When a joyrider was nailed to a post in Belfast, the media relished
describing it as a crucifixion. Others thought this indulgent and
sensationalist. The whole case provides for a study in how language
evades the issue.
Patrick
Grant
In
2002, Harry McCartan, aged twenty-three, was apprehended in the
hardline loyalist Seymour Hill area of Dunmurry. Harry came from
the nationalist Poleglass estate, and was a notorious joyrider.
One report claims that he had stolen more than two-hundred cars,
and for his trouble he spent time in jail.
By
all accounts, Harry was a reckless customer, and recklessness is
made up of bravery and stupidity mixed to varying degrees. Thus,
Harry was brave enough to steal cars from within loyalist enclaves,
and stupid enough to be found drunk by the Seymour Hill vigilantes
on their own turf.
There
is some suggestion that Harry was set up by people who wanted to
see him dealt with, but details of this sordid little sub-plot remain
unclear. By contrast, the main outcome of Harry’s reckless
behaviour is not unclear at all: he was beaten until he was unrecognizable,
and was fastened to a wooden stile by six-inch nails driven through
his hands. Locally and internationally, news reports described Harry’s
ordeal as a crucifixion, and I want to ask what is entailed by saying
that.
Harry’s
hands nailed to a post might well evoke the judicial torture favoured
in ancient Rome and made famous by the demise of Jesus. If the resemblance
seems at first not especially striking, we might reflect that some
thought must have gone into providing a hammer and nails, so that
even the newt-like minds of the perpetrators would have registered
a glimmer (at least) of recognition that here, however crudely,
they were enacting the ritual made famous as Christianity’s
chief symbol.
Vigilantes
Still,
it does not matter much what the vigilantes thought they were doing,
if only because, in the mechanisms of victimization and scapegoating
with which humanity has afflicted itself through its ugly history,
the spontaneous and the ritualized constantly interpenetrate. That
is, rituals frequently give rise to spontaneous feelings, and spontaneous
feelings can find expression by evoking rituals, sometimes unconsciously.
This is a deeply embedded fact about human societies, as the anthropologist
and literary intellectual René Girard explains in a compelling
argument to which I will return.
For
now, the point is that however dimly the Seymour Hill boyos realized
they were crucifying Harry, they managed to evoke the well known
religious symbol in a disturbing way. Certainly, news reports seized
on the point, describing Harry as a “crucified man,” “crucified
by vigilantes,” “crucified by thugs,” subjected to
a “crucifixion beating” by a “crucifixion gang,”
and so on.
By
contrast, Superintendent Gerry Murray, who investigated the incident,
is reported as having “ruled out” a sectarian motive (Telegraph,
4 Nov. 02). This opinion is echoed by Chief Constable Hugh Orde,
who advised caution: “It’s very easy to take short snapshots
of this community — the lunatic fringe. It sells newspapers.
But it’s not capturing the reality” (Boston Globe, 9 Nov.
02). Yet, when it comes to evading “reality,” Orde and
Murray seem at pains to avoid seeing the elephant in the drawing
room, and in this they are followed by the imperturbable BBC (3
Nov. 02), which describes an “impaling attack” but scrupulously
avoids any mention of religion except to quote Superintendent Murray
as ruling it out. The BBC even claims that Harry’s father “had
no idea why his son was attacked.” As we shall see, other reports
attribute quite different opinions to Harry’s father and to
other McCartan family members. In short, the BBC (like Murray and
Orde) seems largely concerned to de-contaminate Harry’s ordeal,
cleansing it of religious infection.
Fastidious
Responses
in Poleglass and Seymour Hill were not so fastidious. Harry’s
mother is reported as saying that her son “suffered like the
Lord” (Boston Globe, 9 Nov. 02), and his father flatly condemned
the attack as sectarian (“This is because he is a Catholic”
[Guardian, 5 Nov. 02]), as did Harry’s brother, who points
out that the loyalists “knew that he was from Poleglass and
they said ‘We have got a Catholic here’” (Ireland
On Line, 4 Nov. 02). For their part, astoundingly, some loyalists
tuned right in, as ever unwilling to pass up an opportunity for
bad publicity. Graffiti in and around Seymour Hill mocked at “Harry...
also known as Jesus (Ha. Ha. Ha.),” while announcing to the
world that “Joyriders will be crucified” (Boston Globe,
9 Nov. 02; Telegraph, 5 Nov. 02). Although UDA boss Jackie McDonald
assured the press that the attack was not sanctioned beforehand,
he added that if UDA approval were in place, Harry “would have
been nailed up in front of the estate as a warning to others”
(People, 10 Nov. 02). The mixture of forced hilarity and menace
in these loyalist responses, far from suppressing sectarianism,
flaunts it, and with some relish.
So:
what does it mean to say that Harry was crucified? On the one hand,
he was not exactly a man of heroic virtue suffering for a high principle
to which he dedicated his life, and we might hesitate to depict
him too enthusiastically as Christ-like. On the other hand, he was
a victim, and Christ invited us to see the victimized as somehow
like himself, enjoining us to treat them with compassion.
