Decapitation

“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (circa 400 BC).

For nearly all of human history, Thucydides has been right. The Nazis made his apothegm shorter and more punchy, as was appropriate to our then-emerging electronic-media age. “Macht macht Recht,” they said: “Might makes right.”

As if to emphasize the point, the Nazis put a similarly catchy but diabolically ironic slogan over the main gate to their concentration-death camp at Auschwitz. “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work makes you free”), it said. The camp’s purpose was exterminating members of mostly innocent and wholly defenseless minority groups (Jews, “Gypsies” and Communists) by working or gassing them to death.

Then the Nazis lost the war. And then came the Nuremberg Trials.

Long before our presidency was a gleam in Donald Trump’s eye, I argued that those Trials were a seminal and grossly underappreciated event in human history. Yes, tyrants who had made unprovoked and brutal war on their neighbors had been “offed” before. But the “offing” had always been in battle, in its immediate aftermath, or in the endless chain of intrigue, retribution and treachery that Machiavelli described in his seminal work “The Prince.” (He recounts two instances in which parties of high officials from rival city-states had been lured to so-called “peace” conferences only to be assassinated in surprise attacks, to the last man.)

Before Nuremberg, the goals of action against leaders were always retribution, revenge and domination, not exposure, trial and punishment for “crimes against humanity.”

The Nuremberg Trials changed all that. They were something new under the Sun.

Nuremberg gave us a novel legal process intended to adjudicate crimes against our entire species (and its nascent sense of general justice and order). They publicized the adjudication worldwide, using the then-nascent technologies of radio, film and rudimentary television. Then came the punishments: executions and imprisonments (many for life).

This new cycle of solemn legal prosecution and punishment continued with action by the Israelis. They tracked down and captured, in Argentina, one of the surviving principal authors of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. They put him on televised trial in Jerusalem and executed him by hanging in 1960.

The Nuremberg Trials themselves spanned the dates of late 1945 to spring 1949. They started less than 81 years ago. That’s about 1.35 percent of our species’ roughly six-thousand-year recorded history. Not surprisingly, that’s similar to the historical, population-weighted incidence of democracy, which I recently estimated as 3.2%. We are discussing very rare and recent social innovations.

The conclusion is simple. Our human species is just now in the earliest, incipient stages of trying to accelerate our social evolution to ameliorate the most dangerous aspects of our biological evolution: “survival of the fittest” in increasingly devastating and catastrophic wars. If we cannot succeed, our accelerating weapons technology and relatively primitive social organization, if not our heedless planetary heating, will make self-extinction likely, if not inevitable.

Right now, we seem to be playing out, on our own planet and in real time, credible explanations of the Fermi Paradox: the presence of so many billions of habitable planets out there, but no contact yet with other intelligent species. Maybe the “Paradox” derives from most species of intelligent and competitive individuals committing generalized seppuku in catastrophic wars after developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Viewed against this background, the unusual events of the last few weeks are a big, big deal. Nuclear weapons are rapidly proliferating. They are already in the hands of unpredictable and evil tyrants reminiscent of the “worst of the worst” of old: Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. Our safety, as a species, from nuclear self-annihilation is as precarious today as it has been since we came within minutes of self-extinction during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. With such dangerous weapons in the hands of leaders who increasingly resemble Ivan the Terrible, what can we do?

Enter “decapitation.” In its Latin origins, it means “beheading,” like cutting the head off a snake. Today, it has also come to include changing the likely course of human history by removing, disabling or eliminating the deviant human leaders who threaten our collective survival, species wide.

The seminal recent events are, of course, the capture and imminent trial of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro (and his wife), and the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s late “Supreme Leader,” along with several high-ranking members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (“IRGC”) and other groups, who sustained his absolute (and absolutely theological!) rule by force and mass murder.

Ironies abound, as often they do in human affairs. The criminals against humanity most in need of a complete, procedurally impeccable and globally publicized trial are now mostly dead.

Though justice has been served on their persons, the Ayatollah and his top military enforcers will never be brought to justice publicly for all the crimes they have committed against humanity, their own people, and their neighbors, including Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, not to mention us Americans. They will never have the details and methods of their crimes fully exposed in extended legal proceedings, as were those of the Holocaust’s perpetrators.

In comparison, Maduro was but a petty criminal against humanity. His brutal, kleptocratic regime, under the guise of “socialism,” stole the wealth of a minor Caribbean banana republic, destroyed its rising energy economy, and brutalized its people. It lasted for less than thirteen years, since the death of Hugo Chavez. In contrast, the late Ayatollah Khamenei had been Iran’s Supreme Leader for 37 years, and his over-the-top religious “vision” has devastated an entire region, if not a sub-continent.

