The growing rift between people and politicians

I recently watched footage of Gaddafi’s last moments at the hands of rebels in Libya. The images are shot on mobile phone and of an extremely graphic and disturbing nature. The treatment meted out to the former dictator would seem to have been on a par with that dispensed by his own hired thugs during his reign.

Despite the delighted whoops, cries of “God is great” and general exuberance among his tormentors, there is no sense of justice in the footage.
I, like millions of others around the world, had seen the sanitized version a month ago when the man was shot in the temple by his captors. Even in that shorter less disturbing version what we saw was a confused and terrified old man being mauled by a bloodthirsty gang. Like a large proportion of those who saw it, I suspected he had been murdered. There were murmurings in the international press about war crimes charges being brought against the men who captured and slay him but in the words of one BBC reporter, “With so many claiming to have delivered the final blow, it may be impossible to identify a single defendant”.
Representatives of the interim government in Libya were quick to commit a lie to the record. They described a situation whereby a captured Gaddafi was being transported when those carrying him crossed into an area where his “killers” were exchanging fire with righteous rebels supported by NATO.
A stray bullet somehow pierced the former leader,s temple and he was killed. One spokesman absolved the rebels of all blaming saying, “No one can tell if it was from the mortars or the soldiers”.    
Few people listening to news bulletins when the death was announced will have believed this line. The footage, even in its heavily edited form, hinted at desperate dark things and in some ways, is as disturbing as the full version. The implied horror can, at times, be more terrifying than the graphic reality in such cases.
It was clear that, in this case, a baying mob had found an old man in a drainpipe and unleashed many decades of repressed rage upon his body for their own personal satisfaction. While they may claim that they did it for their people and relatives who were murdered, tortured and raped at the behest of the man in their custody, they are not being entirely genuine in their claim.
They satisfied their own lust for glory and revenge in the short time they held the living tyrant in their collective possession. They violated him gleefully not in the name of justice but to satisfy themselves and those immediately around them. They used their mobile phones to document the evidence as most people would document a birthday party. In that footage resonates a powerful message with regard to the choice of the people over the rhetoric and lies of politicians and spin.
This must not be misconstrued in any way as a justification for the actions of those in the town of Sirte but it is a clear illustration of the gulf that exists between individual, or more properly mob, feelings on the issue of justice and how it should be dispensed in the case of failed or brutal leaders.
In reality, the twain will never meet but it makes the case all the stronger analysing the gulf that exists between the two groups.
The greater the distance that develops between a group of people and the politicians who claim to represent them, the greater the degree of uncertainty and volatility which develops in any given situation.
This should be especially to the fore in the minds of Europe’s current crop of political representatives. I am not suggesting that people will begin murdering politicians they loathe in the streets by any stretch, but it must certainly be considered that what is felt and expressed on the ground in people’s everyday lives is growing increasingly distant from the day-to-day affairs and priorities of their political representatives.
This incongruity and imbalance will maintain for only so long before it shatters. The consequences of a large-scale breakdown are difficult to predict but it is already clear that many people in Ireland and all over Europe are drifting closer to extremes of political ideology that are directly at odds with those who claim to serve them. 
Certainly the installation of non-elected “technocrats” as the effective leaders of some European parliaments seems like a step in the wrong direction. An unelected leader taking control of a parliament, a nation’s purse strings and issuing orders against the wishes of the population? Sounds almost like a good description of a dictator.
There are a number of definitions of the word justice in the dictionary but moral or fair conduct or outcomes tend to form the backbone of most. This is where we hit a brick wall.
The Sirte mob will feel they carried out just work in their murder of Gaddafi in the eye for an eye biblical spirit, where as many, myself included, will feel a crime has been committed. Similarly the people of Europe will feel that there is no justice, in the morality or fairness sense, in the effective punishment of the people of Europe in the coming years because of the appalling technical difficulties in the European Project. The leaders and technocrats will reply that justice doesn’t enter into the equation. 
This constitutes a stumbling block of significant proportions. A functioning society as it generally envisaged in contemporary European societies has justice as one of its touchstone ideals. If it is sidelined in the way it currently is then the whole edifice is in structural danger.
When justice is seen not to be done, it creates bitterness, resentment and ultimately great turmoil. For this reason, Europe is navigating a dangerous road and Ireland has no choice but to follow. It is unlikely that anyone will feel the coalitions budget announcements are just and will be slow to swallow the line that justice doesn’t come into it with anything other than extreme ill grace.