About Killing for Political Reasons

George Bernard Shaw en On the Rocks, explica su posición sobre el exterminio de personas y las matanzas por razones políticas. Tenía opiniones muy controversiales y se despachaba con cosas como: “Cada gobierno está obligado a practicarlo en una escala variable desde la ejecución de un simple asesino hasta la matanza de millones de personas inocentes.”

Al final aclaramos sobre recoil, The Life Everlasting y The Life to Come.

 

La necesidad política de matarlo es precisamente como la de matar a la cobra o al tigre: es tan feroz o sin escrúpulos que si sus vecinos no lo matan él matará o arruinará a sus vecinos…

 

In this play a reference is made by a Chief of Police to the political necessity for killing people: a necessity so distressing to the statesmen and so terrifying to the common citizen that nobody except myself (as far as I know) has ventured to examine it directly on its own merits, although every Government is obliged to practise it on a scale varying from the execution of a single murderer to the slaughter of millions of quite innocent persons. Whilst assenting to these proceedings, and even acclaiming and celebrating them, we dare not tell ourselves what we are doing or why we are doing it; and so we call it justice or capital punishment or our duty to king and country or any other convenient verbal whitewash for what we instinctively recoil from as from a dirty job. These childish evasions are revolting. We must strip off the whitewash and find out what is really beneath it. Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.

That killing is a necessity is beyond question by any thoughtful person. Unless rabbits and deer and rats and foxes are killed, or "kept down" as we put it, mankind must perish; and that section of mankind which lives in the country and is directly and personally engaged in the struggle with Nature for a living has no sentimental doubts that they must be killed. As to tigers and poisonous snakes, their incompatibility with human civilization is unquestioned. This does not excuse the use of cruel steel traps, agonizing poisons, or packs of hounds as methods of extermination. Killing can be cruelly or kindly done; and the deliberate choice of cruel ways, and their organization as popular pleasures, is sinful; but the sin is in the cruelty and the enjoyment of it, not in the killing.

In law we draw a line between the killing of human animals and non-human ones, setting the latter apart as brutes. This was founded on a general belief that humans have immortal souls and brutes none. Nowadays more and more people are refusing to make this distinction. They may believe in The Life Everlasting and The Life to Come; but they make no distinction between Man and Brute, because some of them believe that brutes have souls, whilst others refuse to believe that the physical materializations and personifications of The Life Everlasting are themselves everlasting. In either case the mystic distinction between Man and Brute vanishes; and the murderer pleading that though a rabbit should be killed for being mischievous he himself should be spared because he has an immortal soul and a rabbit has none is as hopelessly out of date as a gentleman duellist pleading his clergy. When the necessity for killing a dangerous human being arises, as it still does daily, the only distinction we make between a man and a snared rabbit is that we very quaintly provide the man with a minister of religion to explain to him that we are not killing him at all, but only expediting his transfer to an eternity of bliss.

The political necessity for killing him is precisely like that for killing the cobra or the tiger: he is so ferocious or unscrupulous that if his neighbors do not kill him he will kill or ruin his neighbors; so that there is nothing for it but to disable him once for all by making an end of him, or else waste the lives of useful and harmless people in seeing that he does no mischief, and caging him cruelly like a lion in a show.

 

Cuando surge la necesidad de matar a un ser humano peligroso, como todavía sucede a diario, la única distinción que hacemos entre un hombre y un conejo atrapado es que, muy curiosamente, le proporcionamos al hombre un ministro de religión para explicarle que no estamos matándolo en absoluto, solo acelerando su transferencia a una eternidad de felicidad.

La necesidad política de matarlo es precisamente como la de matar a la cobra o al tigre: es tan feroz o sin escrúpulos que si sus vecinos no lo matan él matará o arruinará a sus vecinos…

 

Here somebody is sure to interject that there is the alternative of teaching him better manners; but I am not here dealing with such cases: the real necessity arises only in dealing with untameable persons who are constitutionally unable to restrain their violent or acquisitive impulses, and have no compunction about sacrificing others to their own immediate convenience. To punish such persons is ridiculous: we might as reasonably punish a tile for flying off a roof in a storm and knocking a clergyman on the head. But to kill them is quite reasonable and very necessary.

… The extermination of whole races and classes has been not only advocated but actually attempted. The extirpation of the Jew as such figured for a few mad moments in the program of the Nazi party in Germany. The extermination of the peasant is in active progress in Russia… (On the Rocks, by G. B. Shaw)

 

Jewish prisoner

Vocabulario

Recoil: to move back because of fear or disgust (= dislike or disapproval):

He leaned forward to kiss her and she recoiled in horror.

The life to come: a life that is believed by some people to come after death.

He believed that he would see his family again in the life to come.

The life everlasting: immortality, afterworld, eternity.

This natural life is a little piece of the life everlasting.

We have different opinions regarding death, but as a Christian, I find so much meaning in life, and hope in death, precisely because of the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen!

 

Crítica

What a stupid comment! “Every Government is obliged to practise it on a scale varying from the execution of a single murderer to the slaughter of millions of quite innocent persons…” The ridiculousness of the sentence avoids any other comment.

 

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