Readers Forum,
The Daily Yomiuri,
1-7-1 Otemachi,
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-8247
Civilization is the thinnest of all possible veneers. All of us are just barbarians in modern clothes, only a step above the cave men, and chaos is all around us. Law chisels the virtue of order from chaos. For that reason, Civilization has a right and a duty to protect itself from that and those who would destroy it. That is why I support capital punishment as a right and wholesome punitive measure.
Anti-death penalty advocates are right when they quote studies indicating that the threat of the death penalty is not a deterrent. But so what? Capital punishment is punishment - not a deterrent - which is why it is called that. And, the fact that the anti-death penalty argument continually brings up this point shows how off topic it is, and reveals a marginal social vision.
The fact that some are wrongly accused, wrongly convicted, and wrongly executed in truly terrible miscarriages does not disqualify my point, because I do not equate absence of culpability with “innocence.” Human beings are not morally innocent creatures, and so innocence should not be part of the legal language.
Prisons, properly speaking, are not places of education, rehabilitation and therapy. They are places of punishment by incarceration. People are sent there to suffer for their wrongdoings. Good. They have earned punishment and have a right to receive it. That’s called responsibility.
The detailed, ritualized machinations of how the state kills people are truly - almost erotically - macabre, and it is both telling and
damning how the public does not want to know their details. An accurate description of the process would be a psychopath’s dream, but there is the dual nature of our psychology.