¦..A Romanian comrade writes
Why should Christians support the death penalty and a new juridical paradigm?
(I`m not intending here a äscientificä theological or juridical work, but only a short sketch, with some temptations to pamphlet and humor; but soon I will produce a much larger treatise on this issue of the death penalty, with proper development, quotations and scientific strictness)
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The hand of God often interferes in human life. God is compassionate ” but God is righteous too. So he often punishes human sins not only in the afterlife, but in our very earthly existence too by allowing the hazards of life to exist, and by the very prosaic and logical consequences of our actions.
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[JdN: In the magnificent movie “Ice Age Columbus,” the heroine Zia in the Ice Age Solutrean culture snaps at a lazy psychopath who wanted some of the fish she had caught:
The first Americans were WHITE, not Indians!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=maziRFPYU14
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God will never hit the sinner with a lightning bolt, but it is very probably that those sinful will suffer justly in this life for their sins. For example: taking drugs is a sin. So, the drug junkie will be punished by dying young and painfully. The drug dealer probably will fall too, shot down in a conflict with other mobsters. A promiscuous sexual life probably will result in illnesses like AIDS. And so on ¦
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God judges people, not äbad societiesä The prosaic, apparently very earthly and logical consequences of the actions of a stealer, a murderer, a rapist will be the punishment through law. But the punishment by the law can be seen too as a punishment from God. In traditional societies, the act of making justice and punishment was considered something sacred. So, the punishment of the law is a collective act. God judges, reward us or punish us INDIVIDUALLY, not like a “society”. If a society has very harsh penal laws, this by no means expresses arrogance or setting itself up to determine guilt in a “Final Judgment” on individuals or their afterlife.
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If a murderer decide to commit a murder in a country where there is capital punishment, then it is totally the decision of the murderer to expose himself to the risk of being killed by the law.
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[JdN: I loathe Mao Tse Tung, but he was a brilliant leader and writer. He once wrote: “Discipline one, educate a hundred.”]
Along with the guilt of murder, the murderer will bear the guilt of suicide too when he will appear at the Final Judgment. His hanging by the law enforcement is kind of plain suicide.
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Some will object that a hypothetical murderer can be a very good and compassionate person all the previous part of his life, and the murder was a regrettable mistake in a momentary fit of anger and he really regrets his mistake. Some heretical liberal äChristiansä will say that death penalty should be avoided in order to let the hypothetical ägoodä criminals repent for their sin for the rest of their lives, in order for them to have a chance of salvation too.
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Should the law spare such a criminal for such reasons? No. Because in order to be redeemed by God, someone really don`t need all the rest of his life to regret his wrongdoing.
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Its sufficient a fraction of second to sincerely regret his murder and God will precisely know and will forgive him as He forgave the robber crucified next to Jesus. And what can be more joyful: this vale of tears which is life or the happiness of salvation in eternity?
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God will compensate him if He will consider it justified. If the murderer is hanged, it`s not the guilt of the judge, nor the guilt of the jurors, nor of the lawmaker, nor of the government, nor of the executioner, nor of the citizens, nor the guilt of “society” ” because God judges us individually, not by the laws of our country.
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Deep in his heart, the judge who condemns a murderer can be a good Christian, and have the greatest pity for the murderer. But the judge must condemn him to death anyway, no matter if the judge is a good, loving Christian or a hidden sadistic person who finds a great pleasure in condemning a human to death. God will punish or reward the judge only for his inner sentiments towards the murderer, not for his act of condemning the murderer to capital punishment, because this death penalty is not a individual act of a judge, but an act intended to assure a functional society and to prevent further sufferings of innocent people from criminals.
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If under the influence of his compassionate feelings, the judge is not capable of preventing further crimes efficiently, he will be punished by God for his failure. Only God knows what is in the soul of every citizen of the country who sends the murderer to the gallows, whether he be judge, lawmaker, juror, or executioner.
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So only God will judge their sentiments regarding the hanging of the murderer, and will punish them too correctly, if needed, in this life, or in the afterlife. So we are judged by God strictly individually, not as a “society”, because a society is not a äpersonä to be good or bad.
