One survey, conducted five months after Berg’s death, found that between May and June, 30 million people, or 24 per cent of all adult internet users in the United States, had seen images from the war in Iraq that were deemed too gruesome and graphic to be shown on television. This was a particularly turbulent time during the war that saw not only Berg’s beheading, but also the release of photographs showing the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib by American military personnel, and images showing the mutilated bodies of four American contract workers who had been killed by insurgents in Fallujah, dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates. Nonetheless, Americans were seeking these images out: 28 per cent of those who had seen graphic content online actively went looking for it. The survey found that half of those who had seen graphic content thought they had made a ‘good decision’ by watching.
The decision to view Berg’s beheading became politicized online. Bloggers claimed it was no coincidence that the liberal news media dwelt on the harrowing images from Abu Ghraib, which undermined the Bush administration’s credibility in Iraq, while – as they saw it – sidestepping the Berg story by giving it fewer column inches and refusing to show the full extent of the atrocity. ‘One day the media was telling us we had to see the pictures from Abu Ghraib so we could understand the horrors of war,’ Evan Malony wrote. ‘But with Berg’s beheading, we’re told we can’t handle the truth … The media that had – rightfully, in my opinion – showed us the ugly reality of Abu Ghraib prison refused to do the same with Berg’s murder.’ Professor Jay Rosen was more explicit: ‘They aren’t showing us everything: the knife, the throat, the screams, the struggle, and the head held up for the camera. But the sickening photos from Abu Ghraib keep showing up.’
Other viewers admitted to watching execution videos simply out of curiosity, with no ‘higher’ purpose. One anonymous internet user said, ‘You almost can’t believe that a group of people could be so pitiless as to carry out something so cruel and bestial, and you need to have it confirmed … Watching them evokes a mixture of emotions – mainly distress at the obvious fear and suffering of the victim, but also revulsion at the gore, and anger against the perpetrators.’ Meanwhile, website editors expressed a similar range of attitudes towards showing the content. They made the videos available either because they were dedicated to the fight against terror (people should see) or because they were opposed to the ‘censorship’ of the mainstream news media (people should be able to see), while ‘shock sites’ posted the footage purely as macabre entertainment alongside the other violent and provocative videos that drew their clients (watch this!).
Decapitation videos draw viewers who watch unapologetically and viewers who watch despite their own deep misgivings, and the internet offers everyone anonymity. The camera promises spectators a degree of detachment, but the action is only a click away, and this combination gives the videos far greater reach. As the military analyst Ronald Jones put it, with little more than a camcorder and internet access, a militant group can create an ‘international media event … that has tremendous strategic impact’. Indeed, as terrorist attacks go, decapitating your victim on camera is an extremely efficient and effective strategy. It requires little money, training, equipment, weaponry or explosives: beyond the initial kidnapping, it does not rely on complicated coordination or technology that might fail, and the results are easy to disseminate. According to Martin Harrow, another analyst, it is a strategy that ‘has maximum visibility, maximum resonance and incites maximum fear’.
No wonder, then, that the Iraq hostage beheadings were ‘made for TV’. Other terrorist activities, like suicide attacks or bombings, are hard to capture on camera because they are necessarily clandestine, unpredictable and frenetic events, but the decapitation of a hostage can be carefully stage-managed, choreographed and rehearsed while still remaining brutally authentic. The footage is clear and close up. The murderers are offering their viewers a front-row seat at their show; and what they want to show is their strength, their organization, their commitment to the cause, their complete control and domination of their victim. When one Italian hostage, a security officer named Fabrizio Quattrocchi, jumped up at the moment he was about to be shot by his captors on film and tried to remove his hood, shouting, ‘Now I’ll show you how an Italian dies!’, Al Jazeera withheld the resulting video because it was ‘too gruesome’. Was this a small victory for Quattrocchi in the face of certain death? No one saw the footage of his murder online, either for entertainment or for education, and his captors could not capitalize on his death in the way that they had planned.
During these carefully staged execution rituals, everyone, even the victim, must play their part. The whole procedure is a piece of theatre designed to create power and cause fear, just as with state executions stretching back to the thirteenth century, except, as John Esposito, a professor at Georgetown University, pointed out, when it comes to executions like Berg’s, ‘it’s not so much the punishing of the individual as the using of the individual’. Even when the victim is an innocent hostage, the power that comes from killing is exerted over a wider community. The crowd is compliant too. By turning up to see the show, or by searching Google for the latest execution video, the people watching also have their part to play.
‘The point of terrorism is to strike fear and cause havoc – and that doesn’t happen unless you have media to support that action and show it to as many people as you can,’ said one analyst interviewed by the Los Angeles Times shortly after Nick Berg’s execution. These murderers post their videos on the internet because they know that the news media will be forced to follow the crowd. Television news programmes either become redundant by refusing to air videos that are freely available online, or else they do exactly what the murderers want and show the footage to a wider audience. Meanwhile, the internet provides a ‘void of accountability’, in the words of Barbie Zelizer, where it is unclear who took the images, who distributed them and who saw them. The whole experience is lost in the crowd.
