WE are, in essence, simple things. Much of our psychology, has barely advanced beyond the rules we learned in the school playground. There is cause and effect, crime and punishment, good and evil, right and wrong. We are uneasy when one of these elements is unaccompanied at least by the possibility of the other. Freestanding, each makes us nervous; we doubt the authenticity of singular goodness, and evil beyond reproof or control is St bearing. The prospect of crime unpunished reaches into our most primitive race memories of society without justice.
Playground rules demand punishment of male factors. This is so fundamental, especially this century, when vast conspiracies of law distortion occurred so that the victorious allies could engage in judicious vengeance at Nuremburg. Who, with that gang of cut throats in, their custody and Europe a smoking, judenfrei wilderness, would not have done similarly? In retrospect, even though war crimes were carefully selected so that the Allies could not be held accountable for their crimes we might consider the Nuremburg tally modest. The stench of the death camps fills our nostrils even yet, its psychological and political consequences haunt the people of Jaffa as they do the people of, Gaza.
It might even be that Jewish anger at their singularly evil crime done to the Jewish people could justifiably have been assuaged by a far more liberal use, of retribution than was the case. Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord is no doubt admirable and in our private lives it is not merely commendable, but also obligatory for the maintenance of civilisation, else we are perpetually mired in the vendetta culture of desert nomads and hill shepherds. But it does not cope with the evil done vastly; it cannot cope with the political consequences which arise from that sense of wounded perplexity, of numb, uncomprehending agony, left by Bergen Belsen and Auschwitz.
Third Reich Geniuses
The survivors of those camps knew that the great geniuses of the Third Reich, Wernher von Braun and the other rocket scientists, whose factories employed vast armies of slaves departed for celebrity and wealth in America. No doubt strategic reasons justified to the Americans the exculpation of such creatures, as they did in due course find reason to excuse those other employers of slave labour, the Krupps. Yet the suppressed rage of the survivors of the greatest single evil in the history of the planet was bound to find expression, for that is only human. The lash must find a back, and the back it found was Palestinian.
But we are like children. We want, if not culprits in custody, at least the possibility of culprits falling into our hands sometime in the future. That is why the fall of Srebenice and, the massacre of its male citizens, while under the protections of the UN, will be remembered as long as there is a Bosnia. The Muslims of Bosnia know that their Serb torturers will never be punished. Those who jestingly conducted the roadside massacres of the helpless, the cringeing, are immune to punishment; and that is the offence which hurts most of all.
And that is why the poor people of Dunblane in their grief have suffered the greatest loss; not in the dyaths of their children, which is something, however subliminally, all adults prepare themselves for, though admittedly not in the sanctuary of the schoolroom. Yet one of the ingredients of adulthood is the expectation of loss, of bereavement, which we bury deep and seldom acknowledge But it is there, and we know it each time a loved one is late.
Total Unfairness
What we are unprepared for is the total unfairness which can cause a life or lives to be murderously taken, yet leaving no one to blame not as in the random acts of an unfair nature, for these we know. We, all of us, at some time expect a coronary, and Dunblane was no coronary.
Nor as most of us are half prepared for that deadly companionship. Nor was it a hit and run drunken driver, whose exploits we all fear and who might yet one day be caught, or to his guilt, even in old age, confess.
There is in Dunblane no possibility of vengeance or even of forgiveness. The killer there massacred an entire generation of innocents and their guardians and then killed himself, and left behind him a wasted wilderness, without any chance of vengeance, or - just as important - of the deliberate and studied rejection of vengeance.
Even the families of the suicide bombers in Israel have a general sense of whom to turn their rage towards. Directed anger can be a great sustainer in a time of violent bereavement. It concentrates the will of the survivors and gives a context to their suffering.
Nihilistic Nightmare
But in Dunblane there is no context, merely a nihilistic nightmare from which there is no escape. No punishment awaits the culprit. He is as free as the children he killed, and the rage his evil provoked is as impotent as Lear's.
We do not need to go to Dunblane to find unrequited anger. We all know of the clergy who'd have used the innocent and the fragile to please themselves, and we all of us have experienced the human instinct to pursue and punish the wrong doers. How many such creatures even now have been imprisoned? Where is the vile priest Patrick Hughes, whose repeated rape and numerous other unspeakable violations of a nine year old boy merely led to a diocesan cover up?
And where, pray, is Hughes today? Where are any of the priestly abusers of children? And, after so many apparent cover ups, is it surprising that the mood of general vengefulness should choose as its targets the nuns of Goldenbridge and the demented, pathetic wretch, Brendan Smyth - not so much for what they have done but as proxies for all the evils done to children by adults? They are the scapegoats of Leviticus, convenient clerically attired targets for all the heaped injustices of bruised childhoods.
We should not need Dunblanes to remind us of the monstrousness of a crime against children being unpunished. We know it all too well ourselves.