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Date of Debate: April 7, 1997
Well, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades, Mr Chairman, thank you for a very fulsome introduction.
I’m not really sure how I’m going to make this last for ten minutes, but I believe I can underline at least some of the reasons why this battle, so far from seeming marginal or humanitarian, is very important, essential in fact to those of us on this side of the
House and the argument who have devoted their politics to the fight for a classless society and against the foul hereditary apparatus of absolutism. We frankly unalterably oppose the practice of human sacrifice, and we even have our doubts about the system that requires it. Let me explain a little what I mean by that.
Every one of you by now will have read of the recent human sacrifice that took place in Florida. Actually, it turned rather disagreeably in the eyes and points of view of some liberal commentators into an immolation.
It was unpleasant.
There was the stench of burning flesh, repulsive to the nose. There was the flash of flame behind the mask, appalling to the eye. Mr. Medina’s last few seconds can’t be measured exactly, but they don’t seem to have been very civilized as a means of exiting the society.
The flames and the stench, I would say, are more or less routine. I don’t want to dwell on them.
The jaunty warders and governors of prisons in Florida have called that machine Old Sparky in their charming way for good reasons for a long time, to show who’s in charge.
That’s why they do it. And I’ve seen worse myself. If you’ve ever been to the Sinai Chamber in Parchman, Mississippi, you can say you’ve seen worse.
The most remarkable thing about these procedures, including the banalized, medicalized system now being preferred that degrades the medical and physician profession, the worst thing about it actually is how calmly it’s received.
In Arkansas, the other day, they executed three guys in one go.
One guy had to lie on a gurney with a drip in his arm for an hour and a half, while Clarence Thomas debated whether he should live or die. And the statement made by the prison governors afterwards was, well, it’s cheaper to do it in batches.
It saves the state some money.
Also, it saves on stress among the staff.
This is what it means to have a therapeutic society. This is also what it means if you give someone like Clarence Thomas the power of life and death.
We, on this side of the house, do not grant him that right.
And I could stop here. But I won’t, okay?
There were some other points of interest in Florida.
The victim’s family said they thought that Pedro Medina was innocent, which there’s good reason to think that he was.
That will be settled another day. It’s too late for him now. His Holiness the Pope intervened, asking for clemency.
I would consider that a problem for the National Review rather than myself.
It’s not my business. But it was a point of interest.
And the district attorney said in an approval rating seeking statement, well, that’ll teach anyone who wants to kill anyone in Florida not to do it here because there appears to be something wrong with our execution apparatus, he said.
A considered statement by a district attorney in a state of the union, clearly seeking popularity and possibly getting it for all I know or care.
Because, as you probably don’t know, Mr Chairman, there are some politicians who are not good enough to resist the temptation of the opinion poll attitude to human sacrifice or indeed to the photo op campaign human sacrifice.
I hope this news does not shock or distress you.
The president of these United States, in fact, launched his campaign for that high office by executing a mentally retarded black man named Ricky Ray Rector in Arkansas, a man so deeply lobotomized that he saved his dessert after every dinner.
He had a fondness of pecan pie when they came to the cell to take him away because Bill Clinton was having a hard time in New Hampshire.
And I say, and I can prove it, for no other reason did they come for him that night. Mr Rector, as he left the cell, left his pecan pie behind, saying he’d save it for later. He didn’t know why they’d come, and he helped them to find a place in his arm for the catheter because he thought they were doctors who were trying to cure his condition.
A small price to pay, certainly the Clintonoids think, for a presidency of such excellence. and certainly not the least such price, and certainly in the scale of the cost of human sacrifice, probably not the foulest. Now, but take that opinion poll execution that I just alluded to.
It could be argued that this is actually an argument against the degradation of our public life and against postmodern politics, that it shows the corruption and rottenness of that, not specifically of the human sacrifice system, sometimes called capital punishment. Well I could take that point on board, I believe.
