Israel, in particular, but also the United States, has been breathing new life into the concept of decapitation as a weapon of political violence. Needless to say, this weapon violates all contemporary international conventions on warfare. The international legal order that governed the world with relative effectiveness after World War II was buried after September 11, 2001, when the legal authorities at Harvard proclaimed the fatwa declaring it legitimate to torture alleged enemies beyond the limits previously established by the dominant doctrine of human rights. From then on, once the enemy is declared a terrorist, the destruction of their life ceases to be a matter of legitimacy and becomes a matter of opportunity and effectiveness. Terrorism is any threat to national security that cannot be combated diplomatically, that is, by peaceful means. Having the privilege of naming who is a terrorist, or who threatens whose security, has become the principle of politics. Tragically, this principle of politics is also the end of politics.

Decapitation, both literal (severing the head) and figurative (the radical elimination of an individual who symbolizes a collective struggle, an organization, or an idea), has a long tradition. It uniquely combines the horror of elimination with the orgy of triumph, victory, or revenge. Freud wrote in 1922 that decapitation signifies castration; it is the way the unconscious presents itself in a transformed manner to the individual’s consciousness. His analysis focuses on the mythology of the head of the Gorgon Medusa, severed by the demigod Perseus. Political leaders or others who resort to decapitation manipulate this unconscious drive to convey the idea of unlimited power (reducing the enemy to utter impotence) and equally unlimited efficacy (individual extermination, which is also collective).

The cultural tradition of decapitation finds its highest expressions in art and literature. John the Baptist’s head is severed at the request of Salome’s mother, Herodias, because he had opposed the incestuous relationship between Herodias and Herod. Judith, the Jewish widow, saves her city of Bethulia from the Assyrian invasion by seducing and beheading Holofernes, the Assyrian general of Nebuchadnezzar. Goliath, the heavily armed Philistine giant, was defeated by the stone fired from David’s sling. David, upon seeing Goliath on the ground, cut off his head with the giant’s own sword. In a variation of this tradition, Samson, the all-powerful Israelite judge, lost all his strength and was captured by the Philistines when Delilah, a Philistine infiltrator, seduced him and cut his hair after discovering that Samson’s strength lay in the hair he had never cut.

The fascination with decapitation was irresistible to Renaissance painters. With his penchant for realistic violence, Caravaggio immortalized many of these decapitations in his paintings: Medusa in 1597, Holofernes in 1599, John the Baptist in 1608, and Goliath in 1609–10. Other Renaissance painters captured the political and cultural symbolism of decapitation in beautiful paintings. For example, Donatello, in 1408–9, and Michelangelo, in 1508–12, immortalized David’s victory over Goliath; Artemisia Gentileschi, the beheading of Holofernes in 1612–21; and Francesco Cairo, in 1625–30, the beheading of John the Baptist. It is not the aim of this text to analyze the erotic dimensions or psychoanalytic interpretations of decapitations or of the painters who immortalized them (the actions of women in the cases of Salome, Judith, and Delilah; the homosexuality of Caravaggio or Donatello)1. Rather, I intend to analyze the role that decapitation plays in contemporary struggles and wars.

Decapitation as an instrument of contemporary violence

As I mentioned, decapitation consists of the elimination/neutralization of an individual as a means – simultaneously spectacular and economical – of eliminating/neutralizing the struggles, organizations, or ideas that this individual represents. Etymologically, decapitation derives from the Latin word "caput," meaning "head." Figuratively, it was used to signify chief, leader, or leadership, a source. It is in this sense that it is used today in the irregular and illegal wars waged by Israel and the U.S. Decapitation means eliminating an individual considered an enemy who represents, in a special way, a collective enemy threat.

To the extent that it is possible and effective, decapitation is a valuable shortcut because it allows one to strike a target in a single blow that, if attacked collectively, would require many blows and many resources. The specter haunting decapitation is the Lernaean Hydra. In Greek mythology, the Lernaean Hydra was a monster with the body of a dragon and multiple serpent heads. According to some versions of this myth, whenever a head was cut off, two grew in its place.

