Nothing Exceeds Like Excess
Christian Peacemaker Teams are celebrating, and that's all very nice. Most particularly for those three members of the CPT recently released after months of being held captive in Iraq by a group of insurgent Iraqis. These religiously-motivated people, driven by their personal beliefs deliberately placed themselves in harm's way for the purpose of drawing public attention to the ongoing harm being done to Iraqis at a time of war. As though without their presence in that war-torn theatre most people might not have noticed.Most normal people admire the idea of pacifism, as most people are by nature anti-war. We deplore the horrors of war and the many victims that conflicts claim. Some of us even voice our alarm over these events, and some others of us become quite vocal and take part in public displays advocating cessation of war. We feel committed to ideals as well. Christian Peacemaker Teams take this kind of activity a huge step forward, seemingly willing to sacrifice their very beings for the sake of their beliefs.
We can understand to a degree, then experience a failure in total comprehension. Just as we find it somewhat difficult to understand the mindset of some individuals who deliberately seek out danger to prove to themselves that they are capable of overcoming adversities. Like devoted bungee-jumpers, recreational parachutists, hang gliders, and determined Everest trekkers, all of whom are dimly aware that a definite percentage of such enterprises end calamitously. Obdurate ego and determination brings them to the challenge.
Reminiscent of that little cartoon creature we all loved and laughed over in the L'il Abner comic strips, the Shmoo, whose self-sacrificial and very brief lives dedicated to providing gustatory pleasures to humans remained their sole reason for existence. They died happily fulfilling their purpose in life; whether it be scrambled, fried, oven-baked or barbecued.
It is as though these people cannot find their place, as though they seek a higher meaning for themselves in this life and the sacrifice of their place on this earth is but a small price to pay for their compulsion. They appear willing, even eager to offer the sublime sacrifice of self for their ideal, their search. Whether to achieve in the process their vision of a better world, or a world record of personal achievement.
These people may well be in a state of arrested adolescence, where with youth's keen eye everything that is wrong about the world is observed and rejected, and everything that is right about the world is theory, and it is their duty to bring the rest of the world's inhabitants into their sphere of surety to achieve their ideal. And the rest of the world is obliged to accompany them on their trip of discovery, like it or not. At the proper time rescue may or may not be appreciated.
These peace-loving and humble people so willing to give their lives for their ideals tend to scorn their protectors, particularly if they are coincidentally those seen as waging war upon the innocents. In this instance as in so many others the innocents are simply a figment of their febrile imaginations; the civilians whose lives are so miserably disrupted, sometimes irrecovably, are not truly being favoured by the Christian Peacemaker Teams' initiatives.
Who will withdrawal now favour? The Sunnis, the Shi'as, the Kurds, for whom internecine warfare is now a real fear? Will the ordinary Iraqi who can be any of those groups benefit from the total withdrawal of foreign troops attempting now to create an environment conducive to Iraqi self rule? Certainly Iraq's Ambassador to Canada, loyal to the new Iraqi governing council doesn't think so, and places them squarely in their religious zeal, in the al-Qaeda camp as far as results from their tactics are concerned.
So the CPTs' zeal, as intent as that of the Islamists to bring the world around to their way, their ideals, has no place in Iraq; they can and should protest should they desire to do so, in Chicago, Washington, London or Ottawa. Where coalition troops need not worry about their welfare, and the lives of soldiers need not be placed at risk by their vainglorious attempts to alter a world they know simplisticly little of.
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, March 25, 2006
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