Retired Generals Oppose Hasan Execution Livestream: Military Honor Discourse Masks Institutional Legitimacy Crisis
Original framing: “Retired US generals call on Pentagon to cancel 'barbaric' execution livestream” — BBC News - World
The trickster (Hermes, Eshu, Coyote) exposes the absurdity of power's self-serious rituals. Here, 72 generals who authorized 'signature strikes' killing unknown military-age males in Yemen and Somalia now clutch pearls over 'barbarism' of one televised execution. As Erasmus wrote in 'Praise of Folly': 'Kings and princes... think it a great piece of wisdom to be able to deceive their subjects.' The letter performs 'honor' while the Pentagon's 2022 National Defense Strategy names 'lethality' as its core value. The livestream is the trickster's mirror: it reveals the military's true theology — not honor, but spectacle as control. Anansi would note: the spider spins the web, then pretends to be caught in it. The generals signed the letter; they also signed the deployment orders.
The Hasan execution livestream is not an aberration but a revelation: the US military, having normalized extrajudicial killing through drone warfare and signature strikes, now seeks to ritualize its one remaining legal execution as theater of 'honor' — a concept the signatory generals violated in Fallujah, Haditha, and the black sites.
The trickster sees clearly: the generals' letter is not dissent but brand management. True honor would require them to confront the 7,000+ service member suicides since 9/11, the civilian casualties they authorized, and the structural Islamophobia that made Hasan's radicalization invisible to his chain of command. Indigenous peacemaking, Islamic legal tradition, and the scientific evidence on deterrence all converge: this spectacle heals nothing, deters nothing, and exposes the military's moral injury as institutional policy. The only systemic solution is abolition — of the military death penalty, of execution broadcasting, and of the impunity that lets generals perform conscience while evading accountability.