How? What? Can every person on this earth watch on their phone as a man is shot live, in front of a running camera? Fathers, mothers, singles, and children — all welcome to watch? Sure thing. Don’t forget the popcorn.
And who says tradition has no staying power. Public execution has a long, dark history to offer. In London, so-called “hanging days” were declared statutory holidays. It was a fun outing for the whole family, with vendors hawking snacks and steep prices paid for the good seats. The irony: while one man was hanged for picking pockets, other pickpockets worked the crowd of onlookers. Irony really is a classic.
The crowd of citizens sometimes cheered the condemned and sometimes rioted.
In 1848, Charles Dickens watched a man publicly hanged. The horror on Dickens’s face came from watching the behaviour of the spectators. He found the crowd of gawkers more dreadful than the killing itself.
England decided twenty years later to end organized public killing. France took a bit more time, moving executions behind closed doors starting in 1939.
Now, are there still countries in today’s modern — or moldering — times that still put on such spectacles? Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea offer the spectacle, meant as a message to their own people.
No, the United States of America does not belong to that list.
The man marked for death is Nidal Hasan, who in 2009 shot and killed thirteen people at Fort Hood, senselessly and without mercy.
The man went through the entire legal process. He was charged, given a trial with a jury, convicted, and then years of appeals followed.
Justice did its legitimate, lawful work.
Now, with a monstrous perpetrator, a show-shooting made in the USA is to be staged. What a drunken idea from Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense — one meant to be live-streamed to the whole world.
An ancient idea straight out of the authoritarian handbook, just with a better camera. The last public execution in the USA took place in 1936 in Kentucky and drew twenty thousand people into town. The scene must have been so ugly that the states finally moved executions permanently behind prison walls.
Why have democratically led nations moved public executions behind closed doors? Well, the original goal of deterrence through a legal killing-show never actually prevented crime. Public executions didn’t make people safer — they made people crueler.
Death as entertainment carries no lesson.
Ancient Rome, over two thousand years ago, understood the trick all too well when they introduced bread and circuses in the Colosseum. Keep people fed and entertained, and they stop asking questions.
The brutal method for achieving that goal was soon replaced by private television and social media. Much gentler — but just as effective at getting the job done.
It is, for me as a Swiss-Canadian, hard to bear daily, when I turn my gaze to our southern neighbour. A soup is brewing there, the kind Tucholsky warned about a hundred years ago — the crowd, the spectacle, the cheering at the watching.
Nothing has changed about that in 2026.
