With opposition to capital punishment so firmly entrenched in Europe's worldview, it came as no surprise to learn that US officials tried in vain to convince the UN, the European Union, and a host of countries to assist with the tribunal that judged Saddam. "They all refused," the Boston Globe reported last week, "because they opposed the tribunal's use of the death penalty."
But what if Europeans don't oppose the use of the death penalty? When the German magazine Stern commissioned a poll on whether Saddam should be executed, it found 50 percent of Germans in favor and only 39 percent opposed. A poll conducted last month for Le Monde found that most Americans (82 percent) favored hanging Saddam -- as did most Spaniards (51 percent), most Germans (53 percent), most French (58 percent), and most Britons (69 percent).
In fact, once you get past the leftist elites who run the media and staff the foreign ministries, other industrialized nations may not be nearly as implacable in opposing the death penalty as we're commonly told. "Polls show that Europeans and Canadians crave executions almost as much as their American counterparts do," wrote Joshua Micah Marshall in The New Republic in 2000. "It's just that their politicians don't listen to them."
In Canada, for example, support for reinstating the death penalty ran between 60 percent and 70 percent. Two-thirds to three-quarters of Brits, about half of Italians, and even 49 percent of Swedes (according to a 1997 poll) felt the same way. "There is barely a country in Europe," Marshall concluded, "where the death penalty was abolished in response to public opinion rather than in spite of it."
"Mainstream middle-class sentiment" abroad, it turns out, may not be such an ass after all. When normal men and women in Europe look at Saddam's hanging, they, like us, see an act of moral hygiene. If their politicians and journalists see something different -- well, what else is new? |