Two strange articles
Two weird articles in the Sunday Telegraph. Theodore Dalrymple writes a crazed piece about how there is 'nothing exceptional in the morality of the Soham child murderer' and indeed in his life sentences 'scores and possibly hundreds of thousands of young British men deserve the same fate'.Stephen Pollard's piece is also odd. He (for seven columns) tries to argue that it is morally incosistent to not want the death penalty for Ian Huntley if you don't mind it being applied to Saddam. Given Blair and Straw hold this view their position is 'incoherent, unprincipled and plain wrong'. Hence Pollard supports the death penalty for Saddam and therefore Huntley too.
There are some obvious answers here. Straw and Blair may think killing Saddam is wrong, but have decided that to make a major protest would be counter productive. A country's leaders sometimes have to make such decisions. Or they may believe the application of the death penalty is in the final analysis up to local governments, after all they still talk to George W Bush. Perhaps they think Saddam's crimes are uniquely terrible (Pollard says 'it is a peverted moral calculus which holds that murdering two children is somehow more acceptable than murdering 300,000' -- well I'm not sure it's my view but is it really that peverse? Put another way it seems pretty perverse not to thnk murdering 300,000 people is not worse than killing two. ) Another reason is to do with the law -- under British law Ian Huntley can't be executed, and it would require (I believe) an act of parliament to make it so. If this happened I'm sure Pollard and co would be (rightly) complaining about laws being changed for one person retrospectively (as some were over Jeffery Archer, a far less serious case). And one could go on and on.
Taking Dalrymple and Pollard's arguments together, I guess the Sunday Telegraph is calling for the execution of 'possibly even hundreds of thousands of British men'. And thus progressively The Right marches into 2004.
posted by Matthew @ 12/21/2003 11:35:00 AM
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