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MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo, , ,

Albert Camus llamó al siglo XX "el siglo del miedo". Adolfo Hitler y el nacional-socialismo llegaron a simbolizar la realidad del mal impuesto mediante el terror desenfrenado, sin tapujos, proclamado como idea y práctica del asesinato masivo, libre de toda reflexión moral: el mal como costumbre. Los otros asesinos en masa (Stalin, Mao) cometieron un mal no sólo numérico, sino ideológico. Disfrazaron sus políticas de represión desalmada con el manto ideológico de una filosofía occidental humanista, el marxismo. La confusión de izquierda, por eso, persiste. En cuanto a Hitler y el nazismo, no caben dudas: dieron rienda suelta a lo demoníaco, a lo que Goethe llamó "los impulsos oscuros de la historia".…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Incluso los que han criticado su forma de morir estarán de acuerdo en que Sadam Husein era brutal. Pero era brutal y curiosamente anticuado. Es posible que no volvamos a ver a alguien como él. La muerte de Sadam no significa el final de las dictaduras, por supuesto, pero quizá sí el final de cierto tipo de dictadura cuyos símbolos y aditamentos eran típicos del siglo XX y ahora resultan tan desfasados como, por ejemplo, los cigarros y los sombreros de Winston Churchill, que ya en su día desprendían un aire peculiar y decimonónico.

Como todos los dictadores, Sadam era una especie de urraca a la hora de promocionarse: utilizaba cualquier cosa que tenía a mano.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo, ,

El año 2007 empieza con dos dictadores menos en el planeta. En un breve intervalo, ha muerto Augusto Pinochet y Sadam Husein ha sido ahorcado. La desaparición de estos dos personajes no es en sí misma ninguna fuente de tristeza para nadie que sienta apego por los valores del humanismo y la democracia; sin embargo, deja un regusto amargo.

Augusto Pinochet ha dejado este mundo sin ser juzgado. Es cierto que el cerco se estrechaba en torno a él, y que podíamos pensar que sería condenado un día u otro por los horrores de los que fue responsable tras el 11 de septiembre de 1973.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

There is no decorous way to execute a fallen head of state. However, the failure to prevent the circulation of film footage of Saddam Hussein being taunted as he contemplated the noose has probably aided his pretensions to Sunni martyrdom.

It is unfortunate that some of the more successful dispatches of deposed rulers — from King Edward II to Benito Mussolini and Nicolae Ceausescu — were squalid affairs, carried out with minimal attention to due process of law. In contrast, going through the motions of formally trying Charles I and Louis XVI prior to public execution succeeded only in highlighting their dignity rather than demonstrating their guilt.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Of the 6 billion people on this Earth, not one killed more people than Saddam Hussein. And not just killed but tortured and mutilated -- doing so often with his own hands and for pleasure. It is quite a distinction to be the preeminent monster on the planet. If the death penalty was ever deserved, no one was more richly deserving than Saddam Hussein.

For the Iraqi government to have botched both his trial and execution, therefore, and turned monster into victim, is not just a tragedy but a crime -- against the new Iraq that Americans are dying for and against justice itself.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Why, one wonders, does the Iraqi Government need an “inquiry” into the taunting of Saddam Hussein in the moments before his death on Saturday? Having appointed specially selected victims of Saddam’s regime as executioners, one would have thought the reasons for the former dictator’s torment at the gallows were perfectly obvious. Nouri al-Maliki, the country’s Prime Minister, personally sifted through hundreds of e-mail applications for the post of hangman, each with a personal grudge.

Thus it was no surprise that, with the noose around his neck, Saddam was personally abused and forced to listen to chants of support for the radical Shia cleric, Moqtadr al-Sadr.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Since history is written by those who rule, the annals of the U.S.-supported Iraqi government record that the deposed dictator Saddam Hussein was given a fair trial, sentenced to death for the mass murder of innocent Shiite civilians and duly executed by hanging on Dec. 30, 2006, in accordance with Iraqi law. A tragic era was brought to an end, according to the official history, opening the way for a brighter tomorrow.

