By SJ Otto
The USkilling machine goes on. The USis just about the only industrialized nation that STILL uses the death penalty. Not long ago I saw an opinion piece by a writer who commented on a fellow school mate who was writing an analysis of Fidel Castro. The school mate was looking at what he considered the good things about Castro. But the author of this piece immediately stated that Castro was responsible for many people’s deaths. His attitude was that this leader murdered people, so there was no redeeming value in his regime at all. What surprised me most of all, is the idea that it is communist leaders as Castro who kill people—not capitalist leaders, such as President Donald Trump. Trump has been on a killing spree lately using the death penalty to kill people and he has sped up the process so he can put lots of people to death. So what difference does it make whether someone gets killed by a communist leader or a capitalist one? The results are the same. The person who is executed is dead. Regardless of the reason, the person dies.
So for many people there was little surprise when Lisa Montgomery, 52, was executed by lethal injection at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, and pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m. January 6.
According to CNN:
“Montgomery was the first woman to be executed by the federal government since 1953 and was the only woman on death row.
The Supreme Court denied a last-ditch effort late Tuesday by her defense attorneys who argued that she should have been given a competency hearing to prove her severe mental illness, which would have made her ineligible for the death penalty.
She was the 11th federal death row inmate to be executed by the Trump administration after a 17-year hiatus in federal executions.
"The government stopped at nothing in its zeal to kill this damaged and delusional woman," her attorney, Kelley Henry, said in a statement. "Lisa Montgomery's execution was far from justice."
I have read lately from various pundits that more people “have died under communism that any other ideology.” But how many people have died under the capitalist system we call the USA. The US has had two Indian wars. That cost a lot of people their lives, especially Native American Indians. Sure this country was at war with them. But the Native American Indians were being driven off their land and their way of life was being destroyed. And, at times innocent women and children were killed when US soldiers raided the homes of the Plains Indians they wanted to pacify.
Then there was slavery. Run-away slaves were often hung—that is to say they were executed. It is easy to brush off executions since we normally execute murderers in the US. But not everyone executed here has committed murder. Certainly the run-away slaves usually murdered no one.
Then, during the Indian wars, US calvery often attacked villages that had just women and children. None or nearly none of those people were combatants.
According to Smithsonian Magazine:
“Jeff Campbell worked for 20 years as a criminal investigator for the state of New Mexico. He specialized in cold cases. These days, he applies his sleuthing skills to a case so cold it’s buried beneath a century and a half of windblown prairie.
“Here’s the crime scene,” Campbell says, surveying a creek bed and miles of empty grassland. A lanky, deliberate detective, he cups a corncob pipe to light it in the flurrying snow before continuing. “The attack began in predawn light, but sound carries in this environment. So the victims would have heard the hooves pounding towards them before they could see what was coming.”
Campbell is reconstructing a mass murder that occurred in 1864, along Sand Creek, an intermittent stream in eastern Colorado. Today, less than one person per square mile inhabits this arid region. But in late autumn of 1864, about 1,000 Cheyenne and Arapaho lived in tepees here, at the edge of what was then reservation land. Their chiefs had recently sought peace in talks with white officials and believed they would be unmolested at their isolated camp.
When hundreds of blue-clad cavalrymen suddenly appeared at dawn on November 29, a Cheyenne chief raised the Stars and Stripes above his lodge. Others in the village waved white flags. The troops replied by opening fire with carbines and cannon, killing at least 150 Indians, most of them women, children and the elderly. Before departing, the troops burned the village and mutilated the dead, carrying off body parts as trophies.”
This certainly is gruesome enough. There have been people executed for either political reasons or suspected acts of disloyalty to our government. Such is the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, the four anarchists executed for their alleged part in the Haymarket Affair and Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg. None of these people committed outright murder and politics were the main reasons for their executions.
There are also the other wars such as Vietnam. Over a million Vietnamese died in that war. Did most of them really want the US to stop them from being communists? Was the USright to insist that capitalism prevail there?
After the Nicaraguan Sandinista Revolution, capital punishment was outlawed. Capital punishment is still on the books in Cuba, but no one has been executed in several years. So it would seem that the USgovernment—especially under Trump, is and has been quite murderous. The rest of Europe has abandoned capital punishment, but the US keeps on killing people.
There was plenty of evidence that MS Montgomery was mentally ill. She was not completely sane. So our system of government executed a person who was mentally unbalanced. Once again, our government is murderous under Trump and the system has allowed it. It is hard to say why Trump has such a lust for blood, but it speaks badly of the US justice system that such executions are taking place. This is just about the only place left on Earth where people are executed, with the exeption of the hell holes this country has propped up such as Iraq.
