On the eve of an execution, a plea to end the barbarism
This past May I attended a lecture at Rollins College by Robert K. Wittman, a former FBI agent.
In his lecture, “The Hunt and Reveal of the Secrets of the Devil’s Diary,” Wittman outlined and detailed the philosophy and atrocities of Alfred Rosenberg, one of the masterminds and implementers of the barbarous Nazi regime.
Rosenberg’s writings were used by the prosecution in the Nuremberg Trials to convict and sentence some of the perpetrators of Nazi crimes.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II, and the continuing discoveries of the human remains of people massacred by the Germans during the war, Europe came to embrace the policy that statesanctioned killings were fraught with prejudice and injustice. The European Union abolished the death penalty.
The United States hasn’t gotten the message — especially Florida, which leads all states in the number of exonerations at 27.
Why do we in Florida so desperately cling to killing, especially since, as in most Southern states, capital punishment has its “society-sanctioned” roots in lynching, America’s version of the Holocaust, fueled by white racism and neo-Nazism?
Mark Asay, who is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. on Thursday will be the first white person executed in Florida for the killing of a black person.
Are we to be consoled by this fact? It should deepen our shame.
That we should imitate, albeit in a measured and sanitized way, the “cowardly acts of violence” of Nazi soldiers and camp guards who brutally massacred and gassed helpless masses of people, that we should follow the example of the mob violence and cruelty of the Ku Klux Klan, is an insult to our God and our nation.
Imagine Nazi soldiers with rifles and handguns pointed at frightened and cowering men, women and children, herding them into a pit, shooting them to death, and then burying them, some still alive, beneath bulldozed dirt.
The death penalty in the United States is a remnant legacy of this, a “cowardly act of violence” that not only imitates the behavior of the criminal but perpetuates the legacy of brutal and morally corrupt statesanctioned killings of the past.
If we are a Christian nation, we should strive to imitate the redemptive spirit of the God-Man we worship, and not the evil and oppressive powers that executed him, nor those governments and cowardly mobs in the modern era that would divide humanity into categories in order to punish and kill.