People think that large, raucous crowds at executions belong to a distant era in our past, and so they do, but the more I have read about the history of executions, the more I think that the gradual concealment of executions from the public eye over the last two hundred years – and even, to some extent, the demise of torture as a method of punishment – has had less to do with popular opinion and more with the preoccupations of polite society. There have always been people ready to watch executions, and ready to enjoy the spectacle. If anything, it was not that the sights on the scaffold became unseemly, it was that the persistently enthralled spectators became something of an embarrassment, and also, perhaps, a threat to social order. Public executions came to an end, not because of the executions themselves but because of a widening gap between the sensibilities of spectators who came to see them and the definition of acceptable behaviour among the elite.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it came to be seen as unnatural to be able to watch someone executed, but that has never stopped some people watching when given the opportunity, and it probably never will. Executions have always attracted people from all backgrounds: men, women and children, rich and poor, academic and illiterate. Individual responses may differ – some will laugh and jeer, others will studiously take notes, some will faint or vomit or cry, and to an extent these responses are culturally determined, but the lesson of history is that it is within our capacity as humans to witness decapitations and other forms of execution, and more than that, to enjoy them as popular public events.
For as long as there were public executions, there were crowds to see them. In London in the early nineteenth century there might be 5,000 to watch a standard hanging, but crowds of up to 40,000 or even 100,000 came to see a famous felon killed. The numbers hardly changed over the years. An estimated 20,000 watched Rainey Bethea hang in 1936, in what turned out to be the last public execution in the United States. (Admittedly there had been more publicity than usual
due to speculation that the hangman would be a woman, Sheriff Florence Thompson. In the event, Thompson delegated her role to a former policeman, who pulled the trigger to release the trapdoor under the noose.)
Three years later a large and excitable crowd gathered outside the prison Saint-Pierre in Versailles to see the notorious German serial killer Eugen Weidmann guillotined. Weidmann’s would be the last public execution in France, ostensibly because the crowd on the day had become ‘particularly hideous’, but while it is true that a few people had tried to climb onto nearby roofs to see the guillotine in action, reports of drunken and unruly behaviour were grossly exaggerated by the press.
The real problem with Weidmann’s execution, as historian Paul Friedland has shown, hinged on the fact that it had been delayed. There was a new executioner, it was his first performance and he had underestimated how long it would take to prepare. So Weidmann’s execution took place not at the crack of dawn, as was customary, but in broad daylight, and the photographers in the crowd took full advantage of the light. A series of photographs showing the execution freeze-framed, second by second, could be seen plastered across the pages of glossy magazines in the days that followed. The blade of the guillotine was even caught in mid-descent not once, but twice. Worse, as far as the authorities were concerned, was the fact that the execution had been filmed. You can see it today on the internet. As if the ‘disgusting’ and ‘unruly’ crowd who gathered to watch the event was not bad enough, now, thanks to improvements in camera technology, a public execution could be seen over and over again by untold thousands of curious spectators. A week after Weidmann’s death, public executions were banned in France – not because they were too horrifying to watch, but because the authorities knew that people will watch them no matter how horrifying they are.
The death penalty no longer exists in Europe, and in America state-run executions are not public events, though they can still cause a commotion. When one of the most notorious killers in recent American history, Timothy McVeigh, was executed by lethal injection in May 2001, the small town of Terre Haute in Indiana was inundated with visitors. More than 1,300 members of the news media, accompanied by their support crews, along with a few hundred protesters and several traders selling food, T-shirts and souvenirs, arrived in town to capitalize on the event. ‘We eat, sleep and breathe McVeigh,’ said one local reporter a month before the execution.
Of course, the vast majority of these people did not actually see McVeigh die; those who watched him die, from special observation rooms that overlooked the execution chamber with tinted-glass panels, were ten members of victims’ families, ten journalists selected at random, an undisclosed number of government officials, several prison staff, and four witnesses chosen by McVeigh (two lawyers, an investigator on his defence team and his biographer). A further 232 members of the victims’ families watched the event live on closed-circuit television.
The execution of the German criminal Eugen Weidmann in Versailles, France, 1939. Several hundred additional spectators were gathered behind a second cordon, not visible in this photograph.
The state judges that these witnesses have a right to know what is to be known about a person’s death. We cannot know whether more people would watch state executions if they were given the opportunity, but it seems reasonable to suppose that an execution like McVeigh’s would draw voyeurs as well as the people directly affected by his crime.
It is almost inconceivable that state executions could return to the public stage in America or Europe, and a public beheading is even more implausible, but not on account of the victim’s suffering. Decapitation, when it is skillfully performed on a subdued (or sedated) victim, is a fast, and, as far as we know, relatively painless way to go, but in the history of executions, how things look has been as important as how things feel, and beheadings are messy affairs.
