Friday, September 23, 2011

Bringing Back The Death Penalty

Way back in the comment thread to this entry I said: "Alas, no one seems to be talking about bringing back the death penalty."

SUN TV must have read that thread
.

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4 Comments:

Blogger Dave in Pa. said...

The comment I'm making now isn't about capital punishment, which I support. In a larger sense, intellectually and morally honest people not blinded by Neo-Liberalism see that there is evil in the world and that it must be confronted and defeated. In civil society of any democracy, part of that confrontation and defeat is or ought to be, appropriate use of capital punishment on the worst of domestic criminals.

In wartime, the Western Democracies -what used to be called in more honest and self-confident times, the Free World- need to have the same degree of moral clarity and courage to deal with our enemies in such a confrontational and determined manner.

At Breitbart. com's blog, there's an excellent column regarding the use of waterboarding on our Islamofascist enemies. It's "Arguing Against Waterboarding in the Absence of Reality". Well worth the read and some reflection!

It quotes an interview of Dick Cheney by MSNBC glibly vacuous leftard "journalist" Matt Laurer. It's a remarkable exchange of thoughts between Cheney and moral-equivalencer Laurer. You have to read that for yourself.

The columnist then quotes another essayist, Warren Kozak, author of "The Real Rules of War":

You don’t have to dig too deep to understand that war brings out behavior in people that they would never demonstrate in normal life. In Paul Fussell’s moving memoir, “The Boys’ Crusade,” the former infantryman relates a story about the liberation of Dachau. There were about 120 SS guards who had been captured by the Americans. Even though the Germans were being held at gunpoint, they still had the arrogance—or epic stupidity—to continue to heap verbal abuse and threats on the inmates. Their American guards, thoroughly disgusted by what they had already witnessed in the camp, had seen enough and opened fire on the SS. Some of the remaining SS guards were handed over to the inmates who tore them limb from limb. Another war crime? No doubt. Justified? It depends on your point of view. But before you weigh in, realize that you didn’t walk through the camp. You didn’t smell it. You didn’t witness the obscene horror of the Nazis.

Rules of war are important. They are something to strive for as they separate us from our distant ancestors. But when only one side follows these rules, they no longer elevate us. They create a very unlevel field and more than a little frustration. It is equally bizarre for any of us to judge someone’s behavior in war by the rules we follow in our very peaceful universe. We sit in homes that are air-conditioned in the summer and warmed in the winter. We have more than enough food in our bellies and we get enough sleep. The stress in our lives won’t ever match the stress of battle. Can we honestly begin to decide if a soldier acted in compliance with rules that work perfectly well on Main Street but not, say, in Malmedy or Fallujah?

In his book, Mr. Fussell probably sums up the feelings of many soldiers when he quotes a British Army Captain, John Tonkin, who experienced a great deal of the war. “I have always felt,” Capt. Tonkin said, “that the Geneva Convention is a dangerous piece of stupidity, because it leads people to believe that war can be civilized. It can’t.”

War can’t be civilized.

That’s good advice for all of us to remember as we fight against foreign enemies, and as we fight against domestic enemies who live in a fantasy land where evil people are the good guys and good people are the bad guys.

(And I'm not even going to get started about some of the crap I've read in some of the Canadian MSM about the execution the other day of the guilty-as-hell cop-killer in Georgia. /end_rant!)

September 24, 2011 10:32 pm  
Blogger Louise said...

I like your rants. Beats listening to CBC.

I guess you won't be surprised to know that I agree with Kozak's points.

What is war, if not the complete breakdown of civil society? If we're going to let one side get away with barbarity guess who loses.

As far as torture is concerned, don't you know --- it doesn't work!!!! /sarc

Obviously, it does work and the proof is often very real and tangible results which cannot be denied, such as when the perv spills the beans about the location where his victim's remains can be found or the location where a lab or some such incriminating evidence exists.

If it never worked, the time spent doing it, would be a colossal waste. Why tie up their hands doing something useless when they could be doing something more productive.

September 25, 2011 10:25 am  
Blogger Louise said...

Question: Why do you bother to listen to the CBC???

I went out for a drive yesterday and CBC was the only station I could pull in that didn't have a bunch of guys talking about sports, so I subjected myself to that torture for a while. It was a repeat of The Current, which is one of the absolute worst of the worst. The bias was so blatant, I almost puked.

Luckily, it was followed by a comedy show, which actually had me chuckling. It was youngish comedians making jokes about old people.

One of the comedians was 50 years old, so he was talking about folks in their 70s and 80s +. He had a younger brother who was 20 something (from his father's second marriage) and the comedian was whining about the name his kid brother was given - some ancient Gaelic thing with deep meaning. His punchline was hilarious: "My name is John, which is English for toilet."

September 25, 2011 10:35 am  
Blogger Dave in Pa. said...

Why do I listen to the CBC?

I occasionally follow links from friends' emails or from other web sources (like this one) to articles, what-not at the CBC, BBC, NY Times, MSNBC, etc. I've gotten past the rage that was my usual past reaction to their leftard excrement. I do it because it's important to know what The Enemy is thinking. It also sometimes encourages me enough to make the mental effort to refine my own thinking, to have structured reasoning why their crap really is crap.

September 25, 2011 1:14 pm  

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