|
 |
Public Notice is proudly celebrating 5 years and counting of independent journalism. Our coverage is possible thanks for paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth further embellished his ghoulish record of craven violence and cruelty by announcing that the US will livestream a public execution by firing squad.
The man scheduled to be executed on December 3 is Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in a horrific mass shooting in 2009. The US has not conducted an execution by firing squad since World War II or a military execution since 1961. It has never broadcast a live execution; only a handful of countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran do so.
Most nations avoid public executions for the pretty obvious reason that turning a person’s death into public entertainment and propaganda is an assault on human dignity. It creates perverse incentives for jackals like Hegseth to target individuals for spectacular acts of violence in the name of self-aggrandizement and polling boosts.
As Trump made clear on Friday, he approved the plan to broadcast the election because he is also a moral vacuum.
Many others, though, rushed to condemn it.
Archbishop Paul Coakley, head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the plan a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, senior vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said, “Jewish tradition found capital punishment repugnant, and we continue to do so today.” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said he believed that Hasan should be executed but streaming it was “beyond disgusting.” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy also said he supported the death penalty but that Hegseth seemed to be “mimicking ISIS executions” and characterized the idea to livestream it as “medieval.”
 |
|
Murphy’s comments suggest that a public execution is anachronistic and that we have progressed beyond them. But, as the Trump administration keeps reminding us, we have not, unfortunately, come as far as we’d like to think.
The proposed livestreamed execution of a Palestinian Muslim man is in fact in line with the white supremacism that has shadowed (or more than shadowed) American history, and which Trump loves to pick up, brush off, and supercharge.
Spectacular violence and white supremacy
The immediate precedent for Hegseth’s bloody livestream fantasies is not Europe in the medieval period. It’s the US history of violence against Black people.
Scholar Kellie Carter Jackson writes that following the suppression of a slave rebellion in 1811 in Louisiana, “the rebels’ heads were mounted on stakes along the road leading into New Orleans as a warning to stave off potential uprisings.” Novelist and critic Robert Jones, Jr. notes that
On November 11, 1831, Nat Turner was publicly hanged in Jerusalem (now Courtland), Virginia, for leading an uprising comprised of enslaved Black people. After he was executed, his body was di