From BBC News:
'World peace' hitcher is murdered
An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.
The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday.
She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.
Turkish police say they have detained a man in connection with the killing.
I will not belabour the irony here. Needless to say Lennon-McCartneyism, the ideology of peace through good intention alone, has claimed another victim. The belief in the inherent goodness of man isn't only naive; it's dangerous. I'm sure the Italian woman had pure and beautiful intentions. Most Italian women do. That's why everyone loves them. But maybe the Casa Nostra knows something about human nature that peace brides don't. Peace is not the absence of force but the balance of force. The absence of force creates a vacuum and nature, as well as depraved Turkish peasants, quickly fill a vacuum. The greatest lesson of the twentieth century is the fatal distance between ideals--a classless society, peace in our time, "all you need is love"--and reality. Unfortunately no amount of naked corpses seems capable of quelling the suicide-utopian need to believe in the good in everyone. The kindness of strangers barely extends as far as one's own community, let alone the world. Good borders make good neighbours, and no better paean to failed idealism can match Vladimir Mayakovsky's final words: "The love boat has crashed against the shore of reality." Yet in each generation it is seemingly dredged up and set floating anew, while the savages on the shore lick their lips in anticipation of booty.
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