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Who is the executioner?
I want to talk about execution in a way you probably haven’t heard before. A number of people have said things like “Well, of course he objects to execution, because if he’s ever held responsible for what he did, he’ll be just as dead as Megatron! He’s an assassin, you know. A saboteur and an assassin.”
Yes, I am. Or rather, I was; but now I sit on a throne, and I don’t have any assassins now, because I’ve been one.
This is not to say that we don’t kill people. There are those who will not agree to live by the original principles of our movement, and will also not agree to leave it; some of them even think they should lead it. We will kill those people if we have to, in self-defence and in the defence of those who cannot defend themselves. But we would really far prefer that they just take off their purple badges and go somewhere else. If all you want to do is kill, and you don’t want to create a just and sustainable society in which there is no caste oppression, kindly get the Pit out of Destron.
We’ve adopted Deathsaurus’ policy, not just as a condition of alliance, but because it’s the right thing to do; we don’t send our people out into fights that nobody needs to have and expect them to risk their lives so we can rule over people who don’t want to live in an equitable society, people who will force us to become the oppressors we hated, which in fact is what we have done in the past.
In the early days of the revolution…and from then until only a few cycles ago…I was an assassin.
I was one of the executioners. I was sent out to kill people, early and often, and for most of my life, the mechs who were sending me out to do that work were the two mechs that I have loved most in this life. My conjunx endura. And my amica endura. You probably can’t imagine how truly fragged up that is. It took a toll on them both. Megatron didn’t start out mad. Soundwave didn’t go mad, but he suffered in other ways. And yet…I think it would be worse to be so ordered by a stranger, and compelled by force alone instead of love.
This was not a life that I would have chosen for myself, but I came from the castes where you didn’t get to choose your own life. Even if you rebelled against the caste system—because the caste system was not going to be brought down with dancing and poetry and fair distribution of stolen or salvaged energon, or any of the other things I didn’t hate doing when I was a young thing. There were people who had to die for that to happen. (Megatron has said that wasn’t true, but he said it in a fit of remorse, in which he could not understand that where he went wrong was in killing people who didn’t have their pedes on our necks.)
If you are going to have assassins and executioners, if you are going to have street prostitution, if you are going to have jobs that nobody wants to do, you have to have a caste system. Because if nobody wants to do a job, somebody has to be forced to do it.
Therefore, in order to abolish the caste system, we have to dismantle the whole idea of work that nobody wants to do: work that is inherently degrading to the spark. Nobody wants to do it because it will make you sick inside.
Mining, cleaning, sex work, factory production, and secretarial work don’t have to be awful. What the people who do that work hate is being mistreated, because the rest of society has decided that even though this work is essential to the functioning of society, those who do it are not worthy of being respected as persons, and will not be recognised, so that society can work them to death and pay them very little for doing work upon which the state of the world as we know it depends. We could give all the members of those professions fair pay, safe working conditions, the right to refuse work that is too degrading or dangerous, and the respect that is due to those who keep our society functional, and suddenly, there would be people who would volunteer. If nobody mines, nobody eats.
But to force people to accept the kinds of working conditions the bloated bourgeoisie think they have to impose…there have to be people who are beaten down and desperate, who have no other options.
Killing helpless mechs, however, is not a job that anyone healthy or sane would ever actually want. Not even if it paid what the Senate once paid the Senators. Killing is dirty, ugly, soul-reaping work. Executioners, gladiators, assassins... this isn't stuff we should ever force people to do.
A soldier, under good leadership, kills to protect what they value, and they fight other soldiers. War is a thing that nobody sane or healthy loves, but we mostly accept that sometimes it’s the only alternative to being destroyed.
Assassination seems clean and distant, but it isn’t. Ultimately, your job is to get the mech you are sent to bring down in a vulnerable position without attracting attention, and end his life.
For an executioner, it will be worse; at least an assassin in the service of Destron or Cybertron can tell himself or herself that the work is in the service of a cause. An executioner will be some poor low-caste mech who has been put into a position where he has to kill people who are restrained and helpless, who haven’t done anything at all to him, because some other clean-handed mech has decided that it must be so. What do you suppose happens to the spark of a person who is given the work of killing the helpless?
My belief, as those of you who read my work already know, is that the state (insofar as there should be a state at all), should not be in the business of retributive justice—only restorative justice. So the state should not be set up in such a way that there have to be desperate, uneducated, unhappy people who are willing to come to work and kill helpless strangers. At least, when I assassinated people because Megatron or Soundwave had told me to do it, I knew why they had to die, and I was working for a cause I believed in and still do—even though I no longer believe in those methods.
I could not kill someone who had been laid out before me drugged or bound or both, helpless, and end that person’s life, with no investment in it. There are people who can, but those people need help themselves.
