A Slippery Slope
Wars, death penalty, hunting, etc. – killing is always wrong
A headline in The Guardian caught my eye because it contained the name of Derek Bentley, one of the last people to be hanged in the UK before the death penalty was abolished. “Innocent and hanged” – the opinion piece by Duncan Campbell is a rebuke of Lee Anderson, the newly-elected vice chair of the UK’s Conservative party, who supports the death penalty because “nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed”.
Derek Bentley was born in 1933 and suffered serious head injuries when a bomb fell on the house where his family lived. The accident caused severe brain damage and kept him at a mental age of 11. He was prone to frequent epileptic seizures. When he was 18, he and his friend Chris Craig tried to break into a warehouse, but were spotted by neighbors who called the police. When some officers arrived on the scene Chris, who carried a gun, started shooting wildly at anybody and anything that moved, first injuring the sergeant who still managed to retain Derek, and then killing another officer.
At the trial, both boys were convicted of murder. While Derek was unarmed, didn’t shoot anybody, and had already been arrested when the fatal shot was fired, the judge based his sentence on a law that held all parties involved in a crime responsible for its outcome if they had a “common purpose”. In other words, if two people intend to rob a bank and one of them kills a bystander, they’re considered equally guilty because both of them were in agreement about the possible outcome. Bentley supposedly yelled “let him have it, Chris”, which the judge interpreted as “shoot him”, while the defense argued that Derek urged Chris to let him (the police sergeant) have the gun.
Chris was only 16 and thus too young to face execution. He was released after spending ten years in prison. Derek, however, was old enough to be hanged, although he had an IQ of 66 and couldn’t read or write. His family, foremost his sister Iris, untiringly contested this great injustice. 45 years after his death, in 1998, the Court of Appeal overturned his controversial conviction and granted him a full pardon.
I remember Derek Bentley’s case because I watched the movie that tells the story of his short life, Let Him Have It, exactly 55 years after his death. He was executed on January 28, 1953, and I watched it by total coincidence on January 28, 2008.
When I read that some British Conservative MP supports the return of the death penalty in England, it reminded me of Derek and I started musing about killing in general, any killing. I don’t want to give any attention to a right-wing elected official who has been accused of racism a number of times; enough of Mr. Anderson. And the British are unlikely to reinstate the death penalty. But in the US, only 23 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. In Texas or Oklahoma, for example, a judge can condemn a prisoner to be executed.
I grew up in (then West-) Germany where the death penalty was abolished in 1949; I therefore never heard or read anything about a capital punishment case. Moreover, the war had left a strongly felt and visible presence (I was born in 1946); there were bombed-out houses, and at family gatherings my father’s older siblings told stories about air raids in the middle of the night, how they had to quickly grab their children and rush to the nearest bomb shelter. How they had to worry whether their house was still there after the sounding of the all clear siren. Even as a kid I had a strong dislike for violence, uniforms, anything reminiscent of war.
But wait a minute – my grandfather went hunting on weekends, it was his hobby or a sport or whatever he might have called it. He left on a Friday with a few buddies, and when he returned on Sunday night he’d bring back a deer, some rabbits, and pheasants. It didn’t bother me, I’m sad to say; I didn’t know any better. It just was the way it was.
There is a weird dichotomy at play. On the one hand, killing is bad. It’s one of the ten commandments that are part of all three major religions: Thou Shalt Not Kill. But a state can kill a person who committed a crime even when there is a chance that the person is innocent. People who join the army are being trained to kill. A police officer can shoot a kid because he thought he saw a gun, even when this was nothing but a toy.
And now I’ll make a wild statement: I believe all this killing is possible and accepted because we kill animals so we can eat them. Okay, most people don’t do any killing themselves. And they would shudder at the idea of eating a dog or a cat, they’re our friends, after all. But a pig or a chicken? Or a lamb? Or a rabbit? I’ll offer an excuse beyond the obvious cognitive disconnect, which is that whatever people buy at the supermarket doesn’t look at all like the original animal. And the meat industry tries their hardest to keep all the suffering and cruelty that is the factory farm reality very much hidden from consumers.
But this is the first step of a slippery slope that leads to hunting and fishing (where a person actually DOES kill another living being instead of buying something already dead at the supermarket), to trophy hunting and animal killing contests, to mass shootings, executions, and war. Maybe this sounds extreme and simplistic. After all, many of the perpetrators who commit massacres at schools have serious mental problems, which certainly are not caused by eating meat.
On the other hand, when we consider that human greed and ignorance has destroyed 83 percent of wild mammals and that of all mammals currently on Earth 96 percent are livestock and humans, only 4 percent are wild animals; that Earth’s sixth mass extinction is well underway caused by habitat loss, human overpopulation and overconsumption; and that over half of the Earth’s rainforests have been destroyed in less than a century, it shouldn’t be surprising that many people lose their sanity. We humans have to make every effort to be less self-centered and selfish. The pain that we cause other beings – animals, trees, plants, the rivers, the oceans, and on and on – is affecting us too because we’re not separate. We are under the illusion that we’re discrete entities, separate from each other and from all other things.
I found a quote by Albert Einstein, from a letter he wrote in 1950, which says this perfectly:
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.1
Yes, we must strive. Restricting or giving up animal products is part of this, as Einstein fully knew – he became a vegetarian for the last years of his life.
Have seen that movie. Very well done. Thank you for bringing me back from a bit of societal despair. Have an organic banana 🍌🍌 I make them.