My father, at the age of seven, saw his best friends head roll into the dirt.

OMG!

And holy cow public execution in the US?! I hadn't heard a thing about that until I read your post. I didn't believe you! But it's true! That last time was nearly 100 years ago! What on earth?! The last military execution was in 1961, by hanging, not public.

the most advanced countries, no longer even pretend that they are moral.

I wonder if, the more a country moves toward being perceived as "advanced", what is really happening is that it is moving toward barbarism. Where is the line drawn here? Perhaps it won't be long until will are executing vaccine skeptics by firing squad. There were certainly people calling for nearly that, just a few short years ago. I was being called a domestic terrorist by my government, just as Nidal Hasan was called a terrorist. This is being done to blur those lines, and to inure the public to government murder.