Killer Angels

Killer Angels

 

How very strange we are! So gentle and kind, so artful and creative, yet at the same time we are monsters of deceit, cruelty and murder. What is it that drives us from one extreme to another?

What demons would drive a young man to kill beach goers in Tunisia this week?

What motivation would make a

person rape and kill Jill Meagher?

What would activate a young man to kill Church goers in Charleston?

They estimate that Russian soldiers raped over 2 million German women at the end of World War 2!   Look at any war and once the rule of law has broken down all hell breaks loose.

The Nazi Finale Solution.

The Armenian massacre by the Turks.

Iraq.

Syria

Bosnia.

Rwanda.

Angola.

And the list goes on.

A few years ago I read an excellent book by Michael Shaara called the Killer Angels. In it amongst other things he covers this very conundrum. Find below a short synopsis.

The Killer Angels (1974) is a historical novel by Michael Shaara that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. The book tells the story of the four days of the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War: June 30, 1863, as the troops of both the Union and the Confederacy move into battle around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and July 1, July 2, and July 3, when the battle was fought. The story is character driven and told from the perspective of various protagonists. A film adaptation of the novel, titled Gettysburg, was released in 1993.

 J.L. Chamberlain, a major character, recalls reciting to his father the speech from Hamlet: "What a piece of work is man...in action how like an angel!" The father comments, "Well, boy, if he's an angel, he's sure a murderin' angel."

 

Are we destined to stumble from one tragedy to another endlessly?

The same hands that painted the Mona Lisa, built the Taj Mahal, Created Anti Biotics, wrote the New Testament, built the Apollo moon craft can also do all of the above atrocities over and over again.

It would be easy to give up and be cynical and go with the flow and I guess none of us really know what we would do if our situation or circumstances became desperate.  We cannot deal in the hypothetical only with our lot as we find it and try and improve on that. We can only do and be our best (On a personal level)

AS Pope famously said ‘To err is human to forgive divine’ we need to forgive our fellow man! We can do that but some of those things mentioned above are very, very hard to understand. Hard to forgive, hard to forget.

Let us try to make our world a little better today. No matter how small your effort is if you only change one life that would be fantastic. Perhaps the one you save might be your own, for there are worse things than death far worse. The evil deeds recalled above attest to that.

We are all capable of either being Angels, Killers or both, what are you going to decide to be?

John Condliffe

30.6.15