America is sliding into a dystopia – complete with TV executions

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Only despotic and desperate regimes hold public executions. Iran strings the condemned up to cranes and yanks them into the air. The Taliban killed six men in a stadium last year. But none, not one nation, has suggested or planned to televise state killings. Apart from America.

The US “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth has promised that the Pentagon will livestream the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, a former US Army major and psychiatrist who killed 13 comrades and injured 32 others at a US military base in Texas in 2009, on 3 December this year.

He may be frustrated that the date set for this modern-day horror show is after the November midterm elections in which his boss, Donald Trump, fears the Republican Party may lose control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Hegseth appears to have taken to heart the words of the Roman satirist Juvenal, who said the people only “deeply desire two things; bread and circuses”. Except that around two centuries “Anno Domini”, Juvenal was joking.

He was sneering at a political system that kept a population supine by handing out free grub and staging fights between gladiators, chariot races, and crucifixions.

But Juvenal wasn’t giving a “how to” guide to dictators. And a couple of millennia later, George Carlin, the American comedian, re-upped Juvenal’s satire on stage.

“The polls show the American people want capital punishment and they want a balanced budget,” he said in 1996.

“And I think even in a fake democracy, people ought to get what they want once in a while just to feed this illusion that they’re really in charge.

“Let’s use capital punishment the same way we use sports and television in this country to distract people and take their minds off how bad they’re being f***ed by the upper 1 per cent.”

One hesitates to use such a long quotation for fear that Donald Trump’s “secretary of war” might adopt more biting satire as national policy.

In one sequence of the film, a news announcer reports the summary conviction of a murderer, then declares: “Execution tonight at 6.00. All net. All channels.”

Hollywood constantly warns of the dangers of dystopias in films like The Hunger Games, but the Trump administration looks at these fictions as policy blueprints. Yet Hegseth is a character a satirist would be hesitant to make up.

His politics is harvested from the darkest fields of the fringe internet and has delivered a national security strategy based on the racist, and mad, Great Replacement Theory.

Along with Trump, he doesn’t comprehend what structures like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation really are. They both think it’s a war-making offensive organisation that works for America, not a defensive alliance. This is why they have both complained of being let down by allies in their war against Tehran.

Nor does he grasp that murdering alleged “drug traffickers” on boats in the Caribbean and beyond falls foul of national, military, and international law. It does. It is murder that he has ordered.

In Europe, the death penalty has been off the books for years because it is unethical and because it does not work as a deterrent.

Hegseth will have seen no decline in drug shipments to the US as a result of his state-sponsored killings of men in motor boats, and may rue the day he ordered them.

With the killing of Hasan, he has judicial cover. The extremist killer confessed to his mass shooting.

“He’s gonna get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be,” Hegseth said. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

It goes without saying that Nidal Malik is a bad man. America wants retribution against the former army major. He was convicted of murder and attempted murder and sentenced to death.

But this is execution as entertainment. Only despotic and desperate regimes hold public executions. And now, too, America.

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