One thing I’m very critical of virtual politics, and it’s true that some of the arguments on our side are very good and very sound and very honest and very decent and are made by people who also deserve those adjective,s of whom the Reverend Jackson, whose excellent new book I hope you will buy, is a salient example.
But let us agree that there are weaknesses that we might be the first to admit. It has been said that this is a racist penalty. You may have heard it said it’s a racist penalty. The evidence that it’s a racist penalty is overwhelming.
All the figures confirm that it is applied in the most abruptly differential way as between black and white people of America and that it is indeed in large parts of the country.
a legacy of the time when sharp reminders were needed as to who was running the show.
But it could equally well be argued that’s an objection to racism, not to capital punishment.
It could be argued what we need then, therefore, is not a punishment that is inflicted in a racist way.
After all it can even be said this is a racist society or a society in recovery from racism.
Other penalties too are applied differentially very well.
It could be argued let’s have a non-racist application of the human sacrifice principle.
Let me just say that equal opportunity human sacrifice would not meet any of the objections we have to human sacrifice on this side of the house. Another argument that is very, very popular at the moment. It gets you onto the New York Times letters page.
Infallibly I notice this after Florida again is to say but if we kill killers that makes the state like them. How tainting this would be. It’s as if there’s no moral difference between our government and a murderer.
Well excuse me okay.
This is a government and a state that has just admitted to running a training school for torturers, murderers and death squad conveners all across Central and South America for 25 years.
It’s a state that runs a thermonuclear economy. It’s a state that is the largest exporter of weaponry and the machinery of death globally in the history of any state in the world and that’s quite a long history of violence.
My objection therefore is this.
The state is already too much like a murderer.
It’s not going to get very much more so by conducting human sacrifice but we denied the right anyway. It’s been said it’s capricious. That’s true and there is one of course absolutely morally unanswerable case to be made against it of a pragmatic kind which is that an innocent person executed is an unbearable thing to think about.
That the irrevocability of it means that justice can never be done whereas with all other forms of punishment even if they’ve been applied by a racist system that never sentences the rich nonetheless can be corrected. And of course less often noticed that if you have executed the innocent you have by definition liberated the guilty. I mean it’s a double offense in other words against all possible norms.
Again by definition X hypothesis in the case of the murder of the innocent in a human sacrifice the culprit has obviously gone free.
So that’s too. So that’s bad. I don’t think there will ever be a convincing argument against that but it’s too limited.
No. Our argument is this. My argument is this. I should say our argument is this.
And we think of it as an irrefragable argument and irrefutable one.
We deny to the state the right to assume the power of life and death over the citizen. In 1981 when Monsieur Robert Badinta was the newly appointed minister of justice in France and moved for the abolition of the guillotine in the French National Assembly the only good thing the Mitterrand administration ever did and had a long and very wonderful debate which you can look up.
He argued for it like this with none of the arguments above.
He said we are opposed to the institution of capital punishment.
He called it capital punishment human sacrifice because it expresses a fundamentally totalitarian relationship between the citizen and the state.
The whole campaign of the Enlightenment, the entire progress and conduct of the European bourgeois revolution if you will and of the American revolution in its painite form was exactly that to say to the absolutists no the king has no divine right.
The church doesn’t even have a divine right.
The state is a compromise between the government of men and the administration of things.
It’s an evil compromise.
We accept it because things must be administered and to some extent men must be governed but we hope to replace the government of men by the administration of things. In the meantime the state cannot any longer assume the right of life and death, the power of the high, the middle and the low.
We repudiate it.
This is a struggle in which every generation has to take its place and make up its mind.
Now the state may order you to risk your life. It may order you to fight. It may even, many states have, good my last sentence, may even order you to kill but it may not order you to die and we are so fascinated by states that will order death.
The kamikaze is the counterpart of the worship of the emperor that we realize the moral and historical sewer of ancestor worship and hierarchy from which this disgusting apparatus has come and in saying we reject it and repudiate it we reject also the beastly system of big government opportunistically deployed which it represents.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Well, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades, Mr Chairman, thank you for a very fulsome introduction.
