There has always been something indecent about the revenge a mob takes on a
tyrant once it is safe to do so.
The squalid scene was replayed last week. There was the air of expectation
as Saddam Hussein, now a dead man walking, approached the gallows. The
celebrations were about to begin in Baghdad, Basra and throughout Iraq's
Shi'ite belt. Iraqi exiles the world over had already begun to party.
When the death watch was finally concluded and the news came, it was
followed by cheers and the customary bursts of submachine fire on festive
occasions in those latitudes.
Such scenes are scarcely confined to the Middle East. How little history,
and bloodlust, change. Think of the drawing and quartering of Cromwell's
decayed corpse, or the drunken impulse to dance on Hitler's grave if only
one could find it. A long line of such images burn in the mind:
-The head of Charles I being waved to the madding crowd after he had gone to
"where no disturbance can be."
-Sir Thomas More tipping his executioner for doing him this last service.
Sir Thomas was a properly reluctant saint, loving life and hiding in the
thickets of English law as long as he could put off his fatal confrontation
with the Crown - and the man was no mean lawyer. In the end he chose to save
his soul rather than his head. But always the gentleman, he would leave this
world without shorting the help.
-Somewhere in the archives there are still those grainy photographs of the
bullet-riddled bodies of Mussolini and little Clara Petacci hung upside down
from a post in Milan for the edification and spittle of the crowd. Only a
few years before the crowd had been cheering Il Duce whenever he would jut
his jaw.
For the Crowd is more than a collection of people; it has a mindless life
cycle of its own, like some primitive unicellular excretion that surrounds
its prey with adulation, then devours it.
The mob lurks just beneath the surface of any society. It doesn't so much
hear of an impending execution but smell it. And the orgy of celebration is
on. The champagne is being opened even before the guest of honor has swung.
Only later will the historians try to make sense of it all - with uneven
results.
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