Subtext Message: The cellphone video of Saddam's execution.
A few weeks ago I asked a friend if he would ever watch a video of O.J. Simpson's killing spree--mind you, only if he did it and if such hypothetical footage existed. My friend shook his head no. The sight of Nicole Brown Simpson being decapitated and so much blood would be intolerable. But thinking it over, he had to admit he would take a peek if O.J. had committed the murders with a gun instead of a butcher knife.
"I know this sounds inconsistent," he said about his voyeuristic moral principles. "But a gun isn't as personal or messy."
The execution of Saddam Hussein was by these standards a viewer-friendly spectacle. This time Rupert Murdoch did not judge the event to be "unseemly." Death by hanging is relatively bloodless, and images of the tyrant with a rope around his neck made the front pages of the tabloids ("Good Knot" read the jeering headline of the New York Post) and led network broadcasts around the world.
Thanks to the Internet, which lets each viewer decide what the mind can stomach, you could also, if you desired, see his body fall through the floor and his neck snap. Multiple versions quickly became available, the cellphone video without sound and another that records Saddam's exchange of taunts with his executioners. A YouTube contributor has edited the material down to under a minute and received more than a million hits.
Its presence in cyberspace doesn't unnerve me. Photographs of executions have appeared in books for more than a hundred years. The French surrealist Georges Bataille collected turn-of-the-century prints of Chinese being tortured with knives. In 1928 the New York Daily News ran a front-page photograph of murderess Ruth Snyder dying in the electric chair at Sing Sing. The shot was taken illegally by a newsman who strapped a miniature camera to his ankle.
According to my voyeuristic principles, Saddam's execution is of historic importance, different in kind from the snuff films showing the decapitations of Daniel Pearl, Nicolas Berg and other figures much better and less powerful than the Iraqi despot, deaths I am unable to watch. Postcards of lynchings in the American South also now make me turn away.
The visible end to a murderous dictator has one benefit: It quells theories that he escaped the reaper. Hitler's suicide was not photographed, allowing a belief in his survival to thrive for years. Behind bars and headed for the gallows, Saddam exercised a similar irrational grip of fear over his captors. Philip Shishkin reported Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was so worried last Friday that the Americans might spare Saddam's life at the last minute that he left his only son's wedding early to oversee the hanging.
But in everything from the partisan chants of Shiite bystanders to the grainy, low-lighted jumpiness of the footage and the horror-movie ski masks of the executioners, the video images of the execution contradict the fragile message that a secure and democratic government is in charge, rendering justice to someone who deserves to die.
The intention of the U.S. in putting Saddam in the dock for crimes against humanity was to demonstrate the rule of law, a process he never followed while in power. The trials of Nazi and Japanese war criminals after World War II were a model, along with the more recent (and much slower) prosecutions for genocide of Serbs, Croats and Rwandans at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Damning testimony about Saddam's treatment of the Kurds went unheard, but witnesses before the Iraqi judges--his trial began in October 2005--offered enough evidence to prove his direct role in ordering hundreds of deaths, a fraction of the hundreds of thousands he reportedly ordered over his 23-year reign.
In less than three minutes, the video undid that deliberate process. Saddam will now be frozen in time looking like a tested leader--angry but resigned to his fate--while the Iraqi government is seen hurrying to complete its nasty business before the new year. Even though that government granted him the kind of dignity he seldom granted the people he killed, his uncovered and unbowed head contrasts favorably with the masked executioners shouting "Muktada" and acting up for the camera as if this were a soccer match. Ironically, it is Saddam's stoic behavior on the scaffold that makes his hanging bearable to watch.
The executions on the gallows of 10 Nazi leaders at Nuremberg prison in 1946 and of seven Japanese at Sugamo prison in Tokyo in 1949 had a sense of momentous gravity. The events were well planned, slow, even ceremonial. Reporters were present. But published photographs record the men after death, as prone corpses, the nooses still around their necks after their hoods were removed (the face of a condemned man by hanging is often shielded from public view). It was no media spectacle.
The video by no means assures the martyrdom of Saddam, even among Sunnis. But stately behavior by other executed despots--Charles I, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Nicholas and Alexandra--has enhanced their legacy in the afterlife. Manet depicted the 1867 death by firing squad of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. (The four paintings and a lithograph are now up in a pertinent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.) Although Manet was a staunch republican, opposed to Napoleon III and his Habsburg puppet, he conveyed a measure of respect on Maximilian as he is shot and killed on canvas.
Manet completed the painted executions two years after the event, before photography could stop the action of bullets flying, a feat it has long since mastered. Cameras now routinely picture death in frightening and realistic detail and, linked to the power of digital technology, can report instantly from anywhere you can fit a fiber-optic cable. The Saddam video proves again that no act is too gruesome or intimate that someone won't try to take a picture of it and share it with the wired world. We better get used to living without visual boundaries--and with the curiosity and flexible morality of the viewer as the only limit on what we can see--from now on.
