Tuesday, March 24th,
2015: the crash of the Airbus A320, Flight Germanwings 9525 from Barcelona to Düsseldorf.
Because he is aware of the fact that his depressive state and his eye condition
will over time cause the loss of his job as a pilot for the subsidiary of a
prestigious airline, and realizing that his dream of becoming an aircraft
captain on intercontinental flights is doomed to failure, a young copilot chose
to end his life, leading 149 other people to death. According to the Marseilles
prosecutor’s narrative, the facts speak for themselves: the crime was
premeditated. The perpetrator took advantage of the captain’s brief absence to lock him out the
cockpit, cut off any form of communication with the outside, and operate a
progressive descent, which about ten minutes later would crash the aircraft on the
slopes of the French Alps, causing the death of all passengers and crew
members.
Such a despicable crime
defies comprehension. One cannot use the term terrorism, even though the act
triggers fear, since there is no ideological or political aim. Although such
mass murder is heinous and inhuman, it cannot be considered as a crime against
humanity without political, philosophical, racial, or religious motives.
Yet such a crime is a
denial of humanity, not only of one person, but of a large number of victims who
were, with a few exceptions, anonymous and had nothing to do with the
perpetrator’s frustrating life experience or the organization on which he cast
blame.
Whether domestic or
international, criminal law does not provide any specific characterization for this
kind of crime, though increasingly frequent. The perpetrator knows his act will
have global significance and visibility due to media and social network coverage.
More and more anti-heroes kill dozens of people, often randomly, before killing
themselves, whether in shootings in schools, universities, shopping malls or
other public areas or, such as in the present case, through the destruction of
an aircraft and the killing of all those on board.
Such acts challenge our
ability to react. Efforts are made to secure public places; companies and
regulatory authorities will revise air transport security protocols, but
criminal law cannot have any effect on the criminal who kills himself in the
process.
We are left with the
resource of punishing the criminal by depriving him of the posthumous fame he was
longing for.
Pictures of this young
man smiling in front of the Golden Gate Bridge or wearing glittering sportswear
have been shown all around the world. They ensure the triumph of the diabolical
ego of potential mass murderers and are an insult to the families of the
victims. Let us punish such odious beings using one of the harshest sanctions
the social group can inflict, a total and absolute anonymous treatment. May his
face be concealed with black on any video or photographic representation, may
his name be ignored forever. In the past, France used to inflict the sentence
of “civil death,” a sanction that until 1854 would treat convicts serving a
life sentence as dead. Though physically alive, the convict was treated as
dead, losing legal personality and all its attributes. Let us impose the sentence
of “social death,” by no longer recognizing as human those denying our
humanity.
If the media and the
people relaying the pictures acted this way, we may perhaps defeat plans of
other frustrated people who may find less incentive in playing the anti-heroes and
causing collective death.
Furthermore, such
anonymous treatment would help protect the family, friends, and neighbors of
the murderer, whose lives are shattered and made unbearable due to journalistic
interference, collective stigmatization, and what must be feelings of overwhelming
personal guilt by virtue of their relationship with the murderer.
The idea is not to
promote silence when dealing with those terrible events, which obviously have
to be discussed. The point is to deprive the murderer of his name and face, to
make him sink into his fate of anonymous cursed copilot. Since his crime is
unspeakable, we should deprive him of his name and identity; he should become
void, as one who has never existed. Not even a stone should bear his name.
There is no need to
amend any law or draft international agreements to do so. Let us act as responsible
citizens by changing the law through our collective behavior, which may become a
national and international custom. Custom is a way of reclaiming the law where
our representatives are slow or powerless in making it evolve. Let us create a usage
or common practice of treating collective murderers anonymously, so that
neither our contemporaries, nor our descendants will be able to know, or even
care to know, the name or the face of those who despise and hate mankind. Some
newspapers and television channels already do so. Such behavior must be promoted
and generalized. We do not want to allow our contemporaries to make a gruesome
connection between happiness and horror; we want to prevent our children from
portraying the denial of mankind with smile and innocence.
© 2015 Olivier Moréteau,
translated from the French by Sara Vono, with the help of Jennifer Lane and
Marie-Antoinette Moréteau.
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