Decapitation is always linked to violent struggle. It is war and the metonymy for war. The scope of decapitation has been expanding to the same extent that the concept of war has come to encompass more types of violent struggles: war between countries, civil war, cultural war, religious war, family war, and trade war. Today we can distinguish three types of decapitation: assassination (physical death), imprisonment (political death), and cancellation (civic death). All three types involve death, but deaths of different kinds. Physical death is irreversible public and private disappearance, with the exception, in the Catholic world, of those who are beatified or canonized posthumously.

Political death is illegal public disappearance, whether irreversible or not, and the maintenance of private life under more or less precarious and undignified conditions. The case of Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, is the most recent and significant example of reversible public disappearance. Civic death implies neither assassination nor imprisonment; just as in political death, it implies the maintenance of private life under more or less precarious and undignified conditions, but, unlike political death, public disappearance tends to be irreversible.

In all these types, individual death is targeted to bring about the collective death of a struggle, organization, or idea. In recent times, we have witnessed several cases of these three types of decapitation. The most recent and well-known are the assassination of Ali Khamenei and other religious leaders in Iran; the capture and imprisonment of Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela; and the cancellations of left-wing intellectuals produced by so-called “cancel culture” or, more accurately, “cancel barbarism.”

The expansion of modes of decapitation signifies the increase and diversification of violence in contemporary societies, which, in turn, is associated with the growth of far-right political forces, whether secular or religious.

Decapitation as a political phenomenon

Like any other political phenomenon, decapitation generates a dominant discourse that must be analyzed according to the procedure I call the sociology of absences. Whether as discourse or as practice, decapitation creates an analytical field that promotes certain discussions and omits others. The dominant discourse asserts itself to the extent that the concept of omitted discussion is itself omitted, and consequently, public opinion is led to believe that there is nothing more to discuss beyond what has already been discussed. This discourse, in addition to being dominant, is also hegemonic when the idea that there is nothing else to discuss is endorsed by the classes that would benefit most from discussing the topics that are not discussed. Let us see how a sociology of absences works in this field.

Legitimacy or effectiveness

What has been published in the academic world regarding decapitation as a political instrument focuses almost exclusively on the effectiveness of decapitation. For example, there is debate over the effectiveness of the assassination of Osama bin Laden on Al-Qaeda’s activities, of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah on the activities of their organizations, of the arrest of Abimael Guzmán on the actions of Shining Path, or of the arrest of Abdullah Öcalan on the Kurdish struggle organized by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The question of effectiveness came to dominate studies on decapitation from the moment official documents produced in the U.S. after September 11 (namely, the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, 2003) asserted that decapitation was an effective tool because the terrorist leader tended to be the catalyst for terrorist action. The assassination of the leader would, sooner or later, lead to the collapse of the organization. Immediately after the assassination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, George W. Bush announced that Al Qaeda had suffered a fatal blow.

Over time, the question of the effectiveness of decapitation was extended to regimes and organizations considered particularly hostile. For example, organized crime in drug trafficking. How effective was the assassination of Pablo Escobar? On the other hand, over the past few decades, dozens of regimes and organizations have been designated as terrorist by the U.S. The most recent example is, as we know, Iran, where the decapitation of political, military, and scientific leaders has been a common practice. Artificial Intelligence from certain companies (for example, Palantir) and new lethal technologies are now being put to use for decapitation.

The idea of decapitation is an old one, especially when it comes to charismatic leaders. In the most recent period, following World War II, decapitation has been a tool of political violence widely used against political or religious leaders. From Patrice Lumumba to Aldo Moro, from Indira Gandhi to Olof Palme, from Yitzhak Rabin to Benazir Bhutto, from Oscar Romero to Martin Luther King, from Mahatma Gandhi to John F. Kennedy. It is estimated that, between 1959 and 2000, Fidel Castro was the target of more than 600 assassination attempts organized by the CIA and Cuban exiles, some of them quite bizarre, such as poisoned cigars or pens.

