Shoko Asahara has been sentenced to death today. He was the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, an apocalyptic cult in Japan that has attacked Tokyo subway with sarin in 1995, killing 12 people, and also killed a number of other people in several other incidents. Aum Shinrikyo has changed its name and has been known as Aleph for the last 4 years, and their English-language webpage can be found here.
My position in death penalty is a bit contradictory: on one hand, I think it's better not to have any, on the other hand, I usually have very little sympathy for people who get executed, and certainly none for Asahara.
Aum Shinrikyo believed in yoga, vegetarianism, manual labor, renunciation of desire, drinking Asahara's bath water, Jewish conspiracy, American nuclear attack on Japan (a new one, not the WWII one), total obedience to the leader and impending Armageddon. Apart from Jews and American other sources of evil included, in Asahara's opinion, Freemasons, British royal family and, obviously, Tokyo subway. Probably Japanese goverment too.
Friday, February 27, 2004
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