This
Christian concern for the plight of victims brings me to my main
point, namely that Christianity is distinguished by how it calls
attention to frequently hidden mechanisms of victimization and scapegoating
that operate everywhere in human societies. Knowing how this is
so, people who get the message (not just committed Christians) might
subsequently be better able to desist from such behaviour. This
is not a theological or faith-informed idea: Christianity is, simply,
too important to be left to the churches and theologians. And so
here I want to return to René Girard, who provides an account
of the crucified Christ, bridging the gap between secular and religious.
Violence
Girard
argues that human societies are founded on violence and maintained
by the threat of violence. This unpleasant fact is concealed as
much as possible so that societies can run smoothly under a rule
of law that presents itself as impartial and transcendent. Only
by standing above group rivalries, feuds, and local animosities
can the law quell the disruptive energies that swirl and eddy constantly
through the social fabric. Yet some safe means have to be found
to express and release the enmities, hatred and rivalries which
the rule of law causes people to repress, but which it cannot fully
control. Historically, religions have played a key part in helping
to effect such a controlled release, and they do so through sacrifice
and scapegoat rituals. That is, sacrificial victims and scapegoats
become the focus of violent energies that might otherwise disrupt
the social group, and these energies are allowed a cathartic release
within controlled conditions. Emotional release and ritual are therefore
often closely bound up together; consequently, sacrifice rituals
can give rise to powerful emotions, just as spontaneous violent
impulses can find expression by taking a ritual, or quasi-ritual,
form.
So,
yes, Harry was broken in an act not without religious significance,
in which a spontaneous catharsis of pent-up fear and hatred was
released in a manner evoking a crucifixion, with an uncertain degree
of self-consciousness among the perpetrators. Predictably, Superintendent
Murray and Chief Constable Orde attempt to regulate the local rivalries
by appealing to a decontaminated, transcendent law. Yet they do
so without any inkling of how the ages-old, covert reciprocations
between law and ritual operate, and how imagination (working, for
instance, through religious symbolism) informs and inflames the
rivalries in question. In ethnic conflict zones everywhere, imagined
representations of the Other are the life blood of hatreds and animosities
ravenous for victims and fuelled always by a mixture of paranoia
and resentment. In such situations, paranoia is a response to the
supposition that the Other wants what you have (your job, land,
assets), and resentment arises from a belief that the Other has
access to pleasures and gratifications that you don’t (a different
kind of culture, sexual behaviour, attitude to work, and so on).
Responses
Unfortunately,
the reckless Harry triggered both responses simultaneously. First,
he was an invader from the other estate, bent on stealing property;
second, he was a joyrider motivated by an anarchic pleasure-principle.
Far from being divorced from reality, the transfer of long-harboured,
intensely imagined fears and resentments to a token enemy such as
Harry has real material consequences, as a sickened imagination
fuels the process by which un-freedom yet again takes itself prisoner
by re-enacting a ritual victimization — exactly what Jesus,
through his crucifixion, hoped he could get us to stop doing to
one another. And if it is worth pondering in this light the significance
of what happened to Harry, it is certainly worth calling in question
also the official voices which, by ruling out a sectarian motive,
will manage in the end only to aid and abet the very thing they
themselves lack the imagination to confront.
P
r e v i e w
Issue 429
Crucifying
Harry: On Victims and Scapegoats In 2002, Harry McCartan, aged twenty-three,
was apprehended in the hardline loyalist Seymour Hill area of Dunmurry.
Harry came from the nationalist Poleglass estate, and was a notorious
joyrider. One report claims that he had stolen more than two-hundred
cars, and for his trouble he spent time in jail.
by Patrick Grant
Our
Kinky Forbears Lascivious Bodies investigates “all
sorts of sex, in all sorts of places, with all sorts of people”,
sometime during the long eighteenth century, between 1680 and 1830.
The range of sexual activities proffered to the reader is extensive:
prostitution; adultery; sodomy; bestiality; masturbation; lesbianism;
cross-dressing (both male and female); necrophilia; paedophilia;
foot fetishism; flagellation and strangulation all feature as the
result of Peakman’s exhaustive drive to document the sexual
proclivities of her chosen age. And her attitude to the ever-increasing
commercialisation of sex and the body during this period is straightforward:
people had sex more often, in more diverse ways than before, and
were liberated by experimentation. "The book celebrates those
"lascivious bodies" which continued to "have their
way" in the face of -- often terrifying -- social control."
by Sinead Morrissey
John
Stephenson, founder of the Provisional IRA, was English. Nothing
Strange About That. There are millions of people of Irish descent
all over the world, and quite a number of them have been involved
in Republican politics. Though they left a major imprint on history,
second generation Irish Republicans have largely been neglected
by historians. Brian Dooley’s book is “a modest attempt
to help fill some of the gaps in knowledge about the contribution
of second/third generation Irish people to the fight for Irish independence,
and how some people responded to growing up second generation Irish
in Britain during the Troubles.”
by Liam O Ruairc
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