I do not object in principle to the death penalty for
murder.(Perhaps also for cowardice in the face of the enemy, or otherwise deserting people you have promised to protect. Raping children, that sort of thing).
I should like to believe that a free society should be able to deal in this way with its murderers, and I still believe that to forbid a society from doing so, as the EU has done, is an act of tyranny, but it is clear that the decision to eliminate those who represent too great a danger is never truly in the hands of 'society'. It will always be controlled by those who rule, and the rulers are never part of the societies they rule. They consider themselves above the rest, a breed apart. They care little for the ordinary people, and, in any case, they will certainly make mistakes, mistakes which can never be rectified.
In practice, therefore, theory doesn't matter here.
3 comments:
I suspect you have woven together several threads here which are independently arguable, not as linked as you may wish to present them.
But one things struck me whilst reading it, with a force beyond mere logic: that the EU is not a legitimate authority. It's not even a tyranny, but a conjuring trick which survives only because the audience let it. "Perhaps a member of the audience [a member Government] would like to give me a 20-billion Euro note?" You know the conjuror is going to make it disappear into thin air, but you're somnehow mesmerised, and you believe, with only a little frisson of anxiety, his promises to pay you back.
All we have to do is stop believing in it, stop obeying. But then, I see you are right. The EU is a tyrant, because it terrorises and defrauds us into thinking we will be unimaginably worse off if it suddenly ceases to exist.
As for the death penalty, I leave that to democracy, where it exists; which obviously excludes the EU.
Our death culture is inconsistent. At the moment, only innocents may be killed.
@Vincent
The EU is a curious entity, a new kind of authoritarian government, set up deliberately to bypass any kind of democratic control, but not for the sake of wielding ostentatious control. Those who run the EU, and through it our lives, are a mostly self-effacing bunch, content to use the mechanisms to gain money and comfort, and let a few figure-heads front the whole thing.
The good thing about a tyranny of this kind is, as you say, that you can stop submitting to it. Not easy, and you need to elect a national government whose leaders aren't tempted by a future in Brussells, but there will be no comebacks.
On the death penalty again, it is probable that, in practice, the decisions can never be in the right hands. The right hands may not exist at all.
@Sackerson
Well, the innocent make less fuss, they don't fight back and they don't have dangerous associates. And if you're referring, at least in part, to abortion, the innocent literally have no voice.
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