Bless the Executioner

"Bless the executioner for he knows not what he does
Take the hangman into yourself, he is afraid of blood
Take the soldier to the sea, let him sleep upon the sand
And give the axe-man sympathy for he hates his own hands"
--The Kaleidoscope, "Bless the Executioner", Faintly Blowing

"And yet all grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears. God, who is the author of sovereignty, is the author also of chastisement: he has built our world on these two poles"
--De Maistre, St. Petersburg Dialogues, 1

De Maistre was talking about an idea that gave him pleasure, not a practical reality. With no clear effect on crime or social order, the death penalty has never been anything but a mystical exercise.

Deathspell Omega’s Kénôse is about divine violence. The three long tracks move like clouds and sudden hailstorms: they loom and swirl, then burst, grind and fade. Seven minutes into the second track, the series of climaxes feels like continually discovering new muscles: they tense and release, one after the other. The music disrupts to build to yet another another logical and visceral plateau.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5M78jWUuJ4

The Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, squat and vigorous, delivered a speech on the Death Penalty in 2002 which I heard. Hell, I wrote the press release.

He spoke of how God has given the state the power of life and death. It does not matter whether the state is just in our terms. The implications were absurd, delicious, nauseating if you were foolish enough to entertain this political mastermind as a philosopher of law. As head of a state, Saddam Hussein had the divine right to do what he did. Once we took the mandate of heaven away from him he became a murderer. The magic of the state alchemically transmutes lawless, unnecessary violence into lawful force, one of the poles on which God founded the world.

Scalia evoked St. Paul's claim in Romans 13: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God:... But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."

A jaunty metaphysical adventure: believing Christians go happily into the night of death, confident that the power that wields the blade is always, ultimately, a firm, warm and familiar hand: “Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition [of the death penalty] has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe and has least support in the church-going United States. I attribute that to the fact that for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal, a grave sin which causes one to lose his soul, but losing this physical life in exchange for the next”

The full title of Kénôse track II is “Therefore GOD honours the sword so highly that He calls it His own ordinance, and will not have men say or imagine that they have invented it or instituted it.”

It continues, “For the hand that wield this sword, and slays with it is then no more man’s hand, but GOD’s, and it is not man,but GOD, who hangs, tortures, beheads, slays and fights All these are His work and His judgments…”

"Chastisement" reveals the sovereign God's necessary opposite number, the other pole on which he founded the world. The death penalty proves sovereignty exists. Killing by persnickety, arcane rules, the state shows we are no match for it; it is eternal; it is immortal.

Every person any state has ever put to death was a sacrifice to God and the State to prove their existence.

Why do they have to repeat this sacrifice over and over again?

Because it never works.