But I do understand that some people simply will not feel restored until they have taken the life of the person who hurt them or killed the person they love. Let them try; let them have their hearing, file their intention to kill. If the conjunx of someone I murdered snuffs out my spark, so be it. I would fight back because I want to live, but I would understand that they had the right to try, and I would hope that Soundwave, upon finding out why the person had killed me, would let it go.
But a judge? If a judge wants to sentence a mech to death, they had better be willing to kill that person themselves.
There are two things that happen when you learn to kill easily and well. One is that it stops being easy to imagine yourself living in a world where you are truly safe, and another is that it stops mattering so much. It should never stop mattering. I would rather have a murderer in my vicinity than an executioner. I would trust someone who said, “yes, I killed him, because after what he did I couldn’t stand to exist in the same world with him” far more willingly than I would trust someone who said, “I killed him because I needed to get paid so I could buy energon.” At least with the first one I know I’m safe as long as I don’t draw his rage down on me.
If someone who lost their amica to Megatron’s direct action tore out his spark, I would mourn him, but I would let it go. I will not stand by and say nothing while a bunch of nodding heads decide the fate of my amica—or for that matter, the fate of anyone else, even my singular enemy—and order some MTO or prison guard who’s never had the chance to make a real choice in their life before to snuff him out while he is bound. I may not be able to stop it—he may even decide to permit it. But if I am able to stop without restarting the war, I will, and if I am not able to stop it without restarting the war, I will forever hold my own desire for vengeance, not against the hand that dealt the blow, but against the nodding head who thought that wage slavery was an ethical way to compel one person to kill another, another who has been made helpless to resist.
If I had had choices in my youth I would probably be a professor of literature somewhere. But I didn’t. I have stood in the darkness unseen and taken the lives of mechs who did not even know I was there. And I was only able to do it because I believed I had to do it in order to free my people. I would not demand of anyone to take the life of a helpless, bound and conscious person with whom they had no personal quarrel, because I at least can imagine what that would be like.
Most of those who want to see people thrown into the smelter or snuffed out like candles have no idea what it would be like to do those things. You don’t know the sense of power it gives you, the false sense of power that can make you a cheerful murderer; and you don’t know the pain that this act inflicts on your spark, even if you’re already desperate and have been forced to make so many bad choices you can no longer feel that pain consciously.
You need to think about what you are asking people to do when you ask them to do the vengeance for you that you will not do. If you do not want someone to die badly enough to stand there yourself and watch the light die in their optics, you don’t have the right to ask anyone else to kill them.
I want to talk about execution in a way you probably haven’t heard before. A number of people have said things like “Well, of course he objects to execution, because if he’s ever held responsible for what he did, he’ll be just as dead as Megatron! He’s an assassin, you know. A saboteur and an assassin.”
Yes, I am. Or rather, I was; but now I sit on a throne, and I don’t have any assassins now, because I’ve been one.
This is not to say that we don’t kill people. There are those who will not agree to live by the original principles of our movement, and will also not agree to leave it; some of them even think they should lead it. We will kill those people if we have to, in self-defence and in the defence of those who cannot defend themselves. But we would really far prefer that they just take off their purple badges and go somewhere else. If all you want to do is kill, and you don’t want to create a just and sustainable society in which there is no caste oppression, kindly get the Pit out of Destron.
We’ve adopted Deathsaurus’ policy, not just as a condition of alliance, but because it’s the right thing to do; we don’t send our people out into fights that nobody needs to have and expect them to risk their lives so we can rule over people who don’t want to live in an equitable society, people who will force us to become the oppressors we hated, which in fact is what we have done in the past.
In the early days of the revolution…and from then until only a few cycles ago…I was an assassin.
I was one of the executioners. I was sent out to kill people, early and often, and for most of my life, the mechs who were sending me out to do that work were the two mechs that I have loved most in this life. My conjunx endura. And my amica endura. You probably can’t imagine how truly fragged up that is. It took a toll on them both. Megatron didn’t start out mad. Soundwave didn’t go mad, but he suffered in other ways. And yet…I think it would be worse to be so ordered by a stranger, and compelled by force alone instead of love.
This was not a life that I would have chosen for myself, but I came from the castes where you didn’t get to choose your own life. Even if you rebelled against the caste system—because the caste system was not going to be brought down with dancing and poetry and fair distribution of stolen or salvaged energon, or any of the other things I didn’t hate doing when I was a young thing. There were people who had to die for that to happen. (Megatron has said that wasn’t true, but he said it in a fit of remorse, in which he could not understand that where he went wrong was in killing people who didn’t have their pedes on our necks.)
If you are going to have assassins and executioners, if you are going to have street prostitution, if you are going to have jobs that nobody wants to do, you have to have a caste system. Because if nobody wants to do a job, somebody has to be forced to do it.
Therefore, in order to abolish the caste system, we have to dismantle the whole idea of work that nobody wants to do: work that is inherently degrading to the spark. Nobody wants to do it because it will make you sick inside.