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The concept of äbad/guilty societyä is strictly a modern leftist concept, totally unknown to Christianity. Christianity has always stressed individual responsibility and accountability. A society is only functional or dysfunctional, not ägoodä or äbadä. Society as a whole is above individual ethical categories. We all know that a dysfunctional society results in many innocent people suffering. The role of the laws and justice is to make the society as functional as possible in order to reduce the suffering of the law-abiding citizens in this vale of tears which is earthly life.
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Laws and penal system are not for advertising a compassionate society, nor for improving the chances of people to get salvation in the afterlife. We have the church for our salvation, not the “Department of Justice”! Maybe some narrow-minded brainless leftists or liberal äChristianä sects and heretics feel better and more äcompassionateä if our legal system sets dangerous criminals free.
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But we truly become better and more compassionate and achieve the grace of God only by individual actions, thoughts and prayers, not because of the merciful laws toward bestial individual humans.
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The truth forgotten by liberals: the pedagogical function of punishment. Fear is good!
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The ONLY commitment justice must make is to ensure that society is functional, by ALL means necessary. And one of the main aspects of punishment is the pedagogical and image impact of the actual act of punishment. In order to have a functional society, the society must teach the people what is good and what is right in manners fitted to every temperament and every level of culture, education and intelligence of the various people composing society.
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Some people assimilate the truth early on and easily, by gentle explanations, by word of mouth, in family or in school, that it is not good to kill, to rape, or to steal or vandalize. And they agree with that and they are capable of refraining from such asocial deeds. But there are some people who will not respond properly to such gentle education, people who will be refractory to any morality for various reasons. Here, in order to educate in a proper manner such individuals, and to prevent them from falling into criminal temptation (and as a consequence, to lose their lives through capital punishment) steps for the imaging and pedagogical punishment by the justice system must be taken.
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And this is not only for the well-being of society as a whole, but for the very own well-being of those possible perpetrators of crimes too. Such people, who are less inclined to respond to the usual soft methods of educating the people to refrain from crimes, are in need of tougher methods to understand the moral commitments of being a member of human society. .
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The fear of death as punishment, the fear of tangible, physical punishment, even the fear of torture has been for thousands of years, over the greatest part of the planet, and in all civilizations (Christian or not), a good method of compelling the asocial, sociopathic, psychopathic elements to refrain from committing crimes.
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In all normal and successful societies, apart from our modern Western one at the moment, the punishment for doing crimes was intended to be so horrendous that even the most psychopathic elements must feel deeply terrified by the consequences of crime.
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Traditional societies, Christian or not, were wisely aware that fear, visceral, animal fear, is needed for pedagogical reasons in justice in order to tame the bestiality of the animal inside the human. The Enlightenment paradigm imposed as a dogma the utopian idea that all the people are rational, are good from nature and can be made better by gentle moral education, explanation, compassion and by rational arguments. The liberal leftism brought this idea to paroxysm, dismissing by default as äinhumanä the idea that fear must be used to control criminality. The result is a demonic orgy of slaughters, rapes and endemic corruption in all countries adopting such ähumanä juridical paradigm that is unprecedented in history.
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An historical case study: Vlad the Impaler (Dracula) and the pedagogical function of punishment. How to have a zero criminality rate?
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If somebody would want something like a äperfectä society, it would be never achievable by the solutions proposed by stupid, bigoted utopian liberals from 200 years ago until now. It would be much more achievable by means proposed by Vlad the Impaler (known as Dracula) in the 15th century.
There are hundreds of testimonies of foreign merchants, diplomats, spies, wanderers etc. regarding the penal system of the renowned Vlad the Impaler: it was very harsh, but unequalled in efficiency. It is attested that in Wallachia, in the times of Vlad, it was possible to leave a purse of gold overnight in a public square, and to sleep without cares, because you would be sure that no one would dare to take something which was not his own or harm you.
