Livestreaming execution will cast America out of the civilised world

Transforming a solemn act of justice into a global media spectacle does not honour the fallen. [Courtesy]

The 2009 Fort Hood military base shooting in the United States was an unmitigated atrocity that stole 13 lives, leaving behind an enduring, agonising grief. Justice for such fanatical cruelty must be absolute.

Yet, as Washington prepares to publicly livestream the execution of convict Nidal Hasan by firing squad this December, I am filled with a profound and sickening horror.

Transforming a solemn act of justice into a global media spectacle does not honour the fallen. It degrades the character of international human rights and threatens to place America squarely outside the pale of civilised nations. As Fort Hood survivor and retired US Army Sergeant Alonzo Lunsford flatly warned, a state-sanctioned killing is "not something you should view for entertainment purposes."

As an American living in Nairobi this proposed broadcast strikes me with a particularly sharp and alarming resonance. From this vantage point in East Africa, I see firsthand how closely the world watches the United States. This is a region that has itself borne the heavy scars of international terrorism, from the 1998 embassy bombings to Westgate.

For decades, America has exported the rhetoric of due process, the rule of law, and human dignity. Yet, planning a digital execution completely strips away that moral authority. By broadcasting a message of performative vengeance to a global audience, the United States risks alienating its global allies. It reduces itself to the level of a rogue state that trades democratic maturity for gladiatorial theatre.

Opposing this digital colosseum fulfills the highest duty of global citizenship: The act of principled dissent. True patriotism, whether in Nairobi or Washington, does not demand blind fealty to short-sighted government policies or flashes of public anger. The highest form of loyalty lies in standing against the state when it loses its moral compass.

We must protect foundational ideals from performative cruelty. As the late Kenyan human rights icon and Nobel laureate Prof Wangarĩ Maathai timelessly observed: "Human rights are not things that are put on the table for people to enjoy. These are things you fight for and then you protect."

Living abroad teaches you that fighting for those rights means rejecting state overreach and theatrical brutality wherever it occurs, especially when it is perpetrated by your own homeland. The sheer barbarity of a televised execution does not summon what Abraham Lincoln famously called the "better angels of our nature." Instead, it flatters our darkest impulses, inviting the public to feast on violence under the guise of nationalism.

By turning a firing squad into a clickable online event, the US government replaces civic grief with a desensitising consumerism. No truly civilised nation in the modern world broadcasts the state-sponsored killing of a human being for public consumption. Streaming this death validates violence as public entertainment.

Furthermore, veteran organisations warn it will backfire strategically, handing terrorist networks a high-definition propaganda tool to martyr a killer. Ultimately, this proposed livestream is a catastrophic failure of moral imagination and a grotesque departure from international norms of decency. As the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that."

Hasan’s terror was born of an absolute disregard for human life. The response of a mature democracy must be an unyielding, dignified affirmation of the rule of law. Dissenting against this broadcast is an act of restoration. Justice is found in the silent, permanent banishment of a killer—not in a televised theatre that shatters the rule of law and diminishes America's standing in the global community.