So, as BBC NEWS | Middle East reports, Iraq captors have freed the 3 Turkish hostages. Supposedly for good conduct by the Muslim brethren in their homeland. What, then of the anti-war movement in the US? Is that not good conduct? Or, will not re-electing Bush count as good conduct in the name of the Muslim or to be more precise Islamist cause also be considered a protest against George Bush? In general, the terrorist vs. hostage cause is a truly ambivalent one. While the whole experience of being taken hostage and being beheaded is by no means a pleasant one, there is a certain extent of understanding in so far as we are dealing with people for whom the democratic process seems to have come to dead end. It's something we in the west probably cannot associate with entirely, but are slowly coming to understand the more democracy comes to mean less and less to us. And, as Arundhati Roy explains in the opening essay of her book "War Talk", we are facing a situation in which nonviolent protest is becoming increasingly ignored by leaders plainly interested in their own economic benefit. The result, predicts Roy in the article entitled '
Ahimsa (Nonviolent Resistance)' is that "Across the world, when governments and the media lavish all their attention and seriousness on war talk and terrorism, the message that goes out is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air and redress a public grievance, violence is more effective than nonviolence. Unfortunately, if peaceful change is not given a chance, then violent change becomes inevitable. That violence will be (and already is) random, ugly, and unpredictable." So, while it is understandable that world leaders do not stand for terrorist or freedom fighter acts of cold-blooded insanity, arguing - maybe correctly so - that giving in to acts of violence only spawns new violence, there is also a sense that not giving in to acts of violence somehow spawns new acts of violence, as desparation and disenfranchisement from the decision-making process - as is the case in Iraq where the population was not formally asked if it wished to be "liberated" - abound. Am I condoning the acts of terrorists? No, but I am not going to condone our leaders' behaviour either, as they put up their populations for ransom, as was the case with the Korean hostage who was recently beheaded, because of his government's firm stance on no negotiation. And it has also been the case with the US administration which has so willingly sent its sons out to the slaughter. I may already have mentioned it somewhere else on this blog, but somehow it keeps on ringing true, that wonderful axiom of how the so-called blowback works by the crimethinc crew which so truly states "YOUR LEADERS CAN'T PROTECT YOU, BUT THEY CAN GET YOU KILLED!" Or, as they have more recently stated: "THE SHADOW OF THE PAST HOLDS THE FUTURE HOSTAGE"...