It’s clear who was to blame for the Lockerbie terrorist bombing: Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi paid over a billion dollars to relatives of the 270 victims of the attack after accepting responsibility. But viewers of Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie: A Search For Truth, might feel that the USA and UK were somehow involved. Here’s a clue as to why that might be the case: it’s co-directed by Jim Loach, son of Ken, who seems not so much a chip off the old block as a chip off the old Trot block.
Swire’s story resembles what a Sinn Féin critic like me calls the forgiveness fallacy
Lockerbie’s hero is Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the 1988 bombing, and later began to reach out to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted Libyan bomber. Swire came to the conclusion that the former Libyan agent was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Lord Fraser, the former lord advocate, said Swire’s campaign to prove al-Megrahi innocent was comparable to Stockholm syndrome where captives grow to admire their captors.
Alternatively, Swire’s story resembles what a Sinn Féin critic like me calls the forgiveness fallacy, whereby relatives of victims of Provisional IRA crimes, unable to get at the actual perpetrators, begin to blame state institutions, like the British Army or the RUC.
Some individual relatives go much further. In the BBC documentary, Bombing Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher, which was broadcast in October, Princess Diana’s cousin, Jo Berry, whose father, Sir Anthony Berry, was killed in the Brighton hotel bombing in 1984, reached out to Patrick Magee, who was convicted of planting the bomb.
Predictably, Magee did not react with remorse. Instead, he recounted his restless sleep the night of the Brighton bomb, not because his bomb would kill innocent people, but in case his bomb was found or failed to explode.
Magee’s refusal to reciprocate her reaching out does not seem to bother Berry. She continues to meet “Pat”, as she calls him, regularly, as a result of which she, rather than “Pat”, seems to be feeling remorse for the past: “I wasn’t at all political. We need to love, like meditate…but I do remember the hunger striking time and being horrified that Maggie Thatcher refused to listen to them. That really shook me.”
But not as much as it shook Irish democrats like me, who despair of relatives of British victims reaching out to IRA thugs. This is not only because it’s morally nauseating, but because it fosters in future terrorists the delusion that they deserve forgiveness – which, of course, they don’t.
The policy of ‘forgiveness’ is backed by Sinn Féin and the British and Irish governments as to promote what an exasperated former Taoiseach John Bruton once famously called the “fucking peace process”. Bruton fully supported peace. What bothered him, as it did me, was not peace, but the prospect of a perpetual ‘peace process’.
These fears were well founded, as Sinn Féin is currently using the perpetual peace process as cover for demanding constant concessions from the British government on ‘legacy’ issues – the prosecution of aged British soldiers for alleged crimes committed in the course of duty, for instance. This is all part of Sinn Féin’s cynical interpretation of the Good Friday Agreement, not as closure, but as a stepping stone to an enforced Irish unity.
The forgiveness fallacy really began in 1987 with the saintly Gordon Wilson. Within hours of losing his daughter Marie in the Enniskillen bombing, and distraught with shock and grief, Wilson said that he prayed for the bombers and declared that talk of revenge was futile.
This act of heroic forgiveness rang around the world, approved by all except two groups: relatives of IRA victims who felt pressurised by the media to emulate Wilson, and long time critics of Sinn Féin like me, who knew the party would cynically use ‘forgiveness’ as a ploy to promote its agenda of amnesia about IRA atrocities. We, saw, too that the ‘forgiveness’ diktat would not extend to aged British soldiers or RUC officers.
In 1993, Wilson, who had been appointed to the Irish senate as part of the peace process, sought a meeting with Provisional IRA leaders in the hope of persuading them to end the violence. He returned from the lengthy meeting tired and depressed, reporting that the IRA “didn’t seem to care how many people were killed”.
By now you may have noticed my use of quotation marks around the word ‘forgiveness’ and ‘forgive.’ Does this mean I think Gordon Wilson was insincere in ‘forgiving’ the IRA bombers who murdered his daughter Marie? Yes and no.
Does this mean I think Gordon Wilson was insincere in ‘forgiving’ the IRA bombers who murdered his daughter Marie? Yes and no
Soon after Wilson’s BBC plea, I had a long conversation about his call for forgiveness with my late friend Patricia Redlich, the senior psychologist in the Irish Eastern Health board. She was a wise woman who believed in the existence of evil and liked to quote Joan Didion: “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask”.
Patricia believes Wilson could not have truly forgiven his daughter’s killers, because no normal person could forgive the murder of a close relative unless they were mentally ill; they could only go through the motions of forgiveness to satisfy some public good, which is what she believed Wilson was doing.
Patricia also believed that, contrary to conventional wisdom, it was much easier to publicly ‘forgive’ the killing of a relative rather than carry the burden of relentlessly pursuing the perpetrators. Cynthia Ozick, the American Jewish literary critic, agrees: “It is forgiveness that is relentless,” she writes. “The face of forgiveness is mild, but how stony to the slaughtered”.
Jews like Ozick believe there can be no forgiveness in the absence of ‘teshuvah’, or remorse on the part of the offender. I believe only two Provisional IRA penitents met that high standard: the late Seán O’Callaghan, who became an Irish government agent out of moral conviction; and Shane Paul O’Doherty, who still runs a riveting blog exposing the IRA’s past crimes. Both risked their lives to prove their repentance was real.
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