In fact, Vlad`s Wallachia became a zero-crime country, and probably the only one such country in history. And it was a good model for a new juridical paradigm of the future. Do not suppose that Romanians of the 15th century were a nation of moralist philosophers who discovered äthe moral law withinä them, like Kant ¦ No, it was fear, deep and serious fear of impaling, maybe the most excruciating painful way to die, that made them happy to be good, moral, polite citizens, forgetting any possible thought of committing any kind of crime, staying apart from any kind of temptations.
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[JdN: As Wikipedia points out, Vlad is seen by Romanians as one of their best rulers ever.]
Vlad was so good at convincing potential criminal elements to refrain from their savagery that he thus saved their souls from damnation and their lives from punishment. If he lived in 21st-century at Hollywood, Vlad certainly would have been a great movie director because he was brilliant at using almost äcinematographicä methods of maximizing the pedagogical effect of fear induced by application of the law. However, by medieval standards even the horror of impalement was not something uncommon. The cruelty of Vlad`s penal system was not much greater than that of other rulers of his time. Contrary to common knowledge, Vlad`s penal system was not a generalized carnage, involving probably far less violence towards criminals than todays criminals inflict on their innocent victims in countries like South Africa, for example.
[JdN: See my article here: https://johndenugent.com/jdn/white-south-african-tragedy/ It has been estimated that over 50,000 white South Africans have been murdered by blacks since apartheid ended 16 years ago.]
In fact, he administrated only ähomeopathicä doses of violence to known criminals of the society in order to save the lives of 1) other potential criminals and 2) their victims. So, he was a master in ädirectingä the application of law with maximum imagological effect, in using the terrifying images in order to suggest without doubt almost a mystical almightiness, implacability, ubiquity and excruciating cruelty of the law.
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If the image of a few exemplary cases is a sufficient deterrent, then real violence is needed less. He used the terrifying image of the LAW in order to send away and to exorcize the ädemonsä from the deep bowels of human society. And frankly it worked great! Juist as he was a very efficient ruler in assuring a functional, incorruptible, and peaceful society for his subjects, he was also a very devout Orthodox Christian: he built many churches and monasteries and he even boldly tried to take back Constantinople from the Turks, despite the ratio of forces between Wallachia and the Ottoman Empire being hugely to Vlad’s disadvantage.’ In his military campaign near Constantinople he was greeted and supported as an liberator by Bulgarians and Greeks. Sadly, when he was far from Wallachia, machinations in Catholic Hungary (by äChristian brothersä) forced him to interrupt his liberation campaign and return to Wallachia to face the western äbrothers’ä attempts to remove him from power.
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His campaign against the Ottomans occupying Constantinople triggered a military campaign of revenge from Sultan Mehmed Fatih, the brilliant conqueror of Constantinople. (Mehmet was the one who put an end to the Roman
Empire after 2000 years of uninterrupted existence; the proper name for the äByzantineä empire was always äthe Roman Empireä and the notion never existed then that the äByzantineä Empire could be anything other than the veritable old Roman Empire).
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But, despite outnumbering Romanian forces by 10 to 1, once the sultan arrived in Wallachia, the great conqueror of Constantinople suffered a bitter defeat ¦ Why? Because Vlad employed the same imagological techniques of demoralizing the Turkish troops, instilling in them a paralyzing terror and neutralizing their will to fight. He used guerrilla warfare with a special stress on psychological aspects, just as when applying the law he stressed the psychological (pedagogical) aspects of the punishment.
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In both cases, in law and in warfare, he proved to us that fear is good, but ONLY if applied in sufficient quantity and properly “advertised.” Regarding the pathetic ähumanä death penalties applied in some states of the USA today, Vlad surely would laugh at them and consider them a disgrace to the idea of justice, with no effect on reducing criminality.
That`s why leftists can claim that todays death penalty has no influence on the criminality rate: because it is too rarely applied, and because it is perceived as improbable to happen by most criminals.
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How we can judge Vlad the Impaler and his approach to law from a Christian Orthodox perspective?
