Written by Maggie Raker, Opinion Editor
Last publication, I wrote an article discussing Christa Pike, a woman currently recovering from a failed lethal injection attempt in Tennessee. In my article I discussed the nature and history of unnecessary cruelty caused by the death sentence in the United States and questioned the possibility of ethical execution.
Completely ignoring the difficulties and complexities of such weighted ethical issues, Pete Hegseth took to live television the next day to announce a live-streamed execution by firing squad.
The proposed livestream has since been cancelled, but the proposal itself remains evocative of several aspects of the current political landscape and Hegseth himself. The execution in question is for Nidal Hasan, a former US Army major guilty of the attack on Fort Hood in 2009, which killed 13 and injured 32 others. The attack is considered one of the worst terrorist attacks on US soil. While I still find the issue to be a complicated one and would encourage you to read last week’s article on execution ethics, I’m not writing today to discuss the ethics of the specific criminal, but rather the cultural reflection which Hegseth’s proposal has brought to light.
Hegseth is a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a group considered to perpetuate Christian nationalism. It encourages the creation of a theocracy– a “government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided”, as defined by Merriam Webster. According to Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, executing non-believers is a part of that vision.
Hegseth holds particular hate for Muslims amongst non-Christians. He has tattoos and has written books glorifying the medieval crusades, a historical event which features the assault and slaughter of countless Muslims. Nidal Hasan is an American citizen of Palestinian descent and was radicalized by Islamic extremists before the attack on Fort Hood. Hegseth’s claim now is that a broadcast execution would deter future terrorist acts. Either way, the Islamophobic and Christian-nationalist factors are hard to ignore and might push one to wonder if Hegseth would have the same reaction to white, Christian terrorists– such as those involved in terrorist attacks such as the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
This is only one aspect of the mentality which has brought about such a proposal. Much more can be said about the US’ history of public executions. Unfortunately, they are by mass majority events marked by institutional racism. The Death Penalty Information Center elaborates on this below:
“The announcement echoes an era where executions — particularly for Black men — functioned as public celebratory gatherings. Public executions in the United States, especially in southern states, have a painful and racialized history. The last widely recognized public execution in the United States was the 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea in Kentucky.1 In addition to official, state-sponsored executions, the Equal Justice Initiative has documented more than 4,000 Black people killed in racial-terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. And between 1865 and 1950, at least 16 people of color were lynched in Bell and Coryell counties in Texas, where Fort Hood is located and where Mr. Hasan is scheduled to be executed. 2 Many of these extrajudicial lynchings were treated as “festivals”, drawing thousands of predominately white spectators, including elected officials and prominent citizens. Both legally sanctioned public executions and extrajudicial lynchings drew large crowds of spectators, with the two events appearing almost indistinguishable from one another.”
With the unnecessary cruelty and publicity of executions in the US spread across headlines once again, I implore you to learn about the history of such events, and the dangerous extremist culture it represents. Whether Hasan’s execution is broadcast or not, the idea and proposal is detestable. As NPR’s domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef has said, “In some ways, the damage is already done just by the public proposal of this method of justice. And that’s because, you know, an idea that lies at the very extreme end of what the public considers acceptable policy has now been put forth by a powerful Cabinet member. […] And so just that itself shifts the boundaries of the conversation. You know, what was once unthinkable, unsayable, has been said. And so people are now considering this. And that is how [..] we see extremist ideas shift the public conversation.”
