the stubborn one

You know this is sick, right?

Because after all, after everything, he was still a human being. And Christ said that an eye for an eye should not be so, and Gandhi was right that it'll leave the whole world blind.

Because you can see the videos of the noose being dropped round his neck on CNN. And you can see pictures of his body in the Daily Mail, and it's so dark and such gossip, God, how we love to be sickened by shit like this because nobody knows that it is sickening. This is what makes us sick.

And if you say it out loud, perhaps suggest that maybe this was wrong all you'll get is raised voices, a fight to see who can say 'genocide' the loudest, that righteous fucking indignation, as if arguing his right to live is condoning the things that he did. As if by pitying him you somehow become him.

So I'll just say it like this: nobody, nobody, nobody has the right to take the life of anyone, anyone, anyone, no matter who they are or what they've done unless it's self-defence. If Saddam Hussein ran at me or anyone I care about with a knife and I happened to be the gun-toting hillbilly I secretly dream of, I'd pop the bastard.

If I thought he might try to pop me first.

But you see, I don't think Hussein was really all that much of a threat any more. He was broken. He killed hundreds, thousands of people and committed war crimes that I can't even name, but he was caught, he was stopped, he was, for want of a better word, neutralised the second he was found eating Mars bars in a hole in the ground and some cocky American soldier told him that President Bush sent his regards.

He was the world's biggest joke, unmanned and finally harmless. And now he's a martyr, and more dangerous than he ever could have been alive. It just seems to me that it's this sick fascination, it's this glamour that makes dead leaders so appealing. Seems to me if I'm looking for a hero, a scruffy little nobody in a cell isn't half as sexy as the man they sent to the gallows. Perhaps it's just me but doesn't it seem like the more we try to destroy the things we hate, the more power we give them?

So congratulations to all of us. We can rest our superstitious little heads now that we've seen his broken neck on YouTube, that he definitely won't be coming back. Now we've seen him stepping onto the trapdoor, we can sleep easy. We won. I mean we didn't just win, we really really won. It's almost like we won twice because we didn't just stop him, we really fucked him up.

We like that. We like it so much we're gonna watch it over and over and it'll be on the internet forever and ever and maybe one day we can show our kids and say this is what it was like, back when we were civilised.