As the Crime Wave inundating the Western World in the late 20th century continues, Americans are faced with the lies and contradictions of a system of power that has principally served the interests of slavemasters and speculators for over two centuries. Black slaves seeking freedom before 1864 were outright criminals, and the prospect of a slave revolt in which desperate local slaves might slaughter one's own self -- if by chance, one were to encounter the fugitives in their flight -- had a powerful effect, moving ordinary citizens to readily support the death penalty for such crimes. This fear still exists in a wide spectrum of the population, who don't even realize that they are manipulated regularly to demand death sentences for strangers, many of whose crimes are alleged, but whose convictions may be based on spurious evidence. Yet this is not to state categorically that, in some circumstances, there is no role for a death penalty; it is merely to state forthrightly that there is a blood lust that is roused every time a DA demands a death penalty for a suspect, who is then hated by the population solely due to press leaks from the same DA's office; press leaks that are given wide circulation due to the eager collaboration of the "free press."

The death penalty is fundamentally alien to early tribal law. Many tribal codes pronounce death as a penalty for a wide number of crimes, but in practice, many tribes did not actually inflict this ultimate punishment. The principles of law and the principles of justice both speak to the need in human beings for fairness, and human society has always had a predisposition to associate vengeance with justice. Vengeance was an ancient right that basically created a burden upon one's tribe, that once a member of the tribe was the victim of a crime, the whole tribe was, in effect, duty bound to avenge that wrong done upon one of their own. This led to clan feuds that could last for generations, and a very cogent example of a society dominated by clan feuds is that of the Irish; also, the Middle East is also still practicing the principles of clan justice involving private retribution. The evolution of the modern law involved the creation of a new public interest that found a benefit in social peace. The social peace, as a product of law, logically mandated that the law must provide the justice the individuals in the society required, if they were to surrender the ancient right to vengeance.

In Anglo-Saxon law there evolved the ideal of the King's Peace, which was a peace that was fundamentally guaranteed by private authorities, the father of a family, the headman of the village, and the chief or king, of the tribe (or nation). In order for the Peace to succeed, it was necessary for the principles of justice to be carried out in the government of the nation. This meant that the Government had to function according to law, and that proceedings to "find the law" be balanced and impartial. This sounds ordinary to us in the 20th century, because we have been told that the Founding Fathers invented the idea of a government of law, but the historic reality is that the principle of a legal government is an ancient innovation of Anglo-Saxon law.

Germanic law is one of the most property-oriented law codes in the known world. The punishments for theft and fraud, any crime associated with the possession of property, were all corporal, including whippings, beatings, tortures and even death. The punishment for changing a landmark designating the boundary of a landowner's property was to be buried up to the neck in the affected field, while the party violated plowed the field with six oxen. Of course, we could think of this as an indictment of early law, but in reality, like all laws, it only reflected the values of Germanic society, and there are distinct traces of those values in Americans today, especially when the Federal Government and the news media go to any lengths to stir up public support for a prosecution. We may not want to bury anyone up to their neck in dirt, but when called upon, we will dutifully call for the death of a perfect stranger, based on no more than what we have read in a newspaper or seen on television.

In a tribal society where happiness and physical survival are dependent upon membership in a viable group-support system -- the family -- the ultimate penalty for disobedience to the law was banishment. In the classic civilization of the Greek polis, exile was the equivalent of death. That was why Socrates drank the hemlock, rather than leave Athens, his homeland. The Scottish highland armies that supported the Young Pretender knew that they were up against the modern army, the regulars; they knew that their clan hosts were no match for the artillery of the Hanoverian king of England, but as men they felt obligated to support the ancient claimant to the Throne of Scotland as a matter of honor, and to live without honor was the equivalent of death. This sounds "romantic" to modern ears, where the world is venal, and the only motivation for men is property and advancement. Yet there are men alive today who also act upon the mandates of honor, rather than the expediency of opportunism.

When a modern jury is "death qualified," it means that all the members of that jury are screened in advance, to make sure that they would have no moral reservations about imposing the death penalty. This has the end effect of stacking the jury, so that if the jury finds the defendant guilty, they feel almost obligated to proceed with sentencing him to death. The eagerness of District Attorneys, acting on behalf of the state Attorney's General, to charge criminals with crimes that must be punished with death, as part of complicated media campaigns to win trials, exposes a base blood lust that is frightening and chilling. The suppression of evidence that would exonerate individuals, by the Government that is supposed to be representing our own interests, is terrifying. And yet these things have taken place, and only in a few instances have the true facts led to innocent people being vindicated, while many innocents have suffered unduly under the heavy hand of a police state.

The principle of capital punishment is associated with the folkright of a tribe to survival. Individuals who consciously hunt the members of one's own tribe are a genuine menace to its survival, and the invocation of a death penalty when invoked in the pursuit of self-defense, is justified in the law. This constitutes an almost hygenic purpose and function, in effect, validating the removal of genuine predators. But it is also a narrow purpose, and it exists in a well-defined middle ground that is at its center extraordinary. Societies do not kill their own members; any society that is defined by the function of killing its own people is, by definition, sick. This is because society PUNISHES individuals who commit murder. Murder is homicide with intent to kill, and it is a strictly legal term. The evolution of the death penalty as a punishment for crimes against the state took on the insinuation of treason upon the development of the feudal Norman society, that succeeded the tribal society of the Anglo-Saxons. The feudal society of privilege contrasted with the folkright of the various Germanic tribes of England, but the laws of these two societies eventually merged to become the common law of the English-Speaking world of the 20th century.

