LaRouche: Shall We Hang Billy Bailey
And Let Newt Go Free?
On Jan. 24, 1996, Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche issued an open letter to Delaware Governor Thomas R. Carper, equating Newt Gingrich's budget-cutting attacks on America's poor and elderly with Delaware's planned, execution by hanging of convicted murderer Billy Bailey. "Which is worse," LaRouche asked, "the hired killer, or the person whose policy the hired killer carries out?" (Bailey was hanged at 6 a.m. on Jan. 25.)
The text of the open letter follows.
TO: Governor, State of Delaware
FROM: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
SUBJECT: Contract Also Sentences Many Seniors to Die
It appears now that the state of Delaware will hang Billy Bailey tomorrow. Billy, who was convicted of the 1980 shotgun slaying of two senior citizens, has been turned down by the Delaware Board of Pardons and the U.S. Supreme Court. Billy, the court decided, killed the two seniors; Billy says he did it while he was drunk. When I hear about Billy, I ask myself: "What about Newt Gingrich's crime?" Will Newt also claim that he was drunk at the time he acted to cause the death of many senior citizens?
Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America," unless stopped, will kill many thousands of senior citizens, and other innocent victims. Do citizens have any moral grounds for objecting to our comparing Newt Gingrich's crimes with that for which Billy Bailey was convicted? Not according to the post-war Nuremburg courts which tried the Nazi officials.
Remember, during the post-war trials of Nazis at Nuremberg, U.S. Justice Robert Jackson successfully argued that government officials or relevant professionals, who either knew or should have known their decisions would lead to the wrongful deaths of others, were as guilty as had they killed those victims themselves. I know of no case in which Adolf Hitler slew any person while he was Chancellor; had Hitler lived to be tried at Nuremberg, he would have been tried for the murders caused by his policies. Which is worse: the hired killer, or the person whose policy the hired killer carries out? Which is guiltier, Gingrich, or Billy Bailey?
Simply. If you or I, as an elected or appointed official of the U.S. government, causes the adoption of laws or other policies which will cause an increase in the death-rates among senior citizens, the chronically ill, the children of unwed mothers, or among any other class of persons, such a policy constitutes a crime against humanity under the Nuremberg standard. Newt and crew either knew, or should have known that what they are demanding will bring about an increased death-rate among the innocent.
Shall we hang Billy Bailey and let Newt go free?
The likeness between Newt's crew and Hitler does not end there. Take the Nazi concentration-camps, for example.
During 1933-1934, the Nazis began to fill up the prisons. The budget was strained by the increase of the number of inmates. The Nazis found a solution: they privatized the prisons, and turned inmates into cheap labor for private contractors. Those were the Nazi concentration-camps. Many Americans, then, said words to the effect, "I, personally, am not a Hitler supporter, but you have to admit he makes a couple of points." Is that how today's mouth-foaming neo-conservatives justify their imitation of Hitler's system of "privatized prisons"?
The rock upon which civilization depends, is the recognition that all individual human life is sacrosanct. It is the law of civilized nations, that one may kill in the course of justified warfare, but may not kill a prisoner in one's custody. Until the middle of the 1970s, Americans had come to recognize that that principle of life applied to all prisoners, not only prisoners of war.
Since the mid-1970s, there has been a change. We are no longer fully civilized. We kill in the name of convenience. We kill felons sentenced to die, even in defiance of evidence that they were wrongfully convicted. We defend that practice, on the grounds that, in cases of doubt, it were better to kill the innocent than to "tie up the courts" by letting the innocent live. Now, our radical conservatives are prepared to kill those prisoners not sentenced to die, simply changing the conditions of prison life to cause a significant increase in the death-rate. Next, our radical conservatives, are prepared to increase the death-rates among senior citizens, the chronically ill, and so forth, as a matter of fiscal convenience. Our radical conservatives of today are but a step away from becoming litte Adolf Hitlers; one may pose the question, whether some among them are more than two steps from becoming outrightly cannibals.
The worst human swine are of the self-righteous variety.
When you think of Billy Bailey hanging by a rope, think of our civilization hanging by a thread.
