To Wish for a Tyrant’s Death Is Human; to Force Him to Live Is Just : Romania: The Ceausescus’ violent end served as catharsis, but violent catharsis exacts a further price.

It is completely understandable, but nevertheless ironic and tragically out of sync with their own hopes and the times, that the preponderantly Christian Romanian people marked Christmas this year with the summary execution of their deposed leader and his wife. This is the sort of violence for which, though forbidden even by his own totalitarian constitution, the dictator who oppressed them was notorious.

It is not that sudden death is too good for political criminals, though this could be cogently argued. Rather it is that the violent quick removal of such monsters from our midst is not good enough for the rest of us, for it inevitably sets in motion another cycle of violent revolution/repression/revolution in which hope is suffocated.

Unlike less complex organisms, we humans enter life needing a long and detailed education in how to function and survive. For much of our past, that education has been coercive and maladaptive to our deep inborn yearning to live fully in freedom. The vengeful removal of oppressors from our midst is a tragedy for our species, for it reinforces old habits and sharply curtails our education in the democratic human habits that are necessary if we are to survive.

This is where a living Ceausescu would have value.

As a Jew, I must admit that I felt the shameful satisfaction of revenge when Adolph Eichmann was executed. But I was puzzled by the profound sense of anticlimax and futility that quickly followed. I wondered whether perhaps the 40-year confinement of Rudolph Hess in Spandau Prison better served the future of Jews, of all people.

Such thoughts inevitably recall the Nuremberg trials. Month after month, the world community was educated and changed by their extensive documentation of the violations by Nazis of international law as well as of human rights. Although the information elicited did not altogether prevent repetitions, is not our community of nations at least somewhat better off as a result than if the defendants had died precipitately with their Fuhrer in his bunker?

As I now see it, the education of humankind would have benefited if all those convicted of war crimes had joined Hess at Spandau to live out their days for the world to study as exemplars of inhumanity. They could have been followed by a parade of celebrity miscreants--Mussolini, Franco, Batista, Somoza, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, to name just a few--who might have been brought to trial before a new world tribunal, a United Nations-sponsored International Court of Political Crime. The culmination of such endeavors might be an annual Procession of Sorrow, held in a different major city each year. The convicts would be transported to a large square where, willingly or not, they would witness an annual Global Mourning for the suffering and degradation they caused, conducted with pertinent presentations and media attention.

In the course of the past four decades, this sort of program might have changed the consciousness of people everywhere about the blights of totalitarianism that we have learned to afflict ourselves with--and that we hope, finally, to exterminate for all time.