I’m not really sure how I’m going to make this last for ten minutes, but I believe I can underline at least some of the reasons why this battle, so far from seeming marginal or humanitarian, is very important, essential in fact to those of us on this side of the
House and the argument who have devoted their politics to the fight for a classless society and against the foul hereditary apparatus of absolutism. We frankly unalterably oppose the practice of human sacrifice, and we even have our doubts about the system that requires it. Let me explain a little what I mean by that.
Every one of you by now will have read of the recent human sacrifice that took place in Florida. Actually, it turned rather disagreeably in the eyes and points of view of some liberal commentators into an immolation.
It was unpleasant.
There was the stench of burning flesh, repulsive to the nose. There was the flash of flame behind the mask, appalling to the eye. Mr. Medina’s last few seconds can’t be measured exactly, but they don’t seem to have been very civilized as a means of exiting the society.
The flames and the stench, I would say, are more or less routine. I don’t want to dwell on them.
The jaunty warders and governors of prisons in Florida have called that machine Old Sparky in their charming way for good reasons for a long time, to show who’s in charge.
That’s why they do it. And I’ve seen worse myself. If you’ve ever been to the Sinai Chamber in Parchman, Mississippi, you can say you’ve seen worse.
The most remarkable thing about these procedures, including the banalized, medicalized system now being preferred that degrades the medical and physician profession, the worst thing about it actually is how calmly it’s received.
In Arkansas, the other day, they executed three guys in one go.
One guy had to lie on a gurney with a drip in his arm for an hour and a half, while Clarence Thomas debated whether he should live or die. And the statement made by the prison governors afterwards was, well, it’s cheaper to do it in batches.
It saves the state some money.
Also, it saves on stress among the staff.
This is what it means to have a therapeutic society. This is also what it means if you give someone like Clarence Thomas the power of life and death.
We, on this side of the house, do not grant him that right.
And I could stop here. But I won’t, okay?
There were some other points of interest in Florida.
The victim’s family said they thought that Pedro Medina was innocent, which there’s good reason to think that he was.
That will be settled another day. It’s too late for him now. His Holiness the Pope intervened, asking for clemency.
I would consider that a problem for the National Review rather than myself.
It’s not my business. But it was a point of interest.
And the district attorney said in an approval rating seeking statement, well, that’ll teach anyone who wants to kill anyone in Florida not to do it here because there appears to be something wrong with our execution apparatus, he said.
A considered statement by a district attorney in a state of the union, clearly seeking popularity and possibly getting it for all I know or care.
Because, as you probably don’t know, Mr Chairman, there are some politicians who are not good enough to resist the temptation of the opinion poll attitude to human sacrifice or indeed to the photo op campaign human sacrifice.
I hope this news does not shock or distress you.
The president of these United States, in fact, launched his campaign for that high office by executing a mentally retarded black man named Ricky Ray Rector in Arkansas, a man so deeply lobotomized that he saved his dessert after every dinner.
He had a fondness of pecan pie when they came to the cell to take him away because Bill Clinton was having a hard time in New Hampshire.
And I say, and I can prove it, for no other reason did they come for him that night. Mr Rector, as he left the cell, left his pecan pie behind, saying he’d save it for later. He didn’t know why they’d come, and he helped them to find a place in his arm for the catheter because he thought they were doctors who were trying to cure his condition.
A small price to pay, certainly the Clintonoids think, for a presidency of such excellence. and certainly not the least such price, and certainly in the scale of the cost of human sacrifice, probably not the foulest. Now, but take that opinion poll execution that I just alluded to.
It could be argued that this is actually an argument against the degradation of our public life and against postmodern politics, that it shows the corruption and rottenness of that, not specifically of the human sacrifice system, sometimes called capital punishment. Well I could take that point on board, I believe.
