Barbaric and pre-medieval

As the days pass and I get increasingly depressed and cynical about the way the world is going, it is rare to have anything to even slightly enthuse over.

I had though yesterday one brief cheering moment.

There was an item on yahoo.com about Israel doing the usual scare-mongering regarding the alleged Iranian nuclear missile. The article was not particularly fascinating but a lot of the hundreds of replies were. Apparently a lot of Americans think that if Israel has a problem, it is for the Israelis to sort it out, not for the United States in particular and the international community in general.

If it had been just one or two responses upon those lines, then I would have shrugged my shoulders and muttered a small word of encouragement. The volume though was what impressed me. Maybe there is hope for the future. Some anyway.

The criticism from those lacking any objectivity (and with little grasp of logic) will now of course use the shallow argument that if I oppose an invasion of Iran (by the West at least), I must be pro the Iranian regime.

Wrong on all counts! I do not know how many times that I have to tell people that because you oppose one thing, you are NOT obliged to take the second alternative. Both can be equally wrong. As here!

IMHO Iran represents just about everything that happens when you trust to the worst instincts of yourself. A theocratic culture based upon the fear drenched myths of generations ago, which should have been proverbially blown out of the water well before now. Power invested in the advocates of that extremist theological belief system and a legal system invested totally and brutally in it. And not to be challenged or questioned?

Sorry, no!

Regime change is desirable, but for that it would require the people as a whole to reject the barbarism and pre-medieval culture associated with it, and, outside the intelligentsia at least, I do not gain the impression that the desire is there.

The other day I picked up a video on the web. A woman and two men were having nooses fitted round their necks and were about to be hanged from a crane in public. Iran. 2007. I could have actually watched this to the bitter end, I chose not to - far too gruesome for my tastes.

Checking the story further, I discovered that the individuals were hardly worthy of a great deal of sympathy - the wife had conspired with the men to murder her husband. A common nasty enough event in the West. In the US, all might have faced the Death Penalty for the offence, in Europe they would have been jailed for a long time.

The only thing that really comes to mind here is that the event was held in a public square, and you could observe the large crowd there to jeer the criminals getting their "just desserts". Not unlike in England in the 18th century in fact!

The thought went through my mind as to with regard to this event, we have moved on that much. If the Death Penalty had been restored in the UK (as many want) and the English murderer, Ian Huntley, had been executed for killing the two young girls in Cambridgeshire a few years ago - and if they had decided to hold the event in a public square, how many people would have turned up to jeer?

Maybe I underestimate people, but I expect that a large number would have done. The appeal to our own worst instincts may still lead us down a road where the barbaric and pre-medieval instincts take hold. The major danger though is that we may allow some political regime that works on those instincts to take power - as sadly is the case in Iran.