Or, to put it another way: you know the war has been lost when you become like your enemy.
Or, to put it yet another way: the best revenge is not to become like your enemy.
The last quote is a thought expressed by the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius in Meditations.
These were my thoughts when I heard that the U.S. Secretary of Defense had announced plans to livestream a public execution.
My mind immediately went to the public beheadings carried out by militant jihadist terrorists, including that of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose murder was filmed and whose execution video was released in February 2002.
The American spectacle will not be a beheading. It will be the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist. On November 5, 2009, Hasan killed 13 people — 12 soldiers and one civilian — and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas, where he was stationed at a Soldier Readiness Processing Center in preparation for deployment to Afghanistan. According to eyewitness accounts, Hasan bowed his head for several seconds before suddenly standing up, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and opening fire. He was shot himself and left paralyzed from the waist down.
It's horrific stuff, and undeniably an act of radical Islamist terrorism.
Let's put aside for a moment the political stupidity of livestreaming an execution, which would spread like wildfire across anti-American and pro-terrorist social media. The footage would undoubtedly become an international recruiting tool. Hasan would be transformed into a martyr, an inspiration to those who already hate America and the West.
Never give your enemy ammunition for his guns or fuel for his rockets. That's my paraphrase of Napoleon Bonaparte's famous observation: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
What Hegseth is proposing is politically stupid in a thousand other ways. But I'm more concerned with what it says about America in 2026, and what it will take to turn the country around.
We already knew there was a fascination with violence, a fetish for military might, and a vengeful, sadistic streak in trump and his minions. In all likelihood, trump will be bragging about the ratings the day after the execution is broadcast.
What bothers me most is the moral defeat this represents for America: a country founded, at least in principle, on universal values, and on the proposition that political legitimacy rests on something higher than tribal allegiance and ancestral hatreds. It is a defeat of wisdom, idealism and character, as much as of moral progress.
When a country abandons its core values, it surrenders to the very instincts it once claimed to have overcome.
When Daniel Pearl's execution was filmed and released to the world, I thought about the moral chasm between those who committed such an act and those who regarded human life as something more than an instrument of terror. What horrified me was not simply the brutality of the murder, but the perpetrators' pride in their own savagery — their desire to publicize it.
You might argue that in Hasan's case, justice is being administered. And I would agree.
But don't you think Pearl's killers also believed they were administering a form of justice?
The point is that a public execution, like a public beheading, is intended to terrorize. Its purpose is to strike fear into the hearts of those deemed political enemies.
America abandoned public executions generations ago, in part because it sought to represent something different: something more humane, more civilized, more evolved. The manner in which a society administers justice says something about the society itself.
Every war is, to some extent, a war against yourself. America is clearly losing hers.
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