It’s a Maltese expression. “Ġabuħ qisu l-aċċjomu” which literally means “they beat him till he looked like the ‘Ecce Homo'”. “Ecce homo” is a stage in the passion of Christ where Pontius Pilate presents the post-flagellated Christ to the people and states “Here is the man” (Ecce Homo). Religiously speaking it’s a powerful mystical moment that overstates the human aspect of the son of God. Ceasar’s representative has taken the messiah’s humanity to the extreme – and the ugly scene of a butchered Christ is proof that “verbum dei caro factum est”.
I was reminded of the powerful biblical scenes of the passion of Christ in a very weird way yesterday while watching RAIUNO’s late night programme “Porta a Porta”. There was a recurrent image of a dead Gaddafi that I couldn’t help comparing with pictures of the flagellated Christ or of the Turin Shroud.
Meanwhile in the studio the Italian panel wouldn’t stop reminding viewers how badly the Libyan Revolution ended. In their opinion “a tyranny should not be ended with tyrannical acts” or better “this was no civilised way to end a revolution”. I couldn’t help but wonder whether these were the sons of the same nation that conducted the very civilised and public execution of Benito Mussolini and his lover Clara Petacci.
The truth is that the pent up anger of a people in such situations will often lead to violent deaths. Gaddafi had denied his people much more than the right to a fair trial and democratic representation. He had trampled on their dignity and used a whole nation as his playground. Only a few months ago he was ordering his own airforce to bombard his own people. While you cannot condone acts of violence nor encourage them I cannot find it in myself to hypocritically condemn the automatic reaction even of a lone man with a pistol when he comes face to face with a dictator.
In the end we are left with the picture of Gaddafi’s bloodied face that ironically reminds us of the “Ecce Homo”. That’s where the similarity ends though.
One died for our sins, the other is belatedly paying for his.
(the Hack the Dog series will resume in the next post)
4 replies on “L-Accjomu”
Meh. Bastard set the army against his own people, and when that backfired, brought in mercenaries to do the job. He’s lucky he wasn’t strapped to a gurney and tortured to the death. Killing him was perfectly understandable, maybe not correct, but understandable.
Look, I perfectly agree that the killing was understandable but I cannot find it within myself to justify extra-judicial execution and lynching of any kind. Having said that I did not expect any trial to be so different than that of Ceauşescu or Hussein. The hatred in these circumstances would have been too immense to guarantee a fair and impartial trial. Also this Lawson guy kind of makes a point when he says that “…the risk is the development of a culture of death porn. For me, as a simple moral position, Gaddafi merits as much privacy in his final extremities as did his victims in the Lockerbie bombing: a germane example from the past of a time when the media by common consent suppressed horrific images in the cause of taste and privacy” (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/21/muammar-gaddafi-death-images-media)
so let us for a while forget how MI5 and CIA may have used Gaddafi’s services to nutralise redicalizim…and look at the big picture as seen by daniel ross in his violent democracy (Cambridge uni press):
…an event shared simultaneously by millions together … (is) the unfloding language of mass communication. For a moment each individual is placed into the temporarality of one person’s mortal fate…another universal reference point for common experience… in the end it may do nothing more than contribute to that distruction of individual experience and responsibility…it adds to the increasingly violent essence of those worlds that proclaim themselves violently democratic.
“violently democratic” – what an interesting and apt encapsulation of the death of a dictator at the hands of the angry mob.