Reflections on the Guillotine (1957)

With respect to Camus, I don't find anything particularly disagreeable about the points he made, but it is wholly irrelevant to my interest in the device, or its modern metaphorical relevance. Put simply: one's thoughts on capital punishment are distinct from one's thoughts on asymmetrical warfare, and that is where my mind goes to, and is preoccupied with, when discussing guillotines. If a class response to political binding is to purchase more and more political control, what option do we have that is not violence? And why should we prefer it? If the upper class doesn't care how their comfort causes lower class death, why should the lower class concern itself with how their response causes upper class death? Raise all boats with the tide or drown in the blood you're using to selectively raise your own boats. Seems straightforward to me. Not sure what's so hard for the stockholders to understand, here.

Anyway, yeah, your dad had a weak stomach and an imagination weak enough to not picture you as the kids that dude murdered (or didn't care enough about his future kids to develop bloodlust for the monster who did it). He's weak? He's a saint? We can give the government a monopoly on violence, but we can never give them the ability to execute its most permanent form, on account of the errors and prejudices of the humans whom make it up? Thoughtful. But I am distracted.

This is a 1957 essay by Algerian-French philosopher Albert Camus.

Hard disagree. There are people who deserve death, and it is a good thing when it happens. It's just really dangerous to give the state such a power.