I just finished watching "House of Saddam", a joint BBC-HBO production documenting the political and personal life of Saddam Hussein in a style which combines the aesthetics and techniques of "John Adams" and "The Sopranos".
These two networks, and next to no others, have a way of forging a connection between the viewer and an on-screen character than said viewer would despise in a real context. Great rappers also possess this skill. And what a revelation it is to understand tyrants as mortals.
The most conspicuous aspect of this series was the presence of the Other side. By Other side, I don't mean to conjure up an amoral purgatory in which Saddam Hussein's sins are excused because of "context" or "extenuating circumstances" or any other such surrender to the insidious elixir of moral relativism.
I mean simply that this series was a shocking reminder of how little we really think about Saddam Hussein's enemies when we appraise his sins. Saddam Hussein did not make Iraq; Iraq made Saddam Hussein. Saddam ruled Iraq because he was better at conspiracy and revenge than all other comers.
For example, let us consider the crime for which Saddam Hussein was executed. He was executed for brutally retaliating against a whole town for an assassination attempt on himself.
In 1982, Saddam Hussein visited a Shia town in the south of Iraq. As he left the town, members of the Da'wa Party, a Shia Islamist Party loyal to Iran, fired 300 rounds at Saddam Hussein's car. Think Lee Harvey Oswald on crack.
Saddam Hussein replaced his slain driver and returned to the town. He gave a formulaic speech about the cowardice of his attackers and the bravery and integrity of true Iraqis. And then he left. And then his men arrested, tortured, and killed hundreds of people.
Of course, this reads as a brutal affair. But what I saw in "House of Saddam" was an appraisal of all points of view, the rarest of things when discussing Saddam Hussein.
It also reminded me that Saddam Hussein was executed for what was deemed to have been a criminally brutal reaction to the assassination attempt by the Da'wa Party. And who was it that executed Saddam Hussein? It was an American-protected government whose Prime Minister was a founding member of the....wait for it.....Da'wa Party.
This does not mean that Saddam Hussein crime's were invented; it simply means that they did not occur in a vaccuum, that their targets were rarely angels, and that the forces that have sat in judgement of Saddam Hussein have no shortage of blood on their own hands, or oozing from their own pens.
Consider: the political leaders of the south of Iraq declare that they are not loyal to Iraq, but to themselves and, indeed, a foreign nation (Iran). The President of Iraq then has 300 bullets fired at his car when he visits the south of Iraq.
Does that not sound like the south of Iraq aims to secede from the nation? That was their plan. Whether their plan was justifiable or not is totally separate from the fact that they attempted to implement their plan. And their target, Saddam Hussein, struck back.
Let us consider Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln has had more books written about him than any other person who has ever lived other than Yeshua Ha-Nostri, aka Jesus Christ. Lincoln is a demigod, as has been idolized by statesmen of rather harsh stripes, from Bismark to Ataturk to Stalin to Hussein.
What did Lincoln do that these supposed devils so admire? Well, he made a statement in blood and iron. That statement read as follows, "in the interest of preserving the unity of the nation, all laws and morals are negotiable".
The south of the United States made it clear that they did not consider themselves a part of the United States, and the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, got a half-million people killed to prove his point that the sanctity of the nation outweighed ALL other considerations up to and including habeus corpus and posse comitatus, which are fancy terms for legalized tyranny. One may agree with this sacrifice, but one may not ignore it.
And how was Saddam Hussein any different? He made the same decision as Lincoln. "The sanctity of the nation outweighs ALL other considerations". Add to that a uniquely artificial nation and a uniquely violent brand of politics, and we get Saddam Hussein.
I'm not saying that Saddam Hussein was a great statesman. But we should never lose sight of the fact that we are not so fundamentally different as Americans as we delude ourselves into thinking.
There are real moral differences between Abraham Lincoln and Saddam Hussein. But the biggest reason for the universe of difference between how these men are evaluated has much less to do with morals than it does with the conspicuous lack of television in the 1860's.
