If I were the editor of a newspaper receiving the kind of letters that the Guardian is publishing, I would be seriously worried: worried for the moral health of the readership; worried about the quality of my newspaper that it should attract a readership like that. But I guess you need to be outside it to be able to perceive it. Today's Guardian has a crop of letters under the headline 'The murder of Ken Bigley', the general tenor of which leaves you feeling in need (as a friend put it to me in an email earlier) of a purifying ritual. There's one letter - from Raza Khan in Lahore - expressing due anger and revulsion, and another which harmlessly calls upon us all to 'resolve to treat our fellows better'. But for the rest, it's condemnation of Bigley's murder merely as throat-clearing; or, to change metaphor, as a springboard towards condemning those who are really to blame, in the warped vision of the letter writers. So it's Tony Blair, Jack Straw and unnamed others in cabinet and parliament whose 'hands are dripping with the blood paid by Bigley'; because, you see, they 'fuell[ed] the recruitment of those wanting to disrupt this [world] order through indiscriminate bombing and murder'. (Just like Salvador Allende's hands, right? Because, oh didn't he fuel.) And, for a second correspondent, Blair's hands are 'covered in [the] blood' of British soldiers. (Like Winston Churchill's, yes?) Then there's the poor unfortunate who regrets the minute's silence in Bigley's memory before the England-Wales match:
Bigley made a choice to feather his nest amid the ruins of Iraq knowing the risks involved. He took a gamble and lost.There you go. You gamble; you have your head sawn off after days of a terrible fear. Logical. Think it can't continue as badly as this? Think again. Next letter:
As for "the world is a better place without" argument, Saddam Hussein may have murdered many Iraqis, but I don't recall him beheading innocent foreign civilians.Is this man ignorant, stupid or a moral barbarian? I'm happy not to count him among my acquaintances and so I'm unable to say. Then there's a 'Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return' letter; which, used like this, if you think about it, makes everything OK, since we can all shunt the blame and guilt ever backwards, and jeepers, you know, Osama, Blair, Straw, beheaders, Bush, Saddam, Stalin, Hitler, what's the bloody difference? Finally there's someone wanting Blair impeached for war crimes.
People the scope of whose thinking about moral responsibility, and whose knowledge of the laws of war, would fit comfortably into the space taken up by the eyelash of a small doll.