"I know this sounds inconsistent," he said about his voyeuristic moral principles. "But a gun isn't as personal or messy."
The execution of Saddam Hussein was by these standards a viewer-friendly spectacle. This time Rupert Murdoch did not judge the event to be "unseemly." Death by hanging is relatively bloodless, and images of the tyrant with a rope around his neck made the front pages of the tabloids ("Good Knot" read the jeering headline of the New York Post) and led network broadcasts around the world.
Thanks to the Internet, which lets each viewer decide what the mind can stomach, you could also, if you desired, see his body fall through the floor and his neck snap. Multiple versions quickly became available, the cellphone video without sound and another that records Saddam's exchange of taunts with his executioners. A YouTube contributor has edited the material down to under a minute and received more than a million hits.
-----------
Its presence in cyberspace doesn't unnerve me. Photographs of executions have appeared in books for more than a hundred years. The French surrealist Georges Bataille collected turn-of-the-century prints of Chinese being tortured with knives. In 1928 the New York Daily News ran a front-page photograph of murderess Ruth Snyder dying in the electric chair at Sing Sing. The shot was taken illegally by a newsman who strapped a miniature camera to his ankle.
According to my voyeuristic principles, Saddam's execution is of historic importance, different in kind from the snuff films showing the decapitations of Daniel Pearl, Nicolas Berg and other figures much better and less powerful than the Iraqi despot, deaths I am unable to watch. Postcards of lynchings in the American South also now make me turn away.
The visible end to a murderous dictator has one benefit: It quells theories that he escaped the reaper. Hitler's suicide was not photographed, allowing a belief in his survival to thrive for years. Behind bars and headed for the gallows, Saddam exercised a similar irrational grip of fear over his captors. Philip Shishkin reported Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was so worried last Friday that the Americans might spare Saddam's life at the last minute that he left his only son's wedding early to oversee the hanging.
But in everything from the partisan chants of Shiite bystanders to the grainy, low-lighted jumpiness of the footage and the horror-movie ski masks of the executioners, the video images of the execution contradict the fragile message that a secure and democratic government is in charge, rendering justice to someone who deserves to die.
The intention of the U.S. in putting Saddam in the dock for crimes against humanity was to demonstrate the rule of law, a process he never followed while in power. The trials of Nazi and Japanese war criminals after World War II were a model, along with the more recent (and much slower) prosecutions for genocide of Serbs, Croats and Rwandans at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Damning testimony about Saddam's treatment of the Kurds went unheard, but witnesses before the Iraqi judges--his trial began in October 2005--offered enough evidence to prove his direct role in ordering hundreds of deaths, a fraction of the hundreds of thousands he reportedly ordered over his 23-year reign.
In less than three minutes, the video undid that deliberate process. Saddam will now be frozen in time looking like a tested leader--angry but resigned to his fate--while the Iraqi government is seen hurrying to complete its nasty business before the new year. Even though that government granted him the kind of dignity he seldom granted the people he killed, his uncovered and unbowed head contrasts favorably with the masked executioners shouting "Muktada" and acting up for the camera as if this were a soccer match. Ironically, it is Saddam's stoic behavior on the scaffold that makes his hanging bearable to watch.
----------
The executions on the gallows of 10 Nazi leaders at Nuremberg prison in 1946 and of seven Japanese at Sugamo prison in Tokyo in 1949 had a sense of momentous gravity. The events were well planned, slow, even ceremonial. Reporters were present. But published photographs record the men after death, as prone corpses, the nooses still around their necks after their hoods were removed (the face of a condemned man by hanging is often shielded from public view). It was no media spectacle.
The video by no means assures the martyrdom of Saddam, even among Sunnis. But stately behavior by other executed despots--Charles I, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Nicholas and Alexandra--has enhanced their legacy in the afterlife. Manet depicted the 1867 death by firing squad of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. (The four paintings and a lithograph are now up in a pertinent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.) Although Manet was a staunch republican, opposed to Napoleon III and his Habsburg puppet, he conveyed a measure of respect on Maximilian as he is shot and killed on canvas.
Manet completed the painted executions two years after the event, before photography could stop the action of bullets flying, a feat it has long since mastered. Cameras now routinely picture death in frightening and realistic detail and, linked to the power of digital technology, can report instantly from anywhere you can fit a fiber-optic cable. The Saddam video proves again that no act is too gruesome or intimate that someone won't try to take a picture of it and share it with the wired world. We better get used to living without visual boundaries--and with the curiosity and flexible morality of the viewer as the only limit on what we can see--from now on.
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