The tyrant defiled
?Will Greece remain a country of the West, or will it become like Libya?? asked a friend, late on Thursday night.
Earlier in the day we had seen Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the former Libyan strongman, being dragged, covered in blood, by a jubilant crowd, we had seen him half-dead and then seen his corpse being hit and defiled, we had seen the storm drain in which he hid.
The images were gruesome: an armed mob dragging a corpse, much like the Mongol horsemen would drag the corpse of their enemy in order to humiliate him even in death.
In his Iliad, Homer described this brutality most poignantly, setting the standard for future narratives about the horrors of war, when he drew a picture of the corpse of Hector, the bulwark of Troy, being dragged behind Achilles? chariot.
And we know the tragic end that met the hubristic winners of the war, those who did not show respect for the remains of the fallen enemy, for the sanctity of the human body, for the altars of the gods and for the women and children of those who died in battle.
The Libyan colonel was indeed a tyrant to his people; he was arrogant, half-mad and a killer. But, he was also on speaking terms with all the leaders of the western democracies over the course of four decades, and they had all visited the chieftain?s home and talked, negotiated with him.
Qaddafi preferred to fight against his own people rather than to surrender and stop the bloodshed. He deserved the most severe punishment. However, even the most abhorrent tyrant deserves to die with dignity, not because he deserves it on a personal level, but because the honor of a dignified death does credit to the tyrant killers and the winners, especially when they like to herald a more just and free society, a society that respects its dead, a society that does not drag bodies through the dirt and the dogs.
We though that the image of a scared-stiff Saddam Hussein, captured in a tunnel, his beard dirty with dust, condemned in a speedy trial and hanged, was an image that was too heavily laden for the modern mind.
We were wrong. The image of Qaddafi?s body being torn at reminds us of the bitter truth that there will always be something new, a new level of horror.