The widespread use of decapitation and the frustration of the perpetrators—who, in most cases, failed to achieve their objectives—have led to the need for more rigorous analysis, a task undertaken primarily by security and counterterrorism experts. For example, Jenna Jordan analyzed 298 cases of leader decapitation between 1945 and 2004 and used various variables to reach a relatively pessimistic conclusion regarding the effectiveness of decapitation2. In short, the specter of the Lernaean Hydra haunts decapitation and its proponents.

The sociology of absences

How is it possible that in democratic societies the discussion of decapitation is reduced to its effectiveness? A sociology of absences reveals that almost nothing has been written about the ethical and political legitimacy of decapitation, especially when it is practiced by agents of states that claim to be democratic. This absence is disturbing because, for those outside the closed world of security and counterterrorism, the ethical-political question is the one that deserves the most attention. Especially if we consider that decapitation is an increasingly normalized instrument of violence and the capacity to decapitate successfully is growing due to advances in artificial intelligence and lethal technologies.

Furthermore, the scope of decapitation targets is expanding ever wider to include all those who stand out for their opposition to established political, religious, or ideological violence—even if disguised as democracy—whether they are political leaders, military figures, scientists in strategic fields, or opinion leaders. Finally, keep in mind that decapitation is multifaceted and capable of killing physically, politically, and civically. The social distribution of these three types of death within countries and in relations between countries must be a growing concern for democratic politics. And what is most serious is that any of these deaths contains fragments of the others.

Class struggle, democracy, and decapitation

Decapitation is the type of class struggle that best disguises the existence of class struggle. By targeting specific individuals, decapitation shifts the political arena from social conflicts between classes or social groups to the individual political entrepreneurship of leaders conceived as metonyms for collective enemies. It thus has the effect of disarming those who believe in collective struggles against inequality, discrimination, and injustice, with the conviction that leaders only lead to the extent that they obey those who participate in the struggles. The mandate of Latin American indigenous leaders is of crucial importance in this context: to lead by obeying.

But the disarming reaches an even deeper level: it is the disarming of peaceful and democratic struggle, based on regulated conflict between adversaries rather than savage conflict between enemies or extremist conflict between good and evil.

The normalization of the use of decapitation presupposes that those who employ it have the privilege of designating as a terrorist or enemy any country, regime, or organization that opposes their interests. In a perversion of Carl von Clausewitz’s famous phrase ("War is the continuation of politics by other means”), decapitation is today, according to the dominant (and hegemonic?) thinking, war continued by other means. It is the end of politics and diplomacy—in short, of international relations, norms, and institutions. Contrary to what Clausewitz proposed, war is no longer the last resort after diplomacy fails. Now, the failure of diplomacy is intentionally produced by decapitation so that war becomes the only means of prevailing. Israel-U.S. relations with the Arab world in the Middle East are a glaring demonstration of this. The end of democracy follows from the end of politics, just as the end of politics follows from the end of democracy.

References

1 Among many others, Laurie Schneider, “Donatello and Caravaggio: The Iconography of Decapitation." American Imago, 1976, Vol. 33, 76-91; Bronwen Wilson, “The Appeal of Horror: Francesco Cairo's 'Herodias and the Head of John the Baptist.'" Oxford Art Journal, 2011, Vol. 34, No. 3, 355–372; Allie Terry, “Donatello’s Decapitations and the Rhetoric of Beheading in Medicean Florence.” Renaissance Studies, 2009, Vol. 23, No. 5, 609–638.
2 Jenna Jordan, “When Heads Roll: Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation," Security Studies, 18:4, 2009, 719-755. Other studies express similar reservations regarding the decapitation of drug trafficking leaders, for example, in Mexico. Brian J. Phillips, “How Does Leadership Decapitation Affect Violence? The Case of Drug Trafficking Organizations in Mexico.” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 77, No. 2, 2015, 324–336.