Public executions are unfortunately not very medieval.

State executions during prime time are yet another raid in the morbid circus Trump. But the proposal is not as medieval as it appears – rather, it is as if America's "war on terrorism" has moved home, writes Kristina Lindquist. An excerpt from Dagens Nyheter, 2026-10-20 08:58 Article's original address: https://www.dn.se/kultur/kristina-lindquist-offentliga-avrattningar-ar-tyvarr-inte-sarskilt-medeltida/ Kristina Lindquist: Public executions are unfortunately not particularly medieval Get more from DN as logged in You know you can create a free account on DN? As logged in you can access several smart features. - Follow your interests - Newsletter At the end of April, the satire website The Onion published an article where the US government was said to have plans to introduce public executions as a type of entertainment (27/4). But satire is a difficult art these days, and as the playwright Mac Rogers notes in a post on Bluesky, we now have a number from The Onion regarding the reality. Six months. After six months it happens. What has happened is that the US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went out and declared last week that the mass murderer Nidal Hasan should be executed by firing squad – and that the whole thing would be live broadcast. People must see that actions have consequences, Hegseth believed. Now Donald Trump has backed down from the broadcast itself, because many "good and well-meaning" people have reacted to the idea of a public execution. Arbitrariness and expediency are precisely what citizens desire when it comes to the handling of state murders? Arbitrariness and expediency are precisely what citizens desire when it comes to the handling of state murders? But the idea of executions during prime time still has a certain shock effect – and one can of course view this as yet another raid in the morbid circus Trump. When DN gathered reactions to Hegseth's statement, many jurists and academics focused very rightly on the radically deviant aspect of live-broadcasting an execution. It is a way to make the American legal system "ridiculous," "lacking a parallel in modern times," and belong in the "Middle Ages" (9/10). But does it really do that? In the classic essay "Contemplating the Suffering of Others," the author Susan Sontag means that the tendency to depict and expose brutality has ancient roots – but it also lives on in our time. One finds examples of "iconography of suffering" in everything from the ancient "broad repertoire of harsh cruelties" to the most famous photographs of modern history. "It seems the desire for images showing physical pain is almost as strong as the desire for images of naked bodies," writes Sontag. In the early 1900s, so-called "lynching postcards" were a popular phenomenon in the Southern States. And how should one describe the lynchings of that time, if not as a kind of public executions with the state's good memory? The pictures of burned and hanged bodies served as souvenirs – and as very ordinary postcards. Sontag also highlights Eddie Adams' famous execution photo from the Vietnam War as an example of how the public's presence interacts with the violence itself. In February 1968, a South Vietnamese general shoots a suspected Viet Cong sympathizer in the head on the street in Saigon; you have surely seen the picture. Sontag describes how the general leads out the bound prisoner, arranges the angles, and then presses them out for the journalists who have gathered at the scene. "He would never have carried out the summary execution if they hadn't been there as witnesses," she writes. Naked men in shackles. Everything marked by staging rather than documentation, and we see a preview of our current digital sharing patterns. In our time, the mediatization of suffering is more or less finalized, and an important step in that direction was taken with the leaked images from Abu Ghraib in the spring of 2004. American soldiers smiling and posing next to dead bodies. Human pyramids. Naked men in shackles. Everything marked by staging rather than documentation, and we see a preview of our current digital sharing patterns. It simply is not possible to decouple Trumpism's vulgar brutality – with live executions and migrant camps – from the time before him. Guantanamo, extrajudicial disappearances, advanced pirouettes around international conventions. Did it not have consequences? The war on terrorism did not only involve an erosion of respect for human rights, but also contributed to weaving a new old image logic with the intense dehumanization of people overseas. It was only a matter of time before this pattern would emerge at home. Read more: Kristina Lindquist: The torture pictures cast shadows on our time – 20 years after Abu Ghraib