A Peaceful Death
The Case for the Whole Head Guillotine
The prisoner lies prone, his face pressed firmly into a steel mask, its only opening a narrow breathing hole. Ten tons of stainless steel hover sixteen feet above his head. The catch releases — and in under a second, his cranium is a bloody pancake. This is the Whole Head Guillotine. This is how the worst of us should die.
The Whole Head Guillotine can be honesty, humanity, and peace wrought in steel. Honesty means admitting who we are and what we are doing. I am an apex predator who knows a little calculus. I want to slay my enemies, yet I’ve never thrown a punch or spanked my son. The Whole Head Guillotine reminds us both that men are violent and that too much violence brings death. It tells an unflinching truth unflinchingly.
The Whole Head Guillotine is humanity alloyed with terror. With it we can earnestly seek the most humane execution possible. Give the prisoner any barbiturate he chooses. Give him a wholesome last meal, a chance to hug his mom, and every other decency he denied his victim. Give him a beer if he apologizes. We do not crave his suffering. We only demand his elimination. We are neither vengeful nor timid.
Peace, if it comes at all, comes through strength. What are fines, probation, jail, prison, and lethal injection if not increasingly determined efforts to cower the wayward into submission? Without terror, the law is impotent. The Whole Head Guillotine gives terror without torture, maximum deterence for minimum pain.
Four centuries ago, Western European nations began systematically executing murderers. For centuries, one in two hundred men who lived to sixteen was eventually executed. The murder rate plummeted by a factor of twenty, and executions became rare. Perhaps Western Europe has achieved that degree of civilization where executions are no longer necessary. Maybe some societies can afford to flinch. We can’t. Our murder rate is five times higher than Western Europe’s.
Every year, American murderers kill as many people as died at Antietam. Most murder victims are young and healthy. Politicians should not tolerate twenty thousand young corpses a year. Their squeamishness is not more important than innocent lives. Squeamishness that kills innocents is grotesque, and among those sworn to protect us, it is abdication.
The people who cry loudest against the death penalty live far from the dead. They sip pinot and speculate about root causes while corpses cool on concrete. They call executions barbaric, then shrug off twenty thousand murders a year like it’s just another abstraction. They call one instant of medicated suffering cruel, while a man drags a screaming girl into a vacant lot and leaves her in pieces. They either want purity without sacrifice or else are willing to sacrifice others. I am not so precious. I would rather extol the Whole Head Guillotine than lament the deaths of innocents. Let them call that barbarism. I call it civilization.