishment without trial presumably depends on the argument that it would have been very difficult to put bin Laden on trial. A few truths would have been expressed about America’s geopolitics that may not have been ornamental to the concept of liberty. A tyrant cannot be wrong in all his analyses, nor is a democrat always right in his.

It is an arduous task for countries and individuals to distance themselves from the intuitive morality where rage decides a life lost can only be atoned for by the taking of other lives. The requirement for the civilizing process is a decent, reasoning society of adults who have chosen the rule of law, and where that society doesn’t take life even when it is tempting. As opposed to the reptilian brains’ retributive emotions, these principles do not arise of their own accord.

The realization that a paradigmatic shift has occurred is reinforced by the fact that no philosophical justification has been required in the papers for “Operation kill bin Laden.” Revenge was suddenly self-evident, legal orders were for sissies, and anything else would have been a profanation of the victims of terror. Well, then we should be consistent and execute all murderers as a rule. A desecrated victim is a desecrated victim. Then we’ll be truly Americanized with crime victims’ justice and everything.

Many people in leading positions this week have stressed that bin Laden is not a religious leader. For he is evil. The cherishing of piety as something warm and fuzzy continues whatever the circumstances. Religious leaders cannot be evil, and terrorism cannot stem from religion since religion accounts for that which is good and precious in humanity. If someone has managed to slip off course and explode a bomb in a doctrine’s name then it’s because he has interpreted it incorrectly. Doctrine and the gods must always be protected; Ulrike Meinhof interpreted communism incorrectly.

We live in a time when it is considered distasteful and racist to draw a socially critical picture of a religious army commander with a bomb in his turban. But a state-sanctioned execution of a religiously-motivated commander with a bomb in his turban is the height of justice and worth celebrating. One is amazed.