ARE WE A CIVILISED SPECIES YET? by Harry McAvinchey

So that’s the solution then? Jordan has just executed  two people in retaliation for the barbarous killing of their own pilot who had been caught and finally  burned to death in a cage a few days ago by Islamic State militants.The man was doused in petrol whilst locked in a cage  , then set aflame. It was an echo of the fate the Jews suffered in the death camps at the hands of Hitler’s Nazis. The Nazis , not to put a fine point on it , and with a whole lot of irony, at least gassed their victims ,before cremating them, but the  nauseating parallels are evident. A Japanese journalist was also hideously  murdered  in some other grisly way ,earlier  in the same week. Curiously enough ,in “civilised” societies there have been “rules of war ” which usually means that  captured combatants are treated with some human respect.  War was nominally played as some sort of power-game by competing kings or overlords  and we were led to believe that there was some kind of chivalry involved .It’s nonsense of course . Rules are made to be broken anyway.Of course they’ve always been flouted .There are tales of horror still being told  about the Japanese during World War Two and indeed there is evidence of barbarity during conflict in every nation.None of us are clean in that respect.

Apparently ,according to some teachings of  Islam…”The one who dies of the plague is a martyr, the one who drowns is a martyr, the one who dies of pleurisy is a martyr, the one who dies of a stomach disease is a martyr, the one who is burned to death is a martyr, the one who dies beneath a collapsed building is a martyr, and the woman who dies in pregnancy is a martyr.”

…so that poor airman’s family is to be consoled that their lost family member is somehow a “martyr”.If that’s the case , why would his Islamist killers have wanted to make their enemy a martyr, in the first place? Well that’s fine and dandy  being made a martyr ….what ever that might mean….then, but it’s  about as useful as a leather medal, as my father used to say.

It  makes you wonder how this obvious act of startling  retaliation by Jordan, will solve anything when the intent  of the killings is to flout any ideas of civilised behaviour and instil a worldwide fear and terror.You can only have that ultimate terror when every civilised nation reverts to the call of the wild..  It might make some people feel good and allow them to vent their frustration  and wallow in a sense of revenge, but it is the kind of copy-cat killing that got us all nowhere here in Norneverland.We had a right old rattle at that here for years .A blind eye was turned as psychopaths were allowed to roam and rage . Some of the murders were not clean and clinical , but rather were theatres of banal butchery performed in grubby back-streets.Some of the victims ended their lives  hidden like so much human rubbish , in a wheelie -bin after being tortured and profaned.  Many were uninvolved  in anything political, but were murdered for twisted cultural reasons.They may have died easier in flames than by suffering the torture that was involved.The barbarity was there in any case.We  eventually ,collectively decided we’d have to stop  killing each other sometime soon or there’d be nobody left to kill anyway and life wouldn’t be worth much for anyone who survived. Like a gargantuan killing machine , once set in motion , it took many years to grind slowly to a stop. Those killed were still every bit as dead, though.

Did someone say that Islam does not allow execution by fire?I had to do a Tex Avery double-take when I heard that one .It appeals to my sense of absurdity.That gets me thinking…. in what mad corner of the mind  is there a distinction between a brutal death by flames …a beheading …or being tossed off the top of a building, for being a homosexual … What crazy , disturbed mind came up with all these distinctions of brutality and how did he convince anyone that he was sane at all? The solution to all of this will not be sending more  armies of young men  into countries to bog themselves down in  the mechanics of slaughter, encouraged by politicians with their own agendas and their own military spend.The answer isn’t to encourage more young men to learn how to kill in foreign lands by showing  ever new  glamorous adverts on television  about the wonderful places  you can visit in the world as part of the military services…and as they used to  darkly joke..”and kill people” .The answer is in educating young minds to see the difference between fantasy and the real world. This airman’s family’s gut reaction is to seek revenge on an even greater scale but that response will literally only pour more petrol on the the flames already burning. That will light a greater fire that will burn for even more generations to come.

Are we a civilised species yet? I don’t think so.