Of Historical Interest?

Richard Dawkins has come up with a unique justification for the increasingly popular (and no-doubt soon-to-be-prevalent amongst outraged intellectuals) view that Saddam should not have been executed:

Executing Saddam Hussein was an Act of Vandalism

Glossing over the usual moral equivocations about how civilised society shouldn't sanction killings and that killing Saddam makes us just as bad as he is, etc, etc (whilst giving them tacit approval, and thereby implying that he skips them not because they are worthless and hard to support with reasoned argument, but because they are self evident) he has instead chosen to go down the unconventional route of environmentalism:

His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars.

Environmentalists have for nearly a century been successfully propagating the idea that preservation of worthless naturally occurring phenomena should be given higher priority than achieving meaningful objectives that benefit the human race. Dawkins has eagerly jumped on this bandwagon in order to retrospectively justify his pro-Saddam, anti-Bush leanings.

Of course in order to make this link, he has constructed the usual web of reasonable-sounding non-sequiturs to support his position. He begins with the obligatory Nazi analogy - cornerstone of any solid argument...

Imagine, in fancy, that some science fiction equivalent of Simon Wiesenthal built a time machine, travelled back to 1945 and returned to the present with a manacled Adolf Hitler. What should we do with him? Execute him? No, a thousand times no. Historians squabbling over exactly what happened in the Third Reich and the Second World War would never forgive us for destroying the central witness to all the inside stories, and one of the pivotal influences on twentieth century history.

By the same reasoning I suppose that Dawkins has taken it upon himself to preserve each of his faeces in case they are of paramount interest to future generations? No? But why not, surely we should be preserving all of the most disgusting aspects of our society so that future historians can revel in how truly unpleasant it was to live in the 21st century?

Okay, so that's unfair. A human brain, any human's brain, contains a fantastic wealth of unique knowledge that cannot be copied or preserved beyond death. And it is probable that in the future we will seek to better understand our past though the revelations of contemporary minds, be they sound or fevered, and that is certainly not a goal that we should seek to frustrate by actively destroying the evidence.

But here's a crazy thought - maybe we should concentrate on trying to preserve what is genuinely valuable and interesting to us, rather than trying to second guess what a hypothetical future society might find interesting. We should no more wish to preserve brutal dictators for historical interest than a z-list celebrity should wish to make a point of falling over drunkenly without their knickers on for the benefit of the tabloid press.

If we had the opportunity to interview Hitler now, having taken him out of the context where he caused so much harm, in an age where very few living witnesses to his brutality exist, and in an age when, because of our relative utopia, we have forgotten what it was like to have to fight and die to preserve our freedom against such monsters, then certainly it would be wasteful to kill him.

At the time though, it was not necessary to study him because everyone knew exactly what manner of bastard he was and didn't feel they needed to know any more. There were other more important concerns, such as making sure he never rose to power again, and that any would be successors were given the message loud and clear that this behaviour would not be tolerated - objectives that were both best served by his death.

And so with Saddam. The man was a mass murderer. This is a concept so alien to us in the west that even when we hear phrases such as "raped to death while husband forced to watch" or "skin boiled off by poison gas", we just don't get it. Saddam was literally evil beyond our comprehension. But allowing him to live (and presumably to live comfortably, since starving or torturing him for an extended period would be even more unpalatable to our fragile sensibilities than killing him) would benefit us relatively little. You cannot expect such a man to provide insight into why he did the things he did - he probably doesn't know, and if he did he wouldn't be able to put it in terms that would make sense to someone who isn't a psychopath.

Besides which, to understand Saddam is desirable, but it is not paramount. Compared to the priorities of convincing his supporters (and, more importantly, those who feared him) that he won't be coming back to power, and establishing the authority of the new government that must replace him this is rightly a minor concern. WW2 German warships were amazing and intricate pieces of machinery and it is a pity we don't have more to study, but that would not have been a good reason not to sink them while the war was still on.

In any case, even assuming that Saddam retained any useful information that was not extracted by his interrogators (he was, after all questioned at great length after his capture), left to his own devices, Saddam would likely not have lived for more than another decade. It's hardly as if we could put him in a museum to be enjoyed by our grandchildren.

So what does Dawkins imagine we could have learned from this man?

Uniquely privileged evidence on the American government's enthusiastic arming of Saddam before they switched loyalties

Ah, so again Dawkins political persuasion pokes its head out from under the cover of scientific integrity. Dawkins primary interest isn't in studying Saddam to find out what made him so bad, what he really wants is another ally in his political assassination of our own leaders. The fact that he feels that the voice of a murderous dictator who has just lost a war against Bush and Blair is a good source for unbiased testimony against his conquerors indicates just how desperate he is for evidence to support the war crimes tribunal he wants them to answer to (so that he can make a big point of not executing them to demonstrate his moral superiority).

He may struggle to make that particular allegation stick if it comes to court, incidentally.

That out of the way, Dawkins goes on to explain the secondary motive - understanding why a brutal bastard should end up in power in some countries whereas similar people in our society end up wielding broken bottles in football stadiums (usually as a prelude to a prolonged prison sentence).

Setting aside his previous implications that Bush and Blair are just as bad as Saddam (moral equivocation is apparently only big and clever when it supports the argument you are currently trying to make) he admits that we in the west are unfamiliar with such horrors in our leadership, and feels we need to study them.

What were the formative influences on these men? Was it something in their childhood that turned them bad? In their genes? In their testosterone levels?

And of course science has the answer! Yes, all political leaders must be subjected to psychoanalysis and testosterone measurement to ensure that they fall within acceptable levels on the Saddamometer - a scale which, thanks to our thoughtless vandalism in executing Saddam, we may never be able to construct.

...what singles out the minority that do come to power? Or were men such as these truly unusual? What can we do to prevent them gaining power in the future? Are there changes we could make to our democratic and other political institutions that would make it harder for men of Hitler's or Saddam Hussein's psychological types to take them over?

Has it ever occurred Dawkins that this process is already well understood - that such men never rise to power in our political institution at all, they rise to power in other societies, and that we wage war on those societies so as to depose these men and fix their cultures so it can't happen again - a policy that Dawkins fiercely opposes, of course.