THE horrible death of Ken Bigley should lead us to question whether it is possible to make any meaningful distinction between, war, terrorism and murder.
Why people are so appalled at the killing of Mr Bigley is that it was face-to-face and incredibly brutal. There are few people anywhere who can act like this.
But the majority of the people who are blown to bits, dismembered, vaporised or burnt alive are the victims of those who are not personally brutal at all but who kill mechanically and remotely with missiles fired from hundreds of miles away or bombs dropped from drones "piloted" from another continent.
Somehow this assembly line way of killing is regarded as acceptable, but it threatens our world much more than the savagery of Bigley's killers. For it is quite possible for those who do it to feel neither responsibility nor remorse after killing not one but several people.
What is done is just as brutal as what Bigley's killers did, but one does not have to be a brute to do it. That is why it is uniquely dangerous.
A decision to go to war is a decision to kill people and to kill people by mechanical and remote means. That is why Blair in taking us to war on a pretext is so immoral.
Like George W Bush, he claims to believe in Christianity, but he must have torn out the New Testament from his copy of the bible.
M Pittock
St James Avenue
MURDERED: Is there a moral difference between the fate of hostage Ken Bigley and the thousands of Iraqis killed by British and US troops?
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