One thing I’m very critical of virtual politics, and it’s true that some of the arguments on our side are very good and very sound and very honest and very decent and are made by people who also deserve those adjective,s of whom the Reverend Jackson, whose excellent new book I hope you will buy, is a salient example.
But let us agree that there are weaknesses that we might be the first to admit. It has been said that this is a racist penalty. You may have heard it said it’s a racist penalty. The evidence that it’s a racist penalty is overwhelming.
All the figures confirm that it is applied in the most abruptly differential way as between black and white people of America and that it is indeed in large parts of the country.
a legacy of the time when sharp reminders were needed as to who was running the show.
But it could equally well be argued that’s an objection to racism, not to capital punishment.
It could be argued what we need then, therefore, is not a punishment that is inflicted in a racist way.
After all it can even be said this is a racist society or a society in recovery from racism.
Other penalties too are applied differentially very well.
It could be argued let’s have a non-racist application of the human sacrifice principle.
Let me just say that equal opportunity human sacrifice would not meet any of the objections we have to human sacrifice on this side of the house. Another argument that is very, very popular at the moment. It gets you onto the New York Times letters page.
Infallibly I notice this after Florida again is to say but if we kill killers that makes the state like them. How tainting this would be. It’s as if there’s no moral difference between our government and a murderer.
Well excuse me okay.
This is a government and a state that has just admitted to running a training school for torturers, murderers and death squad conveners all across Central and South America for 25 years.
It’s a state that runs a thermonuclear economy. It’s a state that is the largest exporter of weaponry and the machinery of death globally in the history of any state in the world and that’s quite a long history of violence.
My objection therefore is this.
The state is already too much like a murderer.
It’s not going to get very much more so by conducting human sacrifice but we denied the right anyway. It’s been said it’s capricious. That’s true and there is one of course absolutely morally unanswerable case to be made against it of a pragmatic kind which is that an innocent person executed is an unbearable thing to think about.
That the irrevocability of it means that justice can never be done whereas with all other forms of punishment even if they’ve been applied by a racist system that never sentences the rich nonetheless can be corrected. And of course less often noticed that if you have executed the innocent you have by definition liberated the guilty. I mean it’s a double offense in other words against all possible norms.
Again by definition X hypothesis in the case of the murder of the innocent in a human sacrifice the culprit has obviously gone free.
So that’s too. So that’s bad. I don’t think there will ever be a convincing argument against that but it’s too limited.
No. Our argument is this. My argument is this. I should say our argument is this.
And we think of it as an irrefragable argument and irrefutable one.
We deny to the state the right to assume the power of life and death over the citizen. In 1981 when Monsieur Robert Badinta was the newly appointed minister of justice in France and moved for the abolition of the guillotine in the French National Assembly the only good thing the Mitterrand administration ever did and had a long and very wonderful debate which you can look up.
He argued for it like this with none of the arguments above.
He said we are opposed to the institution of capital punishment.
He called it capital punishment human sacrifice because it expresses a fundamentally totalitarian relationship between the citizen and the state.
The whole campaign of the Enlightenment, the entire progress and conduct of the European bourgeois revolution if you will and of the American revolution in its painite form was exactly that to say to the absolutists no the king has no divine right.
The church doesn’t even have a divine right.
The state is a compromise between the government of men and the administration of things.
It’s an evil compromise.
We accept it because things must be administered and to some extent men must be governed but we hope to replace the government of men by the administration of things. In the meantime the state cannot any longer assume the right of life and death, the power of the high, the middle and the low.
We repudiate it.
This is a struggle in which every generation has to take its place and make up its mind.
Now the state may order you to risk your life. It may order you to fight. It may even, many states have, good my last sentence, may even order you to kill but it may not order you to die and we are so fascinated by states that will order death.
The kamikaze is the counterpart of the worship of the emperor that we realize the moral and historical sewer of ancestor worship and hierarchy from which this disgusting apparatus has come and in saying we reject it and repudiate it we reject also the beastly system of big government opportunistically deployed which it represents.
Thank you.
[Applause]
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