These two networks, and next to no others, have a way of forging a connection between the viewer and an on-screen character than said viewer would despise in a real context. Great rappers also possess this skill. And what a revelation it is to understand tyrants as mortals.
The most conspicuous aspect of this series was the presence of the Other side. By Other side, I don't mean to conjure up an amoral purgatory in which Saddam Hussein's sins are excused because of "context" or "extenuating circumstances" or any other such surrender to the insidious elixir of moral relativism.
I mean simply that this series was a shocking reminder of how little we really think about Saddam Hussein's enemies when we appraise his sins. Saddam Hussein did not make Iraq; Iraq made Saddam Hussein. Saddam ruled Iraq because he was better at conspiracy and revenge than all other comers.
For example, let us consider the crime for which Saddam Hussein was executed. He was executed for brutally retaliating against a whole town for an assassination attempt on himself.
In 1982, Saddam Hussein visited a Shia town in the south of Iraq. As he left the town, members of the Da'wa Party, a Shia Islamist Party loyal to Iran, fired 300 rounds at Saddam Hussein's car. Think Lee Harvey Oswald on crack.
Saddam Hussein replaced his slain driver and returned to the town. He gave a formulaic speech about the cowardice of his attackers and the bravery and integrity of true Iraqis. And then he left. And then his men arrested, tortured, and killed hundreds of people.
Of course, this reads as a brutal affair. But what I saw in "House of Saddam" was an appraisal of all points of view, the rarest of things when discussing Saddam Hussein.
It also reminded me that Saddam Hussein was executed for what was deemed to have been a criminally brutal reaction to the assassination attempt by the Da'wa Party. And who was it that executed Saddam Hussein? It was an American-protected government whose Prime Minister was a founding member of the....wait for it.....Da'wa Party.
This does not mean that Saddam Hussein crime's were invented; it simply means that they did not occur in a vaccuum, that their targets were rarely angels, and that the forces that have sat in judgement of Saddam Hussein have no shortage of blood on their own hands, or oozing from their own pens.
Consider: the political leaders of the south of Iraq declare that they are not loyal to Iraq, but to themselves and, indeed, a foreign nation (Iran). The President of Iraq then has 300 bullets fired at his car when he visits the south of Iraq.
Does that not sound like the south of Iraq aims to secede from the nation? That was their plan. Whether their plan was justifiable or not is totally separate from the fact that they attempted to implement their plan. And their target, Saddam Hussein, struck back.
Let us consider Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln has had more books written about him than any other person who has ever lived other than Yeshua Ha-Nostri, aka Jesus Christ. Lincoln is a demigod, as has been idolized by statesmen of rather harsh stripes, from Bismark to Ataturk to Stalin to Hussein.
What did Lincoln do that these supposed devils so admire? Well, he made a statement in blood and iron. That statement read as follows, "in the interest of preserving the unity of the nation, all laws and morals are negotiable".
The south of the United States made it clear that they did not consider themselves a part of the United States, and the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, got a half-million people killed to prove his point that the sanctity of the nation outweighed ALL other considerations up to and including habeus corpus and posse comitatus, which are fancy terms for legalized tyranny. One may agree with this sacrifice, but one may not ignore it.
And how was Saddam Hussein any different? He made the same decision as Lincoln. "The sanctity of the nation outweighs ALL other considerations". Add to that a uniquely artificial nation and a uniquely violent brand of politics, and we get Saddam Hussein.
I'm not saying that Saddam Hussein was a great statesman. But we should never lose sight of the fact that we are not so fundamentally different as Americans as we delude ourselves into thinking.
There are real moral differences between Abraham Lincoln and Saddam Hussein. But the biggest reason for the universe of difference between how these men are evaluated has much less to do with morals than it does with the conspicuous lack of television in the 1860's.
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