Zach De La Rocha, lead singer of the reunited Rage Against the Machine, made waves during a recent concert by accusing the Bush administration of war crimes and saying, quite incoherently, “They should be hung and tried and shot.” Fox News pundit Sean Hannity interpreted this as an assassination threat and seemed to call for Secret Service intervention, prompting De La Rocha to clarify: “No: [Bush] should be brought to trial as a war criminal and hung and shot. That’s what we said.”
De La Rocha and Hannity are both poseurs and demagogues who deserve one another. But the problem with De La Rocha’s statement is not the war crimes part. The Bush administration has authorized and engaged in war crimes, and through its torture policies, has sought to redefine what a war crime is. Lefty protesters are right to point this out. What is genuinely disturbing is De La Rocha’s apparent enthusiasm for the death penalty.
The International Criminal Court in the Hague is responsible for trying some of the world’s worst war criminals, yet it does not impose the death penalty:
If the accused is convicted, the Trial Chamber issues a sentence for a specified term of up to thirty years or, when justified by the extreme gravity of the crime and the individual circumstances of the convicted person, life imprisonment.
The death penalty is of course a sticking point between the U.S. and European countries more generally. De La Rocha comes down on the American side of the equation. His supposedly progressive fans applaud.
The U.S., of course, is not a signatory to the ICC and does not recognize its authority. De La Rocha, who supports the idea of hanging and shooting, would seem to have a problem with the ICC as well. Not that he’s given an iota of thought to the matter, I’m sure. His job as a transgressive, subversive rock star hardly requires it.
One can certainly understand the need for catharsis after eight disastrous years under Bush. But following De La Rocha’s logic, there are no grounds to condemn, say, the recent hanging of Saddam Hussein. In fact, if we grant De La Rocha his preference, Saddam should have been shot after he was hanged.
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