Monday 6th October

Well actually every death is, especially those that could so easily be avoided; starvation, disease and neglect.  But then to add to these we have wars, I have almost lost count of the conflicts going on in the world today, and all the deaths do not add one iota to human improvement; they are all senseless.  But in particular three recent deaths spring to mind.

Alan Henning of course; by all accounts a good if slightly naïve man, who hoped that his actions would improve the world.  To die so horrifically must have been truly awful, and again absolutely pointless.  The West, Britain in particular would not change their policies even if a thousand were beheaded.  Not that his murderers do not deserve to be brought to justice, though one doubts that that will ever happen.  And summary executions such as Bin Laden and Gadhafi’s don’t solve anything either.  They just create more Martyrs to their ridiculous cause.  And of course bombing and even militarily defeating them won’t work either.  Even if every single ISIS fighter were killed, their deaths would only serve to fuel others in another time and another place.  We have to deal with the philosophy that these people adhere to, rather than simply bombing them.

And then we have the death of a schoolgirl Alice Gross, murdered on her way home in broad daylight.  And today the discovery of the body of the prime suspect Arnis Zalkains, a convicted murderer from Lithuania.  The almost inevitable conclusion is that he committed suicide shortly after killing Alice.  Two lives gone and for nothing.  Again – so pointless.  And of course this will only fuel the rampant xenophobia being stoked up by both the Tories and Ukip at the moment.  There is nothing the right wing likes more than a “foreign” murderer and one who only served seven years for their first crime to kill again.  And a young English girl too, you couldn’t write the script.  I wrote a few days ago that I was a hopeful skeptic, but the toxic mix being stirred up the right in this country makes me very worried indeed.