Saddam’s Apologists

By Lee Duigon
December 23, 2003

Now that we've got Saddam Hussein, what are we going to do with him?

Before that question could be formally posed, a great howl went up from liberals worldwide. It prompts us to ask a different question: What are they howling about? Why has the capture of this human monster caused liberals such pain?

Because, no matter what they say, they like him .

Al-Qaeda may be trying to kill us, but our own homegrown liberal humanists are trying to put Christianity out of business in America . Their anguish on behalf of Saddam allows us a vivid insight into who they really are and what they really want.

Let's peel away the layers of this mask and see what's behind it.

“Why Did We Have to Humiliate Him?”

When Saddam came out of his hole looking like a skid row derelict and the world watched on TV as an Army medic checked him for nits, liberals complained that this mass murderer was being “humiliated.”

They don't deny that Saddam killed, tortured, mutilated, and terrorized many thousands of innocent people, if not millions. How is it even possible to “humiliate” someone who has done that?

Chalcedon founder R. J. Rushdoony shed some light on this odd mindset when he quoted from a poem by Walt Whitman, entitled “To a Common Prostitute”: “Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you.” Rushdoony commented, “ Total acceptance and total integration are demanded by this relativistic humanism.”1

From a perspective of sheer relativism, it is impossible to understand Saddam's action as crimes. Because he's not a criminal, he shouldn't be “humiliated.”

Of course, were Saddam a pro-life Christian nominated for a federal judgeship, sitting before the Senate Judiciary Committee, liberals would do everything in their power to humiliate him. After all, they would have to protect the humanist sacrament of abortion.

Even as communists believe a “dictatorship of the proletariat” must precede the establishment of a classless utopia, humanists believe that Christians and other “reactionary types” must first be stomped into silence before a truly omnitolerant society can arise. So while they preach tolerance and diversity, they come down like an avalanche on anyone who questions abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, or the theory of evolution. They'll flay you for setting up a Nativity scene or a Ten Commandments monument. At the same time, liberals like TV newsie Peter Jennings will praise Saddam for providing government funding for the arts in his country.

Saddam never did any of those things liberals don't like, so as far as they are concerned, he's a citizen in good standing. They would vote him a federal judgeship before they voted for Miguel Estrada.

“No Capital Punishment!”

Opposing capital punishment is often a disguise for those who have a positive penchant for the criminal.

What do liberals say when there is no capital punishment? In the 1960s, Rushdoony pointed out, there was a virtual moratorium on capital punishment in America , only one execution in 1966.2

Liberals in those days complained about putting murderers in prison. Karl Menninger lectured us about “the crime of punishment,” and his followers demanded that murderers be taken out of jail and put in mental institutions where they could get “help.”

It makes you wonder what liberals would say if we really did stop putting criminals in prison and consigned them to mental hospitals, as recommended. Wouldn't they complain about the mental hospitals - perhaps as a violation of the criminal's “dignity” - and demand one-on-one outpatient counseling for convicted murderers?

The Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, teaches that capital punishment for murder is not only permitted, but required (Numbers 35:29-34; Romans 11:1-4, to name just two of many examples). The church has for centuries upheld this teaching. Unfortunately, liberals don't believe in the Bible. Their teaching, as repeated daily to children in public schools, is, “You must decide what's right or wrong for you.”3

Saddam Hussein decided that mass murder and torture was right for him. As far as moral relativists see it, that's the end of the story.

Why should this surprise us? These are the same people who fight tooth and nail to defend partial birth abortion, who want to pull Terry Schiavo's feeding tube and slowly dehydrate her to death, and who lap it up when the BBC and CNN defend Palestinian suicide bombers. Why should it upset them that Saddam had helpless people lowered feet-first into wood chipping machines? As many a pro-Saddam talk radio caller has argued, “He wasn't bothering us.” Then again, after you get put into a mass grave is a little late to be “bothered.”

So What's to Like?

The late Malcolm Muggeridge, in his autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick4 described what it was like to be a journalist in Moscow in the 1930s, at the height of Stalin's Terror. Never mind that Stalin murdered and tortured unthinkable millions of Russians. The Moscow correspondents of The New York Times and The Nation -- two publications now at the forefront of the “Be Kind to Saddam” movement -- constituted Stalin's biggest cheering section, Muggeridge recalled.5 No lie put out by Stalin was too bold, too monstrous, or too crass for these publications to pass on to their American readers as unvarnished truth.

Saddam often cited Josef Stalin as his role model. Like Stalin, he held himself bound to no law but his own. As a Ba'athist, he set up a socialist, secular dictatorship and relentlessly persecuted his country's majority religion, the Shi'ite Muslims. Like Stalin, he established a statist nightmare that was all-powerful and all-devouring. He exercised absolute power without a shred of mercy and filled mass graves with his victims.

Now, the same liberal lunatics who worshiped Stalin have fallen in love with Saddam. They did everything they could to prevent the destruction of his hideous regime. Failing in that, they now campaign to save his life and reputation.

We believe in God. We believe, as Psalm 100 teaches, that “it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.”

Secular humanists don't believe that. They believe the opposite. They believe we can, by our own efforts, create a paradise on earth, as long as we're willing to break a few zillion eggs to make the omelet.

If we don't want them to give us what they gave to Russia and Iraq , we'd better defeat them in the Culture War.


1. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume 1 (The Craig Press, 1973), 295.

2. Ibid ., 226.

3. William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can't Tell Right From Wrong (New York, 1992).

4. Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick (New York, 1973).

5. Ibid ., 246-247; 254-256.

Topics: Philosophy, Statism, World History

Lee Duigon


Lee has his own blog at

More by Lee Duigon