Central to Buddhism is the idea of compassion and not just compassion for the needy or the infirm but compassion for all living beings who are suffering due to the conditions of their life. You find this sentiment in most religions.
I believe that when Jesus said “You do it unto the least of me, you’ve done it to me,” he just wasn’t talking just about the poor or crippled, but the morally inferior as well. Because I believe people that we define as evil are in reality just people who are very sick. Many times this has to do with what happened to them as children.
I didn’t know this until recently but Hussein was brutalized by his step-father. He never knew his real father. This isn’t to excuse his behavior but to try to get some understanding into how a man like him comes to be because he wasn’t born into this world an evil dictator. Somehow along to his death he became transformed into something vile. More times than not, what he experiences as a child is a factor, as we all know these are formative years.
We can all agree that if we become aware of little boy who is abused, that we will care about the little boy and have compassion for him. Can we then somehow find it our hearts to have compassion for the same boy having grown up and having not dealt with his childhood abuse very well? Once upon a time, Saddam Hussein was an innocent little boy. Do any of you have any curiosity about what you have to add to a little boy to make him into a brutal dictator? This doesn’t excuse the behavior or make it OK, but at least we can get an idea of where it comes from.
In Christianity they say, hate the sin, love the sinner. In Eastern thought this is expressed more as the idea that we must have compassion for all living beings, even if we disagree with their behavior because their behavior is simply the result of their programming. A person is not their programming. With an execution, it’s as though we take a tape player and because we don’t like what the tape is playing, we ceremoniously destroy the tape player.
We can kill Saddam Hussein’s ad infinitum, but until we deal with the conditional circumstances of his development i.e. the cultural, religious, and social customs of his environment; the ongoing vicious karmic cycles of abuse, hatred, retribution, and violence, these programs will continue to be generated and find their way into tape players to play them. And we can continue to destroy tape players, thinking somehow we are wiping out the programs we don’t like, but paradoxically are perpetuating the proliferation of the programs.
But in a small way, in the sense that we become capable of killing a broken old man, we are no longer innocent, and are in fact playing a similar (if less lethal) program. In many ways, we become tainted, corrupted, in our effort to stamp out the perceived evil; we become infected with the same type of hatred. We become mirrors reflecting back the hatred.
The men who killed Saddam allowed Saddam’s inhumanity to rob them of their own. As I said before I don’t mourn Saddam’s downfall, rather I mourn that he succeeds in dragging so many down with him.
