The Darkest Propaganda Game of All
by Dr Les Sachs, guest columnist
 
In 2006, over 200 years after large western nations began to abolish hanging as barbarism, the leaders of the West now make a hanging snuff video, as they kill one of the most well-known people in the world.

This was not an accident, that there was video - just like it was no accident that the BBC spent great sums supplying the world with bandwidth to play this snuff video.

The videos of the hanging of Saddam Hussein, are unique in the history of propaganda, and in their psychological harm to the mass of humanity.

Since glancing at the BBC news website the other morning, my feelings have been greatly moved by an intuition of great foreboding. Our civilisation has been quite sharply moved along toward the precipice of darkness.

There are profound and permanent repercussions from the Saddam Hussein snuff videos now being shown around the world. America's rulers have done something immensely diabolical.

The Americans paid tens of millions of dollars for the Hussein 'judicial process', which directly showed in the botch of the proceedings - so much money, so many American grubby hands in it, it had to become farcical.

Every element was directed by the Americans, who held Saddam in their hands till the last hours, when he was turned over to the snuff video crewmasters. It is hard to avoid the thought that the making of the snuff videos was an explicit and horrifying choice of the US propaganda directors.

Saddam Hussein is the most famous person - the biggest celebrity - the most noted national leader - ever deliberately killed on stage in front of the camera. This is very significant - Saddam, monster though he was in his past crimes, had become a western celebrity, as familiar in people's living rooms around the world, as much as Condoleeza Rice or anyone else. People had gotten used to Saddam Hussein's face and voice, his image now even a cardboard cut-out in college dorm rooms and so on. Thus, the snuff video of his choreographed demise sears itself deeply into the public soul.

Matching this in profundity, is the fact that Saddam was hanged - an extremely ugly method of execution, that was thought barbaric even in the 1700s Enlightenment. The core of Enlightenment territory - in western and northern Europe - generally began to do away with hanging under the French revolution and Napoleon, in favour of the much more merciful (though gruesome) beheading, or the firing squad.

When some of the western European nations briefly revived the death penalty in the 1940s through early 1950s to deal with Nazi collaborators, it tended to be the firing squad that was favoured - shooting is almost always quick, and seems to treat the subject with the most dignity that can be allowed given the intention. It also seems more honest, not masking the violent nature of the act. Even today it still seems the most humane way to deliberately kill someone, for those who believe executions are necessary. Now that US lethal injections are turning into slow-torture events, the firing squad still remains the least offensive method, the method most preferred by execution victims themselves.

The UK of course kept the gallows till the 1960s. With their empire, the British had made hanging a worldwide standard, with their odd faith in the 'expert' hangman. There were hangings in eastern Europe until just a few years ago when EU membership plans mandated their ending, while the US had at least two official hangings in the 1990s, one of them in the 'high-tech' state of Washington, down the highway from Bill Gates and Microsoft. (This doesn't count the many unofficial hangings in various US prison cells, among the suspiciously common 'prison suicides').

In theory, with the long drop of body weight in a planned hanging, people are unconscious instantly from a broken neck, but this is unreliable, and in fact the subject may take 20 minutes or more, or even close to an hour, to die by hanging. And it is a mess, heads twisted, sometimes pulled off altogether, blood and gore a regular feature of the corpse of the hanged victim.

And this is being shown now in the Saddam snuff photos and videos, the blood on the face of his corpse, the twisted head.

Western governments learned some time ago that public executions have powerful negative consequences, encouraging sadistic perversion among the populace. And it had long been taboo to film any execution in many countries where they were taking place - though the reasons need some complexity to state. But the key is in a remark of Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler, I don't recall the exact quote, to the effect that the Nazis achieved their historic uniqueness via tormenting and killing people before their eyes, and accepting that as normal.