Little Eichmanns: Eugene Volokh
Eugene Volokh is a law professor and one of those reasonable, moderate rightwing bloggers. How moderate and reasonable he is was shown up in this recent post, reveling in the way the death penalty is executed in Iran:
I particularly like the involvement of the victims’ relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he’d killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing ? and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act ? was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there’s a good explanation.
I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.
It’s absolutely shocking for a professor of law to confuse revenge with justice; this is another step on the road back to barbarism. It is scary to think that the moral climate in the US and in the west in general (because I would be kidding myself if I didn’t acknowledge it could happen in Europe too) that people like Volokh are comfortable enough to air these views in public.
Eugene Volokh is not just another ignorant yahoo spouting off; he is a professor of law, teaching teenagers, future lawyers and judges; he’s an opinion maker; he has influence and he chooses to use this influence to promote torture as an intransic part of the legal system?
That’s why Volokh is another little Eichmann, a seemingly nice, moderate guy busily chipping away at the very foundations of America. He is the thin end of the wedge. It’s not just enough to condemn him in the usual blogging way; this is dangerous. He should be ashamed, his family should be ashamed, his university should be ashamed, anybody who ever linked to him approvingly should be ashamed, America should be ashamed.