by Tony Curzon Price
Dostoevski, I think, would have sympathised with the You-Tubing of Sadam's execution. Prince Mishkin tries to get the charming Adelaida to draw an execution, with particular concentration on the face of the victim:
"Just now, I confess," began the prince, with more animation, "when you asked me for a subject for a picture, I confess I had serious thoughts of giving you one. I thought of asking you to draw the face of a criminal, one minute before the fall of the guillotine, while the wretched man is still standing on the scaffold, preparatory to placing his neck on the block."
"What, his face? only his face?" asked Adelaida. "That would be a strange subject indeed. And what sort of a picture would that make?"
"Oh, why not?" the prince insisted, with some warmth. "When I was in Basle I saw a picture very much in that style--I should like to tell you about it; I will some time or other; it struck me very forcibly."
Dostoevski was himself mock-executed and Mishkin goes on to say:
I believe that to execute a man for murder is to punish him immeasurably more dreadfully than is equivalent to his crime. A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a criminal.
It is the dread of the execution that so captivates Mishkin: can we watch the video-phone footage and see that same dread? Can we understand the insults hurled at Saddam as he faced death by the atrocity of his own behavior? Or is Iraq, its leader fatigued and its State incapable even of staging an execution, just throwing back in the face of the world the mangled lessons of the media-entertainment-complex?
