The announcement by the US secretary of war that the Pentagon will live-stream the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan is a repulsive display of the depravity and moral decay of capitalist democracy in the United States. It is also a further sign of the danger of incipient fascism in this country.
The execution of Hasan, a US army major, by firing squad is to be carried out on December 3 in the same place where he took the lives of 13 soldiers at Ft. Hood, Texas. Another 32 were injured in that November 5, 2009, shooting spree, which Hasan said was retribution for what he believed to be the immoral US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Those aiming their guns at this man, now in a wheelchair, will be soldiers who form part of the community from which those lives were taken. The method of the killing, placing the instruments of death in the hands of those closest to the tragedy, and the plan to make a spectacle of this execution, are nothing short of lynching — a lynching set to be broadcast into the living rooms of millions across the United States and around the world.
EDITORIAL
There have been no public executions in the United States in nearly a century. In fact, only a handful of countries — including Afghanistan, Iran, Kuwait, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia — currently make this a practice.
Filming and livestreaming executions is more common to terrorist groups like the Islamic State, which became infamous for its videos of gruesome decapitations of prisoners deprived of due process or never convicted of crimes.
While a majority in the United States support the use of the death penalty in extreme cases, there has been backlash even among some of those supporters of capital punishment to turning this cruel act into entertainment.
The callous disregard for human life on display here is the same barbarity paraded before the United Nations on September 22, 2026, when US president Donald Trump “welcomed” representatives of nations across the world to New York by calling for Iran’s annihilation. It is the same savagery and bloodlust that characterizes Washington’s bombing of the Iranian people, enabling the Israeli government’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people, and attempting to starve the Cuban people into submission.
As World-Outlook noted in its editorial on Trump’s UN speech, these are all signs of Washington’s accelerating decline from its former position as the world’s unrivaled top economic and military power. They are also signs of what working people can expect here at home as we organize to defend our livelihoods amid worsening conditions fueled by this decline of the dog-eat-dog system of capitalism in its highest and last stage — imperialism.[1] The lengths to which Trump, US secretary of war Pete Hegseth, and company are willing to go to retain their power and normalize authoritarianism are becoming increasingly clear.
The focus this time is a Muslim man who has admitted to premeditated mass murder. Maybe that makes it easier for some to stomach the live broadcast of his execution. Perhaps that is the point — a part of the government’s effort to get us accustomed to increased brutality, cruel and unusual punishment, more masked federal goons on the streets, the hounding and prosecution of opponents of US policies, the gutting of democratic rights, and the use of armed force against workers and others who organize to resist the bosses’ new world order.
This is a playbook the billionaires who rule the United States have honed to perfection around the world, systematically trampling their “rule of law,” subverting elections, and violating the sovereignty of other nations through coercion, sanctions, covert operations, and military assault. And they justify their actions by labeling their enemies terrorists and morally bankrupt.
Whose morality?
The plan for Hasan’s public killing is of a piece with the grotesque spectacle of the botched execution attempt of Christa Pike in Tennessee on September 30. More of this is coming.
From the outset, the Trump administration has been pushing states to step up the pace of capital punishment. In 2025, US states carried out more executions than they had in any year since 2009. Coming on the heels of the bungled execution in Tennessee, the Pentagon’s latest announcement has raised an outcry about the morality of the death penalty.
No one should be surprised that the plan for the revival of public execution was announced by a man who cloaks himself in “Christian morality.” Hegseth, who broke the news during an interview with far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec, has been itching for this moment.
Trump’s and Hegseth’s morality, and that of the class they represent, do not exist on some ethereal plane of eternal truths, shared by rulers and the ruled alike. It is a morality that functions to keep the profit system in place. As capitalism declines, the moral fabric it has woven to justify its reign begins to fray. When the veil of democracy slips, capitalism’s bloodthirsty character begins to emerge for all to see.
“In so far as the state is concerned, in peaceful times it limits itself to legalized killings of individuals so that in time of war it may transform the ‘obligatory’ commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ into its opposite,” Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky explained in his 1938 essay Their Morals and Ours. “The most ‘humane’ governments, which in peaceful times ‘detest’ war, proclaim during war that the highest duty of their armies is the extermination of the greatest possible number of people.”
Trotsky continued, “Morality is a function of the class struggle; … democratic morality corresponds to the epoch of liberal and progressive capitalism; … the sharpening of the class struggle in passing through its latest phase definitively and irrevocably destroyed this morality; … in its place came the morality of fascism on one side, on the other the morality of proletarian revolution.”
Trotsky’s essay was written in the depths of an earlier crisis of capitalism, with fascism on the rise and humanity hurtling toward World War II. His explanation of the class character of morality can help us better understand what we see unfolding before our eyes today.
As US imperialism declines, the “common sense” morals that most of us have taken for granted are tested. The morality of the capitalist class, which had made allowance for some democratic freedoms and rights, now justifies increasing amounts of bloodletting and cruelty for its cause: the maintenance of capitalist rule, of the system based on maximizing the profits of the greedy few at the expense of the vast majority.
After initially indicating he favored the live broadcast of Hasan’s execution, Trump then said he is weighing the decision. Whatever is ultimately decided in this case, this is but an inkling of what the ruling class has in store for working people who dare to stand up to its brutality. Washington is sending a warning about the lengths of savagery to which it will go to retaliate against its perceived enemies — foreign and domestic.
The labor movement needs to loudly oppose this depravity. Not simply because this case involves the killing of another human being or because of the circus Hasan’s execution may become.
We need to express outrage because the US government is using its power — in our name — to drive humanity in the opposite direction from where we need to go. In seeking to protect the interests of the super wealthy, it is driving us toward barbarism and away from the possibility of a society based on social equality and human solidarity.
NOTES
[1] Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. It became predominant at the dawn of the 20th century. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin gave this economic system the most apt definition in his famous work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916. Imperialism is marked by five basic features, Lenin said: “(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital,’ of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.”
At the second congress of the Communist International in July 1920, a report on the work of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions summarized the further development of imperialism this way: “The characteristic feature of imperialism consists in the whole world, as we now see, being divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, the latter possessing colossal wealth and powerful armed forces. The vast majority of the world’s population…belong to the oppressed nations…This idea of distinction, of dividing the nations into oppressor and oppressed, runs through the theses.”
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Categories: Editorials, US Politics