Last week, following the horrific botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, I repeated as a sort of thought experiment Albert Camus's argument (in Reflections on the Guillotine) that every government that really claims to believe in the death penalty ought to broadcast footage of its executions as widely as possible, since they claim that the whole point of the killing is to "send a message."
Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Because just days later, the Trump administration announced that they do indeed plan to livestream the public execution by firing squad of a man convicted for his role in a 2009 mass shooting (convicted, we should add, in the military justice system—a parallel legal system with fewer constitutional protections for defendants; though there seems little doubt of his guilt).
Perhaps the lesson here is that one should never try out anything like a reductio ad absurdum on this administration. Apparently, there is no conclusion stemming from their own fascist premises, however abhorrent, that they will not giddily embrace. You never want to tempt this administration with a good time.
Camus's point was that if the public could really see what was being done in its name on the scaffold or in the death chamber, they would change their attitude to state killing very quickly.
He gives the personal example of the time his father went to witness a public execution of an accused child murderer. He went in a firm supporter of capital punishment. But when he returned from witnessing the spectacle, Camus writes, he "refused to talk [...] and suddenly began to vomit. He had just discovered the reality hidden under the noble phrases with which it was masked[.]" (O'Brien trans.)
Perhaps we can hope this will be the public's reaction, if the Pentagon really follows through on Pete Hegseth's pledge to live-stream this killing for social media consumption. Perhaps Hegseth will unwittingly produce a new generation of converts to the cause of ending capital punishment.
Something warns me, however, that the reverse may easily be true. What Hegseth aims to achieve here—and may succeed in achieving—is simply the complete brutalization of American life. The point here seems to be to make violence and authoritarianism seem that much more natural to us, and thereby to effectively carry us back toward the Dark Ages as rapidly as possible.
After all, for every gentle-hearted Camus Senior who is converted by witnessing the public spectacle of killing into a pacifist and a vegetarian, there were many generations that turned up for these executions as a form of entertainment and festivity. Indeed, public executions were carried out for centuries without producing any noticeable social reaction in opposition to the death penalty.
As Arthur Koestler writes in his Reflections on Hanging, "The scenes that took place at the public executions were more than a national disgrace, they were outbursts of a collective madness, a kind of medieaval St. Vitus's dance," or "officially sanctioned Witches' Sabbath."
Hegseth seems intent on reviving this tradition—and for all I know he may succeed.
Every member of this administration seems to have their own distinctive perversity—a different deadly sin that they have made all their own. Vance's speciality is lying and hypocrisy. Trump's is grotesque narcissism. And Pete Hegseth's special interest, it would seem, is in snuff films. He really seems to get off on broadcasting footage of the final agony of people killed on his orders.
Together, they form a grim cavalcade of vices like the ones depicted in Otto Dix's "Seven Deadly Sins" (1933)—or like the arrival in procession of Murder, Fraud, and Hypocrisy in Shelley's immortal poem, "The Masque of Anarchy." I think Hegseth would have to take the title of Murder in that particular masquerade, with Trump serving as Anarchy, the lord of misrule himself.
Perhaps it makes no difference to the man killed by firing squad whether his agony and mortification are livestreamed or not. But, to quote Dwight Macdonald, "it makes a great deal of difference to the executioners, and to our evaluation of their act."
Here as elsewhere, the distinctly fascist element in the Trump administration is not merely the fact that they torture and kill; but that they revel in it. They have "taken [life] for the pure, disinterested pleasure of taking it," Macdonald writes of fascism; "What has previously been done only by individual psychopathic killers has now been done by the rulers and servants of a great modern State."
If the ultimate purpose of any execution—especially a public one—is indeed to send a message—then we should not for an instant forget that this message is intended for all of us as Americans. It says: this administration will do anything, anything. It has no respect for human life or for standards of human culture and civilization. So you better watch out.
This livestreamed execution, if it really goes forward—or merely the threat of it—is an exercise in state terrorism. It is meant to chill the heart of every person in this country who protests against the evil being done in our name. It is to get us one degree closer to accepting fascism, depravity, and public revelry in sadism and murder as simply the new normal in our society.
Another passage from Dwight Macdonald describes the future the Trump administration is building and the sort of "boiling the frog" procedure Hegseth seeks to deploy to bring it about:
"We have grown calloused to massacre [...] Our hearts are hardened [....] King Mithridates is said to have immunized himself against poison by taking small doses which he increased slowly. So the gradually increasing horrors of the last decade have made each of us to some extent a moral Mithridates, immunized against human sympathy."
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