Mining, cleaning, sex work, factory production, and secretarial work don’t have to be awful. What the people who do that work hate is being mistreated, because the rest of society has decided that even though this work is essential to the functioning of society, those who do it are not worthy of being respected as persons, and will not be recognised, so that society can work them to death and pay them very little for doing work upon which the state of the world as we know it depends. We could give all the members of those professions fair pay, safe working conditions, the right to refuse work that is too degrading or dangerous, and the respect that is due to those who keep our society functional, and suddenly, there would be people who would volunteer. If nobody mines, nobody eats.
But to force people to accept the kinds of working conditions the bloated bourgeoisie think they have to impose…there have to be people who are beaten down and desperate, who have no other options.
Killing helpless mechs, however, is not a job that anyone healthy or sane would ever actually want. Not even if it paid what the Senate once paid the Senators. Killing is dirty, ugly, soul-reaping work. Executioners, gladiators, assassins... this isn't stuff we should ever force people to do.
A soldier, under good leadership, kills to protect what they value, and they fight other soldiers. War is a thing that nobody sane or healthy loves, but we mostly accept that sometimes it’s the only alternative to being destroyed.
Assassination seems clean and distant, but it isn’t. Ultimately, your job is to get the mech you are sent to bring down in a vulnerable position without attracting attention, and end his life.
For an executioner, it will be worse; at least an assassin in the service of Destron or Cybertron can tell himself or herself that the work is in the service of a cause. An executioner will be some poor low-caste mech who has been put into a position where he has to kill people who are restrained and helpless, who haven’t done anything at all to him, because some other clean-handed mech has decided that it must be so. What do you suppose happens to the spark of a person who is given the work of killing the helpless?
My belief, as those of you who read my work already know, is that the state (insofar as there should be a state at all), should not be in the business of retributive justice—only restorative justice. So the state should not be set up in such a way that there have to be desperate, uneducated, unhappy people who are willing to come to work and kill helpless strangers. At least, when I assassinated people because Megatron or Soundwave had told me to do it, I knew why they had to die, and I was working for a cause I believed in and still do—even though I no longer believe in those methods.
I could not kill someone who had been laid out before me drugged or bound or both, helpless, and end that person’s life, with no investment in it. There are people who can, but those people need help themselves.
But I do understand that some people simply will not feel restored until they have taken the life of the person who hurt them or killed the person they love. Let them try; let them have their hearing, file their intention to kill. If the conjunx of someone I murdered snuffs out my spark, so be it. I would fight back because I want to live, but I would understand that they had the right to try, and I would hope that Soundwave, upon finding out why the person had killed me, would let it go.
But a judge? If a judge wants to sentence a mech to death, they had better be willing to kill that person themselves.
There are two things that happen when you learn to kill easily and well. One is that it stops being easy to imagine yourself living in a world where you are truly safe, and another is that it stops mattering so much. It should never stop mattering. I would rather have a murderer in my vicinity than an executioner. I would trust someone who said, “yes, I killed him, because after what he did I couldn’t stand to exist in the same world with him” far more willingly than I would trust someone who said, “I killed him because I needed to get paid so I could buy energon.” At least with the first one I know I’m safe as long as I don’t draw his rage down on me.
If someone who lost their amica to Megatron’s direct action tore out his spark, I would mourn him, but I would let it go. I will not stand by and say nothing while a bunch of nodding heads decide the fate of my amica—or for that matter, the fate of anyone else, even my singular enemy—and order some MTO or prison guard who’s never had the chance to make a real choice in their life before to snuff him out while he is bound. I may not be able to stop it—he may even decide to permit it. But if I am able to stop without restarting the war, I will, and if I am not able to stop it without restarting the war, I will forever hold my own desire for vengeance, not against the hand that dealt the blow, but against the nodding head who thought that wage slavery was an ethical way to compel one person to kill another, another who has been made helpless to resist.
If I had had choices in my youth I would probably be a professor of literature somewhere. But I didn’t. I have stood in the darkness unseen and taken the lives of mechs who did not even know I was there. And I was only able to do it because I believed I had to do it in order to free my people. I would not demand of anyone to take the life of a helpless, bound and conscious person with whom they had no personal quarrel, because I at least can imagine what that would be like.
Most of those who want to see people thrown into the smelter or snuffed out like candles have no idea what it would be like to do those things. You don’t know the sense of power it gives you, the false sense of power that can make you a cheerful murderer; and you don’t know the pain that this act inflicts on your spark, even if you’re already desperate and have been forced to make so many bad choices you can no longer feel that pain consciously.
You need to think about what you are asking people to do when you ask them to do the vengeance for you that you will not do. If you do not want someone to die badly enough to stand there yourself and watch the light die in their optics, you don’t have the right to ask anyone else to kill them.
