Death penalty serves only to instil yet more violence
WEEK after week, these pages have vitriolic screams by the same people for the return of the death penalty. The great Gandhi left us with this warning to ponder throughout our short lives – an eye for an eye will make us all blind.
Since European colonialists came here even before 1652 with their divide-and-rule strategy to make us fight and decimate one another, for them to colonise the country with its vast mineral wealth, we fell right into that trap when they ingrained into our belief system that even the holy scriptures implore us to kill, kill, kill, until we have rid this planet of all the “scum” among us. They even beheaded and quartered people.
How did we fare? Have we succeeded? If there are 21 000 murders in our beautiful country each year, double that number of rapes, even more armed and other robberies, gangsters, taxi folks and even politicians wiping one another out, racists spreading their hate language, will we ever be able to kill all those in our way?
When the brutal apartheid regime could not kill those they hated fast enough, they switched to higher gear by bizarrely killing them extra-judicially with their death squads, none prosecuted.
When our forebears in Nazi Germany could not kill all their many opponents fast enough, they resorted to gas chambers, mass graves, concentration camps and eventually a war that claimed the lives of more than 60 million people.
Preparations for killing on such a massive scale had been perfected in the genocide of the Hereros and Namas in occupied Namibia (South West Africa at the time) in 1904/5.
They taught us so well that we even sold our brothers and sisters into slavery and later effected genocide ourselves, as in Rwanda in 1994.
As long as man believes in the killing scourge as a solution to ever-increasing crime, and imploring others to join them, things will become worse as we approach an inevitable World War III, as some writers on these pages are warning us all the time.
Some of the worst recent despicable killings are the axe murder by a son of his own parents and family members, the chainsaw attack in which the victim’s one arm was hacked off, the sword killing at a school and so many other school playground killings with sharp objects, dismembering of women and albinos’ bodies and so on.
Are we then any different, any better than the perpetrators of violence and callous killings? Aren't all these budding murderers amid us just waiting to kill as the seed of bloodshed had been sown into their psyche at an early age when they started killing birds, small animals, hurting others, and even taken part in dogfights?
Where did man go wrong? Why are we, as a society, where we are right now? Who do we take our cue from? How do we stop this madness? Must we always find and blame scapegoats? Is there any hope at all for us?
Will it take too long to go back and find remedies? Who caused mankind always to be condemned into just two groups: those who believe in and instigate violence and killing as the only (unworkable) solution, and those who say no, there is another, better way where we can all live in peace and harmony?
It’s easy to kill, even easier to hire others to do it for you, but it’s hard work to believe in, and promote the sanctity of life. Will we always believe the lie that by killing a few, the worst ones, it will scare others?
We all have a role to play: firstly, to examine our own man-made beliefs, and then act upon it by atoning, seeking redemption and forgiveness as all great leaders of the past have shown us, or will we be part of the destruction of humankind ourselves?
Will that be our legacy? Is that what we will leave for future generations? Wasn’t each one of us created with vast talents and ubuntu in us? Evil will never prevail.