Death for Treason can be a reasonable punishment, when in fact the state is defending the people; but when the state is an interest all by itself, demanding the unconditional obedience of the population in the role of serfs, punishable by death, then the population is not free, it is enslaved. When the constitutional executive was the chief of the nation, the tribe, then the nation was undivided, and the government and the people were one. But when the government served no function other than that of policeman, it had the end effect of dividing the population between the police, and the policed.

There is only one legitimate basis for a modern state to execute one of its own citizens: Because that citizen has become a predator. The society has a right to protect itself, and when a criminal has been defined as a predator, someone who is sociopathic, who commits murder for the thrill of the hunt, THE SOCIETY HAS AN INTEREST IN SEEING TO IT THAT SUCH A PERSON IS NOT ABLE TO INDULGE HIS DESIRE TO KILL. This goes beyond the mere locking up of such a person, to his actual destruction, because if this person is released, even by accident, it is a given that he will return to the act of murder, because he gains pleasure from it. This does not include executing a citizen because he is an enemy of the state.

The United States Government doesn't like it, but Timothy McVeigh is a political dissident. The invocation of the death penalty for McVeigh, and its imposition, is a drastic and fatal error in judgment, that will directly lead to additional acts of violence in the future, as a proximate result. The state attorney said it all when she said that the death penalty was made for cases such as McVeigh's, a crime she associated with treason. This was because he is an enemy of the state, and the death penalty is associated with the police state of the republic. A death warrant is the ultimate exertion of power the president of the republic can authorize. The emotional power used to move the jury was the suffering of the wounded and dead, but the real driving force of the state was the defense of the state against the population, for it was the population that blew up the Federal Building, not merely a criminal madman. The whole case rested upon proving that a single man was responsible for the bombing, so that the Government could claim the support of the population. The way a lawsuit is handled can put the government on trial, and great lengths were gone to in order to avoid that happening in this case. Yet when everyone comments on the fact that the criminal is average and ordinary, and that no one could have guessed that he would have blown up anything at all before the incident, it is coded language that the sentiment that moved him was felt by a large cross-section of the population.

No one can sanely side with the destruction of property, or the taking of human life; and what was done in Oklahoma City was a terrible crime. But the Government showed no sensitivity for the dead when, even before there bodies were cold, its officers were threatening to kill the person or people responsible for the bombing. And as the verdict was read in Denver, the public celebrated in an orgy of macabre happiness that was chilling to onlookers. The jury was led by the nose by the blood-thirsty prosecutors, under laws that made the death penalty an almost foregone conclusion (thanks largely to the blood-lust of the Congress, which is responsible for the content of the law). The population's blood-lust was also incited, by the ritual recycling of images of the victims by the mass media. This way the enemy of the state became the enemy of the people, even though the state was not there defending the interests of the people.

Ultimately, by putting McVeigh to death, the state lowers itself down to the level of McVeigh, to the level of the killer. We preach that Cain killed Abel, and we know that God cursed Cain for killing his brother, but we emulate Cain, and ask "Am I my brother's Keeper?" We despise the murderer, but we copy his behavior. And therefore we are like him. We, too, kill. We assume the pretension of righteousness, for our killing is to make us feel better; but we can never show that this man who killed because of his opposition to the Government, is a predator. He viewed the act of destruction as an act of war in an ongoing civil war, and he is not alone. So regardless of how his death is received by the underlings, the indentured serfs, the masses of impotent obedient laborers, his death shall be an act of heroism to those who are part of this civil war. And the 168 dead in Oklahoma are just the victims of war: Tragic but inevitable.

It doesn't matter how many FBI agents think otherwise, or how many lawyers, judges, bureaucrats, reporters, journalists and pundits. In the end, all that will matter is the viewpoint of that NEXT man who feels threatened by the agents of the state, who witnessed Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the execution of the Denver verdict, who feels that HIS safety is threatened now. We think of this anti- government sentiment as a product of the "right" wing; but many who have anti-government sentiments did not derive them from the right, but from the left. Many of todays dissidents grew up during the Vietnam War, when the whole country realized that it was an illegitimate war that could not be won, and that the Flower of America was being sacrificed on the altar of war. The release from prison of Geronimo Pratt, after 27 years in prison after being framed by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for a crime he probably did not commit, gives us relevant evidence that the state is not serving the people, and you don't have to be a right-wing radical to appreciate it.

The abuse of the death penalty always results in more civil disruption; and the denial of social justice always results in urban disturbances. As you read this, the Federal Government's elite forces are practicing to handle urban disturbances, spending our public funds preparing to suppress us! And if we stand up to stop it, we too will be subject to the death penalty... For that is the precedent the jury has decided to approve in Denver. The lack of a pathological condition that predestines the convicted criminal to a psychopathic predilection to murder again if allowed back into society, makes Timothy McVeigh a bad candidate for the death penalty. A life sentence is an appropriate sentence, for it acknowledges the scale of the crime; but to invoke the death sentence serves no purpose other than the inciting of the basest primal instincts in the population, which can only result in additional violence in the future, Mark These Words...

(CNS, 16 June, 1997)