i know that this thread is bombarded with
news articles, but heather mallick's columns
are worth adding. she's usually humourous
which makes unpleasant topics slightly more
palatable ... but, not this time:
Have we learned anything about grief?
By HEATHER MALLICK
The Globe and Mail
This week, I watched the beheading video of Kenneth Bigley. I had no moral choice. Since I planned to write about the hostages now being held as a result of war, I was not going to accept payment for a column on a man's death without doing him the honour of listening to his last words and trying to understand something of what he suffered, the worst possible execution devised by man. Only the Nazis took beheading further: They made the victim face the guillotine blade and taped his/her eyes open.
Still, Mr. Bigley's killers did their psychotic best. Mr. Bigley knew that his calm and moving death speech would be sent worldwide, that his loved ones were listening, and, at some level, he must have known that he was admired and loved by many. I have never seen a braver death.
I shall not forget how his killer's hand kept twitching, eager to grab the blade and do the terrible act, which I do not doubt that he savoured. May I offer one caution in all the conclusions to be drawn from death in Iraq? Just as our own society has its mentally ill monsters, our own serial killers who take advantage of circumstances to kill women and children, so does the Muslim world. They might not be religious, or terrorists even; they might just be sadists handed a cornucopia. Some of the lowly torturers (and indeed their Pentagon and White House masters) at Al Ghraib enjoyed their job immensely. Woe to the Americans who will live next door to them in civilian life.
This will not be a popular sentiment, but I have always believed that mental illness, sometimes to the point of evil, is not sufficiently acknowledged in our daily lives. It's there; it shouldn't be hidden with jargon; it must be managed. The families of murder victims will agree with me, I think.
The killers' marketing decision to cage Mr. Bigley and clothe him in the orange uniform of the place the Americans call Gitmo (and Seymour M. Hersh warns that what is being done there dwarfs Abu Ghraib) was clever. Point taken.
I often wonder why nothing happening in Iraq now is seen in its historical context. This is partly because journalists rarely regard historical study as worthy and helpful and many scarcely read at all. But there's no excuse here. Canadian journalist Linda McQuaig's brilliant It's the Crude, Dude will give you an overview of "Iraqi" history and indeed of the frantic hunt for the last of the world's oil that will transform your view of everything current. She says the motive is oil; Mr. Hersh says it's world ownership. It could well be both.
Linda Colley, author of Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850, has written most usefully in the British papers about the captive tradition. Britain, being a long-time colonial power, had 20,000 Kenneth Bigleys captured from 1600 to 1730, she writes. Most were enslaved unto death. North American settlers were frequently killed, tortured to death or held as slaves by the native population.
Ms. Colley calls them imperial captives. More than 100 British men, women and children were held after the British last marched into Afghanistan in 1838, she writes. Interestingly, public reaction was much as it is now. I say "interestingly," because we have learned nothing from grief and hysteria used as the lively emotional face of a business war few would otherwise support.
I could call Kenneth Bigley a colonial captive, as the American empire is just another colony-collector, really. But what is unique about his situation is that he was begging British Prime Minister Tony Blair personally for help. Mr. Blair's a nobody. He has to beg Furious George for help. And he's hardly going to do that. There is evidence that the Americans have intervened to make the release of two French hostages as difficult as possible, out of sheer vengeance. I doubt Mr. Bigley even entered their radar, which shows in how little regard Donald Rumsfeld holds Wee Tony.
You see, every beheaded hostage helps Republican electoral chances. This is understandable. My hatred for Mr. Bigley's beheaders is a flower of evil, still growing.
But this has to be put aside. Read the times, read the eternities, understand how captives are used by both sides and that their fates are irrelevant to those who conduct this war, because this war is over American control of oil and that's all she wrote.
I remember Mr. Hersh accusing former First Bush secretary of state James Baker of war profiteering after the last Gulf War (it's perfectly legal to do postwar business, responded Mr. Baker). Now, Naomi Klein writes in The Nation that Mr. Baker, as "U.S. special envoy," is touring the world trying to persuade governments to forgive Iraq's debts while attempting to get $57-billion in Iraqi cash owed to Kuwait.
The problem is that Mr. Baker is simultaneously working for the Carlyle Group, which is acting as debt collector/repo man and, yes, Carlyle gets its cut. (After the story of what has been called "influence peddling of the crassest kind" came out, Carlyle got antsy but backed down on nothing.) Why don't lender nations (Britain is owed $1-billion) simply send their Iraqi IOUs to the Carlyle Group? Much more direct, no?
Do you see how Ken Bigley's head, neck and gouts of blood mean less than zero to people like Blair, Bush, Baker and Cheney, and, oh hi there, restyled debt collector Madeleine Albright? That brave, noble man was nothing but a useful distraction.
There will be many more of them.
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