Justice…..or Vengeance?
It is said that at the beginning of the Battle of Waterloo, a British Artillery officer reported to the Duke of Wellington that he had spotted Napoleon within range of his cannons? Should he open fire? ‘Certainly not!’ Wellington is said to have replied. ‘We are soldiers, not assassins!’
Had those cannons opened fire and successfully ‘taken out’ Napoleon, the chances are that the death of their charismatic leader would have demoralised the French troops and the Battle of Waterloo would have been won by the British without the help of Blucher and his Prussian army, and with many, many fewer casualties. Wellington though, drew a sharp distinction between killing enemy troops in battle, and deliberately targeting and killing their leader.
Nowadays we are less squeamish. There is, I think, little doubt that the recent air attack on Colonel Gaddafi’s HQ in Tripoli was aimed at killing him, even though the building destroyed was probably a command point from which troops were being deployed and commanded. Not only did that attack fail to kill Gaddafi, but it did kill his son and two grandchildren. There has not yet been independent confirmation of this says a NATO spokesman. I think though that it is almost certainly true and that it will do much to strengthen the determination of Gaddafi’s supporters, and probably make at least a few of his opponents wonder about the justice of their cause. Whatever may be said about Gaddafi using members of his own family as human shields it was definitely an ‘own goal’ for NATO as well as a tragedy for the families of those killed.
That, and the fact that neither NATO nor the Libyan insurgents will even consider the possibility of peace talks while Gaddafi remains in control makes me feel that we may have already entered the next phase of our progress towards all-out war about which I warned a fortnight ago.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the USA made a deliberate – and this time successful – attempt to assassinate Osama Bin Laden when their special forces attacked the fortified compound in Pakistan in which he had been living. The Americans have certainly learnt a lot since their spectacular failure to free the Embassy hostages in Iran by force and the CIA’s comic opera attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with explosive cigars! It seems that their special forces were told not to hesitate to kill Bin Laden rather than take him prisoner. This they did. He was unarmed but, so it was claimed, attempted resistance – so they shot him. The hundreds of people, men, women and children, whom Bin Laden had conspired to kill had also been unarmed, as The Sun was keen to point out. However, are we really happy that we, or our allies, should model our behaviour on his?
Has ‘Justice been done’? Is the world, ‘a safer place’ without Osama Bin Laden. I think that both are doubtful. If Bin Laden had been captured alive and put on trial, justice unmistakeably would have been done. What what was the advantage to the Americans of a dead Bin Laden, rather than a Bin Laden facing international justice? His death saved the vast expense and time taken by a trial in the international criminal court. It prevented a long-drawn-out propaganda campaign claiming that Bin Laden was obeying the command of a higher power in his war on the USA. Above all perhaps, it prevented him from being in a position to publicise worldwide the fact that the USA had launched him and supported him in his career of terrorism for so long as his murderous activities were directed only against the Russians?
Justice may not have been done but vengeance has certainly been satisfied – and it was clear that it was vengeance and not justice that those joyful, triumphal crowds in Washington celebrating the news of Bin Laden’s death, had wanted. Hitler caused worldwide death, destruction and human misery on a scale far beyond the wildest dreams of Bin Laden. Were there similar joyful and triumphal scenes in London, Washington and Moscow when his death was announced? I think not. Such spectacles, I had imagined, belonged to the distant past when defeated enemies’ heads, or their broken bodies, were displayed to a rejoicing mob.
Because it was vengeance rather than justice that was satisfied, the world is not a safer place than it was before Bin Laden’s death. There are those who will be determined to avenge him. The way in which he was killed will gain further recruits to their cause. Western governments are well aware of this and have stepped up their anti-terrorist activities, warning us all to be doubly vigilant. Quite possibly, despite all the precautions, in the USA or perhaps in the UK, there will be an act of terrorism that will give us something else to avenge! I am reminded of Gandhi’s chilling prophecy that if we all demanded ‘an eye for an eye’ we would end with a world full of blind people.
I hope that we will never entirely forget that, while we humans do our best to administer and dispense justice -‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord, ‘I will repay’
The Tale of a footpath
Immediately opposite my bungalow in Clacton’s Dudley Road, is a narrow footpath providing a short cut through to Agincourt Road. It was useful to me when I was a motorist. I could drive the car the long way round into Agincourt Road, leave it for servicing or whatever with the commercial garage there, and take the short walk home again via the footpath. Now that I rely on a mobility scooter for local journeys I save myself five minutes or so by taking a short cut through the passage when visiting a friend in Coppins Road. I notice women coming through it to reach shops in St Osyth Road or to take young children to school. It is in fairly regular use.