No doubt he had been partly, if not fully, responsible for the recent murders of an estimated 3,117 to over 30,000 protesters by Iranian government troops in less than a week. Without a complete and open trial of his (and his henchmen’s) crimes, we may never know the details of his atrocities, let alone have an accurate account of all those killed. (The low number represents Iran’s own estimate now, while the higher one represents the minimum estimate of independent international organizations like Amnesty International. In comparison, estimates of the number of Gazans who died violently, over the course of the entire recent Gaza War of three years, five months and counting, range from 72,097 from the Gaza Ministry of Health to 83,740 from an independent study reported in The Lancet, a British medical journal.)

The final and crowning irony is, of course, the decapitation’s perpetrator. He is hardly a paragon of justice, reason or international law. He’s Donald J. Trump, the least morally appealing and law-abiding, and undoubtedly the stupidest and most senile, chief executive of the United States (and perhaps of any democratic nation) since the Enlightenment began.

But evolution—including social evolution—never proceeds in a straight line. It proceeds in fits and starts. Whatever the fate of the unfortunate Iranian people, their future looks brighter now than at any time in the last half-century, and their wishes (including those of the vast Iranian diaspora) are more likely now to be taken into account. And Maduro’s kleptocratic depredation of the Venezuela people has come to an end, with a full accounting to be had by legal process in a court in (of all places!) Brooklyn, NY. Any successor regime is likely to be better for Venezuelans, if only because its leaders will be looking over their shoulders.

So the task for our entire species now is to “take the win” and mold it to our better angels.

These two decapitations could be a turning point in human history. For most of our social evolution, bad leaders survived, wreaking havoc on their neighbors and their own people, until they died or were killed in battle, or until their vast (and often only partly willing) armies were defeated in increasingly catastrophic wars.

The last, greatest such war killed some 50 million people and devastated much of Europe and East Asia. The next great war is likely to extinguish our species, leaving only the faint promise of re-evolution after the passage of ten half-lives of Plutonium-239. That’s 240,000 years, or 40 times our species’ entire recorded history. Quite a setback that would be!

During the Imperial Age, the “elite” got exchanged as prisoners, after being incarcerated in relative luxury. Kings and nobles were rarely brought to account, except on the battlefield. “The people,” as common soldiers, were treated as cannon fodder or languished and died in concentration camps. And if you think the Nazis invented those camps, think again. Read a bit about Andersonville, our own Civil War concentration camp, where the unrepentant South kept captured Union soldiers and recaptured slaves under horrendous “concentrated” conditions that foreshadowed the Nazis’ own camps.

When all else fails—and it had, in both Venezuela and the entire Middle East—decapitation can be a backstop to political failures, for the benefit of all humanity. It’s not a perfect instrument, of course. Like anything else that people do, it’s subject to misuse and abuse. But it’s infinitely better than World War III, or even a smaller more regional repetition of World War II. Its mere threat can constrain the depredations of the worst human leaders and their enablers, and its practice can bring those depredations to a close, as in Venezuela and Iran today.

So our species’ task now is clear. Individual responsibility, as the Nuremberg Trials showed, is the best and the only certain way to promote right conduct among leaders. Realistic fear of personal consequences is the best and most effective way to insure that the twisted, selfish, and the ideologically or religiously rabid do not, by their clever manipulation of “the masses,” bring us again to the slaughter of millions, the razing of whole cities, or the brink of self-extinction.

We must learn to perfect the technical arts of decapitation so its mere possibility serves as a personal restraint on the demagogues, beguilers, and deceivers among us. Eventually, we must put the sword in the hands of a neutral, international, well-educated and highly restrained body—something like today’s UN or the International Criminal Court, but more universally accepted, more professional and more effective.

I know, I know. It’s a long, long way from here to there. But properly refined and placed in responsible hands, the technologies and systems that at last brought justice to many of the grand criminals of Iran and the petty criminal Maduro could be the salvation of our species. If history is a guide, we don’t have a lot of time to waste in perfecting those technologies and systems and putting them under rational and effective international control.

Neither the psychopathy of a single individual, nor the collective delusions and ambitions of a small group, should be allowed to fix our species’ fate, or even the fate of a nation. Decapitation is the anticipatory enforcement mechanism of Nuremberg, and it deserves careful elaboration. The general undesirability of our own current leader should not disabuse us of these larger, more durable truths.