But the dark, remorseless, unflinching cellphone video of the execution that quickly surfaced on the Internet tells an alternate history, one that is neither tidy nor hopeful -- and that demonstrates, not just by its content but by its very existence, that forces other than the current beleaguered government intend to be the final authors of Iraqi history.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

The spectacle of Saddam Hussein's execution, shown in pornographic detail to the whole world, was deeply shocking to those of us who respect propriety and human dignity. The vengeful Shia mob that was allowed to taunt the man's last moments, and the vicious executioners who released the trapdoor while he was saying his prayers, turned this scene of so-called Iraqi justice into a public lynching. One does not have to be any kind of Saddam sympathiser to be horrified that he should have been executed - and, so obscenely, on the dawn of Islam's holy feast of Eid al-Adha, which flagrantly defies religious practice and was an affront to the Islamic world.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Hitler shot himself before capture, Stalin received a grand state funeral and Pol Pot died while under house arrest. Just last week, the brutal leader of Turkmenistan, Saparmurad Niyazov, died of natural causes. In fact, when the noose tightened around his neck early Saturday morning, Saddam Hussein became one of a surprisingly small number of modern dictators executed by their own people: Benito Mussolini, Nicolai Ceausescu -- and now the man who once called himself Iraq's president for life. Of those three, Hussein is the only one who had anything resembling a trial.

Other than that, there is no reason to view Hussein as an exceptional or unusual heir to the 20th-century totalitarian tradition.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo, , , ,

¡Con qué estrépito se derrumban los prestigios oficiales! A ese pequeño sector de nuestros lectores que se han molestado por la designación de la solvente y laboriosa vicepresidenta Fernández de la Vega como Personaje del Año de EL MUNDO me bastaría explicarles con palabras de Ortega sobre Mirabeau que «pocas cosas nos convienen más que informarnos sobre nuestro contrario: es la única manera de complementarnos un poco». Pero no quiero dejar de añadir la satisfacción que produce reconocer y celebrar el mérito ajeno cuando, como es el caso, corresponde a alguien que ideológicamente se encuentra si no en las antípodas, sí al menos «al otro lado del río».…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

‘How do y’all like that jumbo shrimp,” the kindly obese jailer asked the black prisoner sitting in front of a plate heaped with good southern food on death row. It was the boy’s last meal in a famous prison in the southern states of America, and in their humanity — or rather in the ghastly traditions of capital punishment — the authorities had allowed him to choose whatever he wanted to eat.

This last treat, this final whopping serving of ice cream sundae and jumbo shrimp with fries was clearly supposed to console the prisoner for the fact he was about to be fried himself.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente PróximoReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia,

Dictators die harder than most of us. Having wielded unlimited power in life, they seem to be sustained by a stubborn belief in their ability to stare down death, too. But secret police, arbitrary executions and torture finally provide no lasting defense against their own date with the grim reaper.

That lends a particularly morbid, even pathetic, quality to the last days of Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro, as it did to those of Francisco Franco and of many other tyrants-in-extremis before el rais Saddam and el jefe Fidel were confronted, respectively, with a hangman's rope and the withering ravages of disease.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

What to do with deposed dictators has long troubled the men who followed them. The British and the French memory and history of regicide, an experience remembered as so savage and traumatic, meant that Napoleon was forced into exile by his captors even though he had escaped once before from incarceration.

It was never likely that Saddam Hussein would be sent to a distant island. His rendezvous with the gallows was secured from the moment that he was prised from his hiding place by US soldiers three years ago. His only other realistic alternative was suicide.

Yet, in truth, Iraqis would have been no worse off politically and better off morally if they had allowed Saddam to be a prisoner for the term of his natural life, thousands of miles away from his country.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

My personal battle with Saddam Hussein — which began in 1972 when I abandoned my medical career in Mosul, Iraq, and joined the Kurdish armed resistance — is at an end. To execute such a criminal, a man who reveled in his atrocities, is an act of justice.

The only issue for me is the timing — executing him now is both too late and too early. Too late, because had Saddam Hussein been removed from the scene many years ago, many lives would have been saved.

Killing Saddam now, however, for ordering the massacre at Dujail in 1982, means that he will not face justice for his greatest crimes: the so-called Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s, the genocidal assault on the Marsh Arabs in the 1990s, and the slaughtering of the Shiite Arabs and Kurds who rose up against him, with American encouragement, in 1991.…  Seguir leyendo »