That is the positive side of the footpath. Sadly, there’s a negative side too.
The Footpath
It is a handy escape route for perpetrators of any kind of anti-social behaviour. They can run through the passage and, once on the other side, can scatter and disappear. It has been the venue of serious crime. I can recall – admittedly several years ago – two muggings taking place there after dark. I understand that it is used for drug dealing. A ‘customer’ loiters in the immediate vicinity. A car draws up. A quick exchange takes place. The car speeds away and the customer disappears down the passage.
It is regularly a site of minor and not-so-minor nuisance. Litter of all kinds is regularly discarded there (the Council does have it cleared from time to time) and it is often used as a toilet. There was an open space half-way along the footpath that was used as a dumping place for larger items of refuse, until one of the neighbouring residents recently took unilateral action and blocked it off! Users are likely to find the footpath litter-strewn and smelly.
For those living on each side of the passage the final straw came over Easter weekend when someone set fire to a mattress and started a fire there! This seriously damaged fences and put properties and lives at risk.
What is the solution? Closing the footpath is the only effective one that those directly affected can see, It is not an ancient ‘right of way’. When my family moved into Dudley Road in 1956 there was a wide driveway opposite my bungalow, giving access to what had been a Carter Patterson depot. It became a similar depot for British Road Service. Huge lorries regularly came and went (damaging the paved footpath immediately outside my bungalow!) My sons, who in the early sixties were in their pre-teens and great local ‘explorers’ assure me that there was, at that time, no way that it was possible to use that route to get to Agincourt Road, without trespassing onto BRS property. The developer who built on what had once been the depot presumably created the footpath and is its owner today.
I am sure that there are a number of local people, including myself, who would suffer minor inconvenience if the footpath were to be closed. I think though that this is an instance in which, unless some other satisfactory answer can be found, the wishes of those directly affected should prevail.
Election Fever
I can’t honestly say that I am sorry about the defeats of the Liberal Democrats in the local elections. I voted for their candidate in the General Election but I certainly didn’t vote for the policies to which they have agreed with their coalition partners. It may be that we are being unfair to them. Perhaps Nick Clegg and his government colleagues really have modified David Cameron’s policies. We’ll never know how awful those policies might have been without a Lib.Dem. contribution!
But it is hardly surprising that faithful members of the party should regard the acquiescence of their leadership to increases in tuition fees at universities when they had specifically pledged to oppose these increases as a blatant betrayal. Since they had lied over that issue why should anyone believe anything that they say or anything that they promise in the future?
I am moderately pleased about Labour’s very moderate successes. I am sick of hearing Lib.Dems. and Conservatives complaining about the mess that they inherited from the previous Labour Government. The financial mess that the country is in was, as the Governor of the Bank of England has made clear on a number of occasions, the result of the greed and incompetence of ‘the Financial Sector’ from which the Conservative Party gets a great deal of its funds. New Labour’s fault lay in not having taken firm action to curb their excesses. Lord Mendelson said that he ‘didn’t have any problem with billionaires’. Well, he should have. The trouble with New Labour was that, just as Ramsey Macdonald had been dazzled by duchesses and had betrayed the party that had brought him to power, so Tony Blair and his New Labour colleagues had been blinded by billionaires! I am hoping, though without a great deal of confidence, that under Ed Milliband the party will rediscover the idealism that brought it into existence.
I am sorry that the Conservatives have consolidated their control of Tendring Council because I felt that their ‘Tendring First’ predecessors had done a pretty good job. However, these days the main function of district councils, whatever their political complexion, is to take the blame for cuts forced upon them by central government policy. It really doesn’t matter much which lot are in office!
I am sorry too – though not all that sorry – about the overwhelming NO vote in the referendum about the ‘Alternative Vote’. I voted YES because I felt, and still feel, that it would have been an improvement on the ‘first past the post’ system. It was no more than second-best though and Nick Clegg was foolish to make the referendum a condition of his recruitment into the governing coalition. One day, though certainly not in my lifetime, Britain will have true proportional representation and our 1,000 year long evolution from autocracy to true ‘rule by the people’ will be complete .
I have no connection whatsoever with Scotland but I am pleased about the SNP’s resounding victory despite an electoral system that made it very difficult for any party to secure an overall majority! I have never understood why a Scottish national party should be ‘left of centre’, reformist and redistributive, whereas any similar party in England would almost certainly be ultra-conservative and neo-fascist.
My main worry about the possibility of Scotland gaining its independence is the risk that it could leave England with permanently right-wing governments!
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