Cicero was executed in the proscriptions of mark Antony and Octavian, who was then Augustus. The game of assassins caught up to him when he tried to embark for Greece, and he, resigned, only asked her tormentor not to make a fondant. She did not do it, he was a professional. The head and hands were exposed in the Forum, on the platform of the rostra, where they were left to rot in view of everyone in the market days. Before, while they were presented to Marco Antonio, the wife, Fulvia, he wanted to add a punishment staff: took out the pins from the hair and nailed her in the tongue of Cicero. The language, obviously, the tool of the great orator, was the one that had allowed him to articulate in the Senate the speeches of the Filípicas against Antonio that shocked his time, and entered into eternity as an example of resistance to despotism and cost him the life. Read now, will be surprised by the insults and colloquialisms, own of the spontaneity and effectiveness of the parliamentary to cause an immediate impression, that fill what seems to be chiseled.
A writer for The Washington Post who lives in exile because of a change in the balance of powers in a hermetic medieval kingdom is not comparable to Cicero. Nothing, in fact, in the imprinting fleeting of journalism is comparable to Cicero.
But in the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi, there are circumstances that remind me of that other crime that Stefan Zweig included among the stellar moments of the Humanity. There are proscriptions, the unleashed in its ascent by the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS, shortening of a footballer). Proscriptions left to scramble to a journalist that she had always lived integrated in the inbreeding of the elite and then, like an epiphany forced, embraced the vocation of criticism. There is, of course, the game of assassins, and the eternal game of killers of the State that is always identical to itself, this particular one will travel to Istanbul in two private planes instead of beading on mounts the appian way towards Campania. There is the professional, Salah al Tubaigy, a medical examiner who doesn’t always know to expect the patient has died prior to undergoing the autopsy, proud owner of a world record of seven minutes in the dismemberment of a human being, who undertook their work of torture, locked in a bubble of music. What does not exist, because the unfortunate Khashoggi you were not given that opportunity, it is the silent dignity of patricia who accepts and delivers the neck. Judging by the leaks of the Turkish police with regard to the recordings, it was noisy, horrible, a gore of B-series that ruins the presumptions aseptic services of other States, to send assassins, they prefer the discretion of the poison that is sprayed on the victim as if it were a perfume. See Londongrado.
Khashoggi, as in a gloating which sought to penalize in addition the exercise of critical freedom, was the subject of a cruel punishment of a chilling resemblance to the pins of Fulvia. Still alive, for to feel in all its depth the pain, he slashed the fingers, that is to say, the tools that are used to type those journalists that work against any form of despotism, political or criminal, their modest attempts of Filípicas destined to wrap fish the next day, as feared Walter Lippmann. In Europe, in Mexico, in Istanbul, have circulated lately too often games of assassins that were printed in the list of tasks the name of a journalist. It is not bad to remember in order to dignify the profession and to remember that there are greater dangers than running out of round.