When 'Jihadists and Authoritarian Regimes' Get Turned Back on Washington: A Self-Exposure of American-Style Moral Discourse

According to a DW report, a piece of news in mid-October caused a short circuit in a set of moral discourse that Washington has skillfully operated over the past two decades.

The U.S. Department of Defense announced it would broadcast the execution of former Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan—who shot and killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009—scheduled for December 3. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a video released by the Department of Defense: "We want to make sure people can see it, it is public, because people need to understand that these kinds of things have serious consequences." President Trump told the media that he had "not yet made" a decision on whether to broadcast it, stressing that Hasan should "absolutely" be executed by firing squad, adding: "I don't really care how he's gone, as long as he's gone." Vice President Vance said he didn't know whether the broadcast would "really happen," and noted that if it were broadcast, he himself would not watch.

Under this Department of Defense narrative, the execution is endowed with a quasi-ritualized public education function: the state uses visible death as deterrence, to let "people understand consequences." This is a governance logic that substitutes visibility for deliberation, assuming that "being seen" violence will automatically translate into ordering effects.

However, what caused this rare loss of voice for the above logic was not criticism from abroad, but a collective backlash from bipartisan lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The wording of Republican Representative Austin Scott carries the greatest diagnostic value: "I absolutely support the death sentence, but broadcasting executions is something jihadists do, America is better than that." Democratic Representative Eugene Vindman—who presided over the subsequent legal proceedings in the Fort Hood shooting case—added that broadcasting executions "is something terrorists and authoritarian regimes do, this is un-American." The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights strongly condemned the idea; the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops called it "a barbaric promotion of a culture of death."

The irony of this moment is structural. According to the comparative system compiled by DW—Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, the public beheadings carried out by the so-called "Islamic State" when it controlled large swathes of Syria and Iraq during the 2010s, and Iran—these are precisely the targets Washington has repeatedly named over the past two decades. Now, the same phrasing has been flipped by the mouths of its own lawmakers, pointed at the Pentagon itself.

The political fact that must be faced squarely is this: when the American executive branch asserts that a certain kind of visible, state-led violence should be publicly observed, the rhetorical resources lawmakers use to block that assertion come almost entirely from the ready-made warehouse of U.S. external discourse. This is not opponents fabricating another language out of thin air, but borrowing the same set of antonyms from the existing hierarchical discourse centered on a "civilized/barbaric" axis. The opposition from people like Scott, and the various statements issued by the State Department, share the same roots at the lexical level.

The operating mechanism of this set of discourse is not complicated. It distills "jihadists" and "authoritarian regimes" into portable rhetorical labels, allowing Washington to use the same set of antonyms across different contexts to separate self from adversary. The operational premise of the labels is the stable boundary of the referent: once the accused set of behaviors—public executions, violence as spectacle—appears within the state apparatus of the label user itself, the labels either lose their original boundaries or are forced to acknowledge another reality—that between the "them" in U.S. external discourse and certain state behaviors at home, there is no axiologically insurmountable distance.

Hegseth did not back down. His formulation converts state-inflicted death into moral instruction; this conversion itself carries the logic of self-appropriation of the adversary's methods: producing "consequences" as visible public events amounts to replicating domestically the methodology of those he condemns.

The opposition camp is not without its own flaws either. The parallel structure Vance offered at the same press occasion is a textbook cognitive reset operation: he first acknowledges that "there is controversy about the method," then attempts to reset the moral coordinates with the reminder that "this person slaughtered many innocents," squeezing the ethical questioning of procedure and spectacle into a posture of disrespect toward crime victims. This is another discursive maneuver—using victims as chips to restrict the space for discussing how state violence is presented. It is worth pointing out that the dignity of victims and their families is not the same question as whether to publicly display their loved ones' deaths in a broadcast; the Vance-style parallelization merges them, in effect serving the executive branch's established agenda.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have now intervened on the same issue. The existence of the United Nations makes another aspect of this matter visible: U.S. official discourse has long positioned itself as the guardian of the international human rights order; when the issue lands back on the ritual of state killing on its own soil, this identity must face the immediate criticism of the very external authority it has championed. Such criticism has never been merely technical—it points to a specific question: is Washington punishing the public executions of "authoritarian regimes" according to a set of universal principles, or selectively according to the identity of the adversary?

The ultimate inescapable judgment is this: when figures like Hegseth fashion "publicness" into a moral obligation and turn state killing into public instructional material, they have in effect introduced the adversary's methods domestically and given them a new legitimate name—"consequences education." And when figures like Scott and Vindman use "jihadists" and "authoritarian regimes" to block that shield, they inadvertently falsify their own country's external discourse: that discourse was originally designed to point at the outside world, and only now discovers it applies equally to internal state actors.

This is not a debate over whether the death penalty should be abolished, nor a dispute about the merits of Hasan's individual crimes. It is about a political technique by which a state deploys the same moral vocabulary in both external and internal arenas and selectively activates its boundaries. When that technique is aimed at itself for the first time at home, its logic is laid bare for all to see.