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Rulers and heroes have different morals and rules to be judged by God, different from those of us who are simple citizens. They are judged according to the functionality, stability and security they enable in society and provide to their subjects.
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Their moral commitment is only to serve their subjects’ needs well. But if they do not apply an efficient criminal justice system, then many innocent subjects will suffer from the bestiality of criminals and the ruler will be judged by God as an direct accomplice to the suffering that criminals inflicted.
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If a criminal is convicted and sentenced to the death penalty, then this is entirely his own suicidal fault, because he decided to commit the crime. But if the ruler, lawmaker, and judge fail to properly punish him, and fail to make him into an example, then they are direct accomplices not only to the crimes committed by the convict, but in the crimes that other potential criminals will be tempted to inflict, encouraged by ätolerantä laws.
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And so, in summary, while Vlad was compelled by his realism and true compassion to take unpleasant measures, those measures prevented scores of possible criminals from being tempted into crime and so Vlad saved many souls from eternal damnation. Moreover, assuring a zero crime rate, he saved the lives of possible victims of the criminals. So, from this perspective, Vlad was a perfect Christian-Orthodox ruler, and that is why he was deeply loved by his subjects and he is still deeply missed in Romania to this very day, and maybe today more than any other time. And so for both his good deeds and due to the prayers of his beloved subjects and their descendants, we can be sure that the soul of Vlad is resting in Heaven.
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Only if they will return to the medieval morality and world view can Western nations survive. And there is no possibility to return to the medieval state of mind other than by returning to true, orthodox Christianity, which was the Western religious tradition for almost 1000 years in the glorious first millennium of Christianity.
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One of the key problems of today’s society is the juridical paradigm. Not only the liberal consumerist, anti-protectionist economical system is bankrupt. The rationalist, “Enlightened”, “humanist” juridical paradigm also has proved itself bankrupt. We see it in the huge violent-crime rates in Brazil, the USA, Russia, France, Germany or South Africa and the massive corruption in Romania and other Eastern European countries.
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The solution for crime rate lies in individual, not collective punishment. We must stop blaming “society” like leftists!
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But harsh, very harsh punishment, and properly advertised works. As Vlad`s system has been historically documented as effective, we can be inspired by himand invoke Vlad: “Revive, fallen one!” ¦
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Those heretics pretending to be Christian while aligning in reality with the anti-Christian, leftist-liberal and truly satanic concept of ätoleranceä ” which is tolerance of EVIL, of rape, murder and suffering of the innocent ” must be aware that they thus promote wickedness, not goodness, and cruelty, not kindness.
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Adn that is why today’s society is much more violent than the medieval society of Vlad the Impaler. If the leftist-liberals do not repent for their sin of neglecting, or misinterpreting, the word of God, they will be damned for eternity for what the victims suffer. And probably they will be punished even in in this earthly life, by any mean God will consider fitting: by accidents, or by legal punishment, or by other evil people getting them, or the anger of the people.
Roman Emperor Augustus, who ended a century of civil war and stabilized the Roman Empire,
defeated only by the Germans under Arminus in his 41-year reign.
Wikipedia:
The reign of Augustus initiated an era of relative peace known as the Pax Romana, or Roman peace. Despite continuous wars on the frontiers, and one year-long civil war over the imperial succession, the Mediterranean world remained at peace for more than two centuries. Augustus enlarged the empire dramatically, annexing Egypt, Dalmatia, Pannonia, and Raetia, expanded possessions in Africa, and completed the conquest of Hispania. Beyond the frontiers, he secured the empire with client states, and made peace with Parthia through diplomacy. He reformed the Roman system of taxation, developed networks of roads with an official courier system, established a standing army, established the Praetorian Guard, and created official police and fire-fighting services for Rome. Much of the city was rebuilt under Augustus; and he wrote a record of his own accomplishments, known as the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, which has survived. Upon his death in 14 AD, Augustus was declared a god by the Senate “ to be worshipped by the Romans.[4] His names Augustus and Caesar were adopted by every subsequent emperor, and the month of Sextilis was officially renamed August in his honour.
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