Commentary 20-Schroth on Daily News Editorial

From the New Jersey Star-Ledger

"Die, you bastards"
Posted by Raymond A. Schroth February 22, 2008 2:21PM

On Tuesday, February 12, by coincidence Abraham Lincoln's birthday, the New York Daily News, the sensational tabloid, hit a new journalistic low.

It was not in its standard pandering mix of below-the-belt or blood-spilling news items -- the raped stripper, the tearful athlete, the staggering starlet -- all traditional tabloid fodder. This was on the editorial page.

I feel strongly about editorial pages. I tell my students they are the newspaper's conscience, My father wrote over 40,000 in his lifetime for the Trenton Times, plus more for the Brooklyn Eagle. And I wrote editorials for ten years as an editor of Commonweal magazine. Always anonymous, editorials speak not for the writer alone, but for the paper as an institution in its role as a teacher, a moral civic voice. In tone they should be bold, but fair. Above all, rational. And they should appeal to the readers' best instincts.

On February 12 the News expressed its approval of the Bush Administration's decision to require the death penalty for the six men held over six years, first in secret prisons, then in Guantanamo prison, for participation in the attack on the World Trade Center.

It is one thing to approve of the death penalty. New Jersey has dropped it. News York has dropped it in effect. All Western Europe has dropped it. Some African and Asian countries, and Muslim countries cling to it, along with the "Axis of Evil" -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- and the United States. So much for our moral superiority.

But it is another thing to condone torture. It is well know that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was tortured, waterboarded, and, as a result, confessed to a number of crimes, including some he did not commit. The News says: "No matter." Do the Daily News' ethical advisers know the basic moral law that to torture others is to accept the proposition that have a right to torture us?

The Administration's decision to torture and execute these men is simply to keep the American people frightened, distracted from its disastrous war in an election year. The Daily news has bought into that strategy. Worst of all it has appealed not to their readers' intelligence, but to their lowest, least human, drives -- fear, revenge, pleasure in another's pain.

The News publisher is Mortimer Zuckerman. The editorial page editor is Arthur Browne. I know nothing of their religious or humanistic principles -- except that they believe in hell, because they want the prisoners to go there: "Burn in hell!" Their sense of the intrinsic value of human life is narrow, and they do not hesitate to appeal to their readers' lowest instinct: the desire to see another person die. The last words of their editorial: "Die, you bastards."

Original Referenced Text

My Commentary:

Posted by Zemack on 02/23/08 at 9:56PM

Some African and Asian countries, and Muslim countries cling to [the death penalty], along with the "Axis of Evil" -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- and the United States. So much for our moral superiority.


Regardless of one's opinion of the death penalty, equating America to the most vicious dictatorships of the world is extremely unjust, to say the least. In America, the death penalty is administered under the most rigorous standards of due process including a long set of appeals and only for the most heinous of crimes. To compare America with that list of countries, where people in many of them are executed for exercising their most basic human rights and where mass murder, political repression, and genocide are practiced is to make a mockery of objectivity.

And to impugn America's moral standing based on the continuing legality of capital punishment here is wrong, also. In fact the reverse is true, in my view. A strong moral case can be made for the death penalty. Rather than paraphrase myself, I will quote part of an essay I blogged after NJ abolished its death penalty statute:

The death penalty issue is primarily a moral one, and it boils down to one question... does human life have value, or doesn't it? If it does, then that which destroys it is evil and thus has no value. The act of committing cold-blooded murder (the taking of another's life in the absence of extenuating circumstances) is the ultimate violation of one's most fundamental right...the right to life. By taking the life of another human being, the cold-blooded killer thus forfeits the right to his own life.

Remember that we are speaking here of the most heinous type of crime...the rape-murder of a child, the gunning down of a store clerk during a robbery, the assassination of a police officer [or terrorist mass murderer]. To speak of "the sanctity of life", or of "love" or "compassion" for life's destroyers is to make a mockery of those terms and to devalue the lives of all of us.

One can not value man's life and the destroyer of man's life at the same time. To the extent that one assigns value to the destroyer of man's life, then to the same extent he is devaluing it. There is no way out of this lethal contradiction. Not if one's standard of value is man's life.

The death penalty is justified, morally justified, not because of hatred or revenge. Nor is it justified on the grounds of deterrence. The ruling principle in favor of the death penalty is justice. The ultimate crime must be met by the ultimate punishment. Death to cold-blooded murderers, the destroyers of life, is the ultimate affirmation of "the sanctity (and value) of life."


Other Commentary:


Posted by JRacioppi on 02/24/08 at 7:24AM

Zemack; what about cold-blooded murder, destroyers of life in the form of armies; i.e. Vietnam; how many innocent Vietnamese civilians did we kill? Millions; what moral basis did we have? none;

I agree with Blarneyboy; the abortion issue is really bad kharma and we will pay a price, are paying a price;

Posted by hglindquist on 02/24/08 at 9:09AM

"In America, the death penalty is administered under the most rigorous standards of due process including a long set of appeals and only for the most heinous of crimes."

Zemack, Zemack ... I've known since reaching the "age of accountability" that one of the benefits of being a white male in the USA is that I would not be executed for a crime I didn't commit ... and probably not even if I did.

Hell, I don't even get stopped by the police. Ten years ago I was pulled over in Alaska for expired tags on my friend's car ... and was written a polite warning without even having to get out of the car. And I'm just a little ol' member of the working class. (Don't get me wrong, I support the professional police force in my community.)


My Commentary:

Posted by Zemack on 02/25/08 at 9:06PM
In America, the death penalty is administered under the most rigorous standards of due process including a long set of appeals and only for the most heinous of crimes.

What I am referring to here is the principles governing American jurisprudence....innocent until proven guilty, trial by jury of one's peers, right of appeal, etc. Hglindquist's point is true, as far as it goes. America's legal ideals, tragically, have all too often been sidestepped. But that misses my broad philosophical point. A country's moral standing must be measured in context. What is the dominant nature of the legal system? On this score, America stands head and shoulders above that litany of countries and, in fact, should not even be mentioned in the same breath with them. That is because the dominant force governing its legal system is "the most rigorous standards of due process". The fact that those standards are not always lived up to does not negate them. It simply means that the battle for the principle that "all men are equal before the law" is not over. Unlike people living under the dictatorships of the world, Americans are free to speak out and agitate against injustice within the system. And that battle rests on that principle of equal justice.

Mr. Schroth's moral equation of America with the world's dictatorships may be a guilt manipulation technique, given his opposition to the death penalty. Nevertheless, I hold that that is extremely unjust and uncalled for.

Jracioppi's Vietnam analogy doesn't hold, in my view. There is a vast moral difference between the application of the death penalty in civilian crimes and the ethics of warfare in regards to civilian deaths. One cannot ignore the broader historical context in which the Vietnam War took place. The American-led West was locked in a worldwide battle against totalitarian Communist imperialism bent on its destruction. As such, America had a right to defend itself. The Vietnam War was part of that defensive effort.

One can certainly argue about the hideous conduct of that war. One can argue that it was a strategic mistake to go into the Southeast Asian war to begin with. One can condemn the no-win military strategy that needlessly prolonged the war. But what one cannot deny is that, however ill conceived, it was part of the American effort of self-defense against a virulent aggressor. I am not here defending the isolated instances, such as there were, of American soldiers' crimes committed outside of the context of legitimate military activity. But just as the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths resulting from the WWII bombing of German and Japanese cities was morally justified as a means to save American and Allied lives, so the destruction of villages suspected of being Vietcong strongholds was also justified on the same grounds. It must be remembered that it was the conquest-minded Communist enemy that used civilian populations as strategic shields, even to the extent of strapping bombs to women and children.

As such, the moral responsibility for the millions of civilian deaths rests with the Communist aggressors, not American soldiers.