FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Terror

Rant Number 534       17 April 2013

The Boston bombing...what kind of mind takes pleasure in concocting a shrapnel-loaded explosion aimed not just at killing but at maiming innocent bystanders? A terrorist mind? Too simple. Because ‘Even in destruction there is a right way and a wrong way – and there are limits.’ Thus speaks a young Russian terrorist in Albert Camus’ Les Justes. A play designed to make you think. And thinking is what acts of terror do call for.

Terrorists have always come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. On May 1882 in Dublin’s Phoenix Park Lord Cavendish and Thomas Burke were stabbed to death with surgical knives by Irish patriots-assassins, the Invincibles. Brutal as the act was, it had its logic, even reasons. Cavendish was British Secretary for Ireland and Burke his Under-Secretary. For fiery Irish revolutionaries, the victims were not innocent. They represented an alien occupying power, bore the guilt of oppression and hence they were legitimate targets. The bloody deed was not indiscriminate. No objectively innocent person suffered death with Cavendish and Burke. The murderers themselves were later tracked down and dutifully hanged by the British.

Later Irish terror attacks have been less selective. In 1974, a bomb exploded near Selfridge’s store in Oxford St wounding several people –  the priest might have been one of them as he was then a student working there as a shop assistant. My guardian angel looked after me.

The sorry list goes on. Consider the 1987 Enniskillen IRA outrage. Ostensibly aimed at British military personnel, it killed ten civilians and many more were injured. The terrorists invoked ‘collateral damage’ in justification for aiming at enemy soldiers. Perhaps. Still, the slaughtering and injuring of so many innocent civilians left a very bad taste in the mouth. Indeed, it brought the IRA widespread condemnation, even from Republican quarters.

Indira Gandhi, the authoritarian Indian Prime Minister, was neatly gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards, in revenge for the storming of the Amritsar Temple. No one else was targeted. Unlike her son Rajiv’s murder by a suicide bomber, a female Tamil Tiger. It involved the deaths of 14 others. As to 9/11...enough said.

Some of course will claim all terrorism is ipso facto morally wrong. You can reply that a very large number of ‘terrorists’ were later rehabilitated, feted and celebrated as freedom-fighters. Jomo Kenyatta, Bobby Mugabe and the well-nigh canonised Nelson Mandela amongst others. Some have danced with the Queen of England. (Don’t envy Her Majesty’s job one little bit...) Who now remembers the numerous innocent victims of the Mau-Mau, the South-African ANC, the Rhodesian guerrilla wars or the Viet Cong? Fiddlesticks! The inexorable, triumphant march of Reason in history is its own justification. Philosopher Hegel, if he has not perished, is laughing a huge laugh, somewhere in his impossibly immanent Heaven.

Could the Boston bombing be one day similarly justified? Regardless of the pathetic image of Martin Richard, the eight-year-old child slain during the ill-fated marathon? And his maimed little sister, who has had limbs amputated? Harrowing but...Children galore have suffered before in similar episodes and many more will very probably suffer in future. What real difference do they really make? No much. Just slush sentimentality to prioritise them, surely?

Cruelty, I suppose, is the rub. Those pressure cookers packed with nails and studs...I can’t get them out of my mind. Who would take pleasure in a thing like that? The IRA, I don’t think, ever stooped so low. And no religion, Satanism excepted, would ever condone such an act, would it?

Christianity justly repudiated Manichean, dualistic worldviews for introducing conflict and strife into the very heart of the Divine. Manichean thought postulated the existence of a dark, evil deity, basically on a par with a God of light and goodness. The two just battled it out until one – say Ormuzd rather than Ahriman - got the upper hand. An outlook monotheism cannot accept. Yet any heresy, however misguided, catches a little bit of the truth. Surely the author of the Boston outrage must be an Ahrimanic devotee? A worshipper at the altar of the god of darkness, what else?

Evolutionary biologists, ‘scientific’ minds a la Dawkins & his ilk will disdain invoking such backward metaphysical notions, shot through with an objectionable supernaturalism. They would, wouldn’t they? That is their problem. Yet, when something really atrocious happens even they occasionally slip back in the old language. The media too, despite not giving a damn for the eternal verities, spits out words like ‘monster burns in hell’, referring to a defunct multiple child murderer. It reveals something slumbering into even the most secularised mind.

The young nihilist of Camus play cannot throw the bomb when he suddenly discovers children in the Grand Duke’s carriage. Unlike the fiendish Boston terrorist. Literary figures of course can be made to feel noble moral scruples – not so the red-blooded, ruthless variety you meet in reality. Art, especially existentialist art, does not have to be true to life. But life can take its revenge. When Camus went to Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, a young Algerian heckled him. ‘Why are you not outspoken in condemning the French repression on my people?’ the student demanded. Camus, himself an Algerian pied noir of French colonial extraction, struggled to respond. At last he fell back on that most non-rational of arguments, his feelings. His own mother might be on a bus targeted by FLN bombers – he could not abide or justify that. Human, all too human.

Two thousand years ago Jesus of Nazareth brought a stunning new message to humanity: ‘Love one another’. ‘Turn the other cheek’. ‘Love your enemy’. ‘Do not requite evil for evil’. Impossible? Soppy? Absurd? Rather, the perfect solution to evil and terror, if only men would hear it.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli