It was described as an honor killing and as such was institutional violence, a capital execution rather than murder. I abhor intuitional violence perhaps more than aberrant individual violence, because institutional violence inevitably abstracts its victims and its crimes into meaningless and intellectualized things. It inevitably is accompanied by a philosophy of apology accomplished means of some ideology. An ideology; a simplifying gauze of thought that softens and obscures the moral sight. It is the apology that allows an act, or even a thought, to be viewed as so threatening to a society’s order that an individual’s life, or the lives of a class, can be ended in a ritual. We arm our terminal rituals with gauzy ideologies, and we set those judged on the path that leads to the executioner’s slaughter. It is always for the good of society, and few of us are ever directly involved.
Yes, I am outraged by the story, but I also know that my outrage is in my own terms, and I have no terms other than my own. Unless filled with some substance, my outrage wanes empty and self-indulgent. The budding rage is doomed to end in the whine of ‘ain’t it awful.’ Outrage thirsts for involvement and experience to be anything other than armchair morality. To judge, I must at least know what was the apology for her execution. The victim; her name was Du'a Khalil Aswad.
I should read Albert Camus, ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’ again. Camus’s point is that there can be no reliable moral judgment without personal involvement and that it is responsible for all persons to seek involvement. I just started the second volume of Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ (three decades late) and read Wiesel, also late.
The Soviets too had their apologies, as do we, and millions trod their paths that lead to the executioners and they are guided only by the apologies that we allow to define our moral judgments. The apologies are those ideologies that we allow obscure our moral vision; like cataracts on old eyes that have seen too much sun.
The apologies are those that allow us to judge what we have no involvement in. Nevertheless, I need these things like I need the name of the Kurdish woman to take my moral judgments out of the armchair and my outrage away from the news. Perhaps joining Amnesty would make a beginning on a different path. I need to act on my outrage, because armchair morality ends with little effect. The victims became just another consumer product; a Kurdish woman’s name to trigger my empty outrage, to self-elevate myself in my own esteem. For many, the apology just becomes company in the process of becoming a self-consumer of one’s own woes. My outrage becomes just another vote for a career politician and witnesses to nothing but the commercials that parade amidst the nightly news. I need to act in some way because institutionalized violence affects us all.
I am affected because executioners always shed blood. Borrowing a bit from Othello: I admit to the vices of my blood, the blood that is shed, the blood that falls and fertilizes the ground that nurtures the tree that bears the fruit that contain the seeds of trees to be; the fruit that never falls far from the tree. The tree is one that grows near where I live. Executions always sow the vices of the blood where ever it is that they occur. It’s good for a person to know their own vices so they might know what it is that their rituals sow. An execution near where I live is an execution of part of me, and I must either recognize and own it or resist it. I must know that it is me that nurtures the fruit to be that falls near where I live. To survive, I must honestly seek some involvement with the wider world in order to make most things fall near where I live. I must not allow victims to become commercial objects to be purchased and consumed for my own gratification. I must take care of where I live.
