News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Every other Wednesday, I get together with a small group of men in what I guess you’d call a book club. We grapple with tough moral questions, and matters of purpose and meaning, conflict and division. Our current selection is Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.” There is a current dramatic adaptation in the FX/Hulu limited series “Say Nothing.”
The book pivots on the December 1972 abduction of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10 children, from her flat in Belfast. McConville was a Protestant who had married a Catholic, and was suspected of being an informant for the British Army. The Irish Republican Army had a long history of killing “touts.” Everyone knew that the IRA had taken McConville, and what her terrible fate must be, but no one said anything about it for decades. In 1999, as part of the peace accords that ended the three-decade low-intensity war in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles, the IRA provided information on the location of her body. Authorities searched, but did not find her. In 2003, the grave was exposed by a storm that washed away an embankment, and her body was found by passers-by. Her children knew it was her because a remnant of her dress showed a blue safety pin, which she always wore to pin up her children’s diapers or torn clothes.
The TV series hones in on the story of Dolours Price and her sister Marian, hardcore, bitter-ender Provisional IRA operators who Keefe alleges were involved in the disappearance and murder of McConville.
It’s a dark and harrowing tale of politically motivated violence that developed its own momentum, becoming a blood feud that consumed lives of victims and perpetrators alike. It’s also a cautionary tale of what can happen when ordinary people fueled by grievance and fear fall into an intense tribalism, where any act can be justified in the name of freedom or self-defense.
As I write this, the United States is marking the inauguration of its 47th president, Donald J. Trump. Half of the electorate is exulting at a political comeback virtually unprecedented in American history, while the other half is in a slough of despond. Exultation and disappointment are the usual fallout of normal electoral politics — but we all know that American politics hasn’t been “normal” since 2016. The intensity of feeling is potentially combustible.
Partisans of “red” or “blue” orientation are increasingly alienated from one another to a degree where they can’t — and actually don’t want to — find common ground. We’re a long, long way from the kind of sectarian conflict that bloodied Northern Ireland for 30 years, but when we start thinking of political adversaries as political — and, worse, cultural — enemies, we’re treading into dangerous territory. When we stop trusting the institutions that underpin a free republic — when the institutions act in ways that make us suspect that someone has rigged the game — that republic is in danger.
It may seem alarmist to call out the potential for violence — but we’ve already seen political violence rear its ugly head. The Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last summer — these are serious acts that could have been far worse than they turned out. In a nation this divided and angry, any serious violent event could quickly spiral into truly dangerous civil unrest. With so many of our social guardrails down or in serious disrepair, the potential is dire.
Of course, partisans of one tribe or the other will condemn the actions of the other while defending their own. That’s how this works. All of the paramilitary thugs in Northern Ireland justified their actions, no matter how heinous, as self-defense.
The value of exploring history — especially “near” history — is not in finding one-to-one correspondences where history repeats itself. It is in recognizing that, under certain circumstances, ordinary people much like us are capable of extraordinary things. Sometimes that’s extraordinary fortitude, resilience, and heroism. Sometimes that’s extraordinary cruelty and violence.
For the past decade and more, our political culture has been playing around with explosives. At some point, something is really going to blow up. What happens then? Can’t say. But history offers some clues, and the picture ain’t pretty. We do not want to go there.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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