generalspeaking

Tribal Instinct

It's fairly disgusting, to say the very least, to visualize, or to witness at second-hand through video clips played on television and the Internet, the actions of an enraged, unruly, psychotic mob as they succumb to a primitive urge to wreak damage on the body of a dead person. That dead person might have been a truly abominable monster while alive, but now dead, beating the object that was once alive is not only enormously futile, but it is also horribly, gruesomely, disgusting.

This is what human beings can descend to, when their humanity sits wedged tightly between primitive tribal hatred extended to all those who belong to other tribes, and a too-briefly meagre introduction to enlightened civilization. We betray, at such moments, the very shallow depths of our better selves. If not our 'better selves', than at the very least, our ability to be rational, intelligent human beings, rather than indulge in the alter-personas of ignorant brutality.

No one outside Moammar Gadhaffi's own Bedouin-originated tribe can believe that he was a decent human being. For all the good that he managed, between spates of insanity, to do for Libya in extending educational opportunities and life expectancy as a result of higher personal earnings potentials thanks to investment enabled through oil revenues, he was a monster of aggravated proportions in his incendiary hatred of those who did not share his perception of politics, society, religion.

He was directly responsible for the violent, untimely deaths of thousands of people. The atrocities he planned, encouraged, financed, was involved with, left the survivors bereft of pleasure in what remained of their lives. His demented threats and treaties with other megalomaniac tyrannical rulers, his stock-piling of advanced weaponry, his attempts to attain a nuclear arsenal all moved the world closer to catastrophic danger.

He's gone, and the world will be a better place for it. It is disgusting that he was brutalized upon capture, a fearful broken husk of a human being. It is far more disgusting that after his execution his corpse, a symbol of oppression to those who surrounded it, indulged in inflicting blows upon it. That a crowd delirious with rage plucked, pulled at him, dragged him about by his hair, slammed fists into his unresisting body before death is a sad testament to inhumanity.

If there is any purpose in condemning them it is for their lack of emotional restraint, but then, their burden was a heavy one, and their relief has lightened it. If it is a crime against human laws to have executed the man, then it must too be such a crime to have extinguished the lives of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, two other notable enemies of life and freedom.

The world is somehow lighter, fairer, has more hope for the future with the deaths of these three. If we could obliterate other key figures busy in conspiring to bring atrocities to the world, other enemies of humanity and justness, we could further make the world an even better place. Irrespective of how they are dispatched.

And then, perhaps, proceed to wean tribal instincts out of those still practising those unfortunate traditions.

Labels: Libya, Terrorism, That's Life, Traditions

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, October 22, 2011