The last two hundred years have seen the introduction of increasingly discreet methods of execution throughout Europe and America, from the introduction of long-drop hangings in the late nineteenth century through to the use of lethal injections; but it is unclear whether a death that looks less violent is inevitably more humane. Studies in the United States have shown that prisoners who opt for an execution by firing squad achieve complete heart death within one minute of the opening shot, whereas a typical complication-free lethal injection can take about nine minutes to kill. What’s more, regularly reported problems with preparing and administering injections increase the risk of a long and painful death. Guns and guillotines may look gory but they are relatively simple and effective.
This is the eternal tension between drama and control that lies at the heart of the death penalty. Killing someone is not an exact science. It is an inherently spectacular and unpredictable event, and beheading perhaps more so than any other method. As justice systems have sought to be more discreet and compassionate they have tried to bring death under control, but discretion and compassion can be opposing forces, simply because the way an execution looks may not be how it feels. This is the bloody, raw power of decapitation.
It is difficult to cut off another person’s head in a single clean motion while they are still alive if you are armed only with a knife or an axe. It takes a good deal of strength and skill, or luck, or all three. This is what makes the severed head such a potent trophy in war. The soldier’s trophy head signifies that he has seen raw, intimate action on the battlefield and survived it against all the odds. In war, the trophy head is a mark of supremacy and respect: it asserts a warrior’s skill and strength, but it is also a tacit acknowledgement that events might have unfolded differently. When it comes to executing a criminal, however, state officials cannot afford to enter into such volatile interactions with their citizens. In state hands, taking heads becomes theatre, and the production must go to plan.
It is no surprise, then, that through the centuries governments have bureaucratized death by decapitation. At different times, and in different ways, they have appointed officials, introduced protocols and paperwork, established rituals and records, and fine-tuned the mechanics of beheading to try and keep the drama of the scaffold under their control. In these ways, governments have appropriated the power of the trophy head for their own purposes, whether that is to announce a crime, to deter others by the threat of a similar fate, or to restore the honour and authority of the head of state.
In many ways, the earliest ritualized exhibitions of traitors’ heads by the state in Britain, in the thirteenth century, were little more than urban versions of the warrior’s trophy head held aloft on the battlefield. Occasionally in medieval England a head taken in battle was sent to the King and displayed to the public. What changed was that these kinds of heads, the heads of rebel leaders and treasonous individuals, were now sometimes despatched ‘on stage’ in an urban environment where more people could see the drama unfold.
The last two princes of an independent Wales, Llywelyn and Dafydd ap Gruffydd, who died during the reign of Edward I, are a perfect example of the continuities between these two kinds of trophy heads because one was killed in battle and the other was killed on the scaffold. The elder of the brothers, Llywelyn, was killed in the Battle of Orewin Bridge by the King’s men in 1282: his head was cut off and sent first to Edward, then to the English troops in Anglesey, and finally to London, where it was set up on the gates of the Tower of London for at least fifteen years. A horseman was said to have brought it into the city on the point of his lance.
The following year, Llywelyn’s head was joined by the head of his brother and successor, Dafydd, who also died a traitor to the King; but Dafydd was not killed in battle: he was captured, tried and condemned to death, and in October 1283 he was dragged through the streets of Shrewsbury from a horse’s tail and hung, drawn and quartered on the scaffold. He was the most prominent rebel yet to have met this relatively new, agonizing and spectacular end.
In a sense, both the Welsh brothers’ heads were trophies of war, because almost all of the
traitors beheaded under Edward I were Celtic ‘rebels’, casualties of the King’s campaigns to conquer Wales and Scotland, the most famous being William Wallace in 1305. And, as in warfare, the heads of Edward I’s traitors were more symbolic than strategic: since, in Edward’s case, decapitation was a fate usually reserved for those who had betrayed a past understanding with the King, they were expressions of his feudal fury. Just a few years earlier, for example, Dafydd had allied himself with Edward against his brother Llywelyn, but when he turned his back on the King he suffered the consequences in no uncertain terms.
Certain customs grew up around the display of traitors’ heads. The heads of executed criminals were exhibited in centralized places – London Bridge, Westminster Hall, the Tower of London, Dublin Castle, the Place de la Révolution – or at the boundaries of cities, on gates, bridges and walls. Dead body parts announced the crime, as well as humiliating the criminal. There was a reason that William Wallace, who had been put to death in London hundreds of miles from his Scottish supporters, was quartered and his limbs distributed to four northern towns: Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Stirling and Perth. The man who was charged with distributing Wallace’s severed limbs, Sir John Segrave, earned 15 shillings for his pains. According to one chronicler of the time, the limbs served as memoria to Wallace’s crimes. Dafydd ap Gruffydd’s body parts, not surprisingly, were sent west from London, to Bristol, Hereford and Northampton.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found Page 9
