Friday 23 August 2013

Holding tyrants personally accountable

The newspapers today are full of pictures of Syrian children gassed in their sleep. An atrocity that, like those which preceded it, the world seems powerless to prevent or punish. Our inter-national institutions are manifestly unable to secure peace and justice. Their tools - diplomatic, economic, and military sanctions - are limited in effectiveness even when they can be used at all. Yet perhaps there is something that we can do about such moral outrages. It was long believed to be a duty of all good men to kill a tyrant. My suggestion is that we revive the tradition of tyrannicide, but make it even more effective by finding a way to give bad men a good reason to kill a tyrant.