The Wardman Wire

I wonder what Morgan Tsvangarai is thinking as he looks across the table at Mugabe? Would he be human if he wasn’t thinking ‘one day you will pay for what you’ve done’?

Yet revenge wouldn’t serve the people of Zimbabwe. Rwanda, not far away, is a tragic example of what happens when revenge and hatred dictates action. South Africa could have chosen this path too - with plenty of justification - but decided that reconciliation was more important than revenge.

Gotcha

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of a certain Mark Brewer, US lawyer and current owner of a chain of UK bookstores. He wasn’t on my radar much until one my fellow bloggers started getting legal threats for reporting on SPCK bookstores. Since then I’ve found out much more than I ever wanted to know about J Mark Brewer and what he’s been up to. Part of me was therefore ever-so-slightly thrilled that this week, Brewer had his come-uppance in the US courts.

Why did part of me want ‘revenge’ on someone who has never directly wronged me?

Sure, it was out of the sense of injustice and outrage at what’s been done to other people, but why not just simple justice? Why is there are sense of satisfaction when someone gets a taste of their own medicine, even when it doesn’t actually put anything right?

Kill ‘em, Cowboy

Saturday afternoon Westerns were a regular part of my childhood TV diet. Strange that my parents didn’t like me watching Scooby Doo or Captain Caveman, but were quite happy to let me watch people shoot each other dead on a regular basis.

The basic plot of most Westerns, from what I can remember, was revenge. Bad people (usually unshaven and vaguely Mexican) did something nasty, and the avenging angel (Wayne, Clint, Yul Brynner) would implement American justice by exercising the right to bear arms and killing them. There’s even a song about one of them:

Whenever trouble came riding into North Fork/the fearful fair folk were never alone/the tall sod-buster let the bad guys make the first move/shot ‘em full of lead and said ’son, let’s go home’ (The Choir: ‘Rifleman’)

(I’ll let others join the dots between this and the foreign policy of a country raised on these stories.)

Leave those teeth alone

It’s nothing new - when early Christians in Rome saw their brothers and sisters imprisoned, fed to the lions or worse, the temptation to hit back must have been overwhelming. Simply being a close-knit community gave rise to all sorts of conflicts, and the missionary Paul had to instruct them: “do not take revenge,”. Jesus went even further:

”You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’
But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also….
”You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?”

Despite the claims of Richard Dawkins, we have still to evolve to the point where we find these words easy. Though it’s worth noting that being struck on the right cheek was an insult: if you were struck right-handed, it would mean a back-handed slap. Turning the left cheek effectively said “if you’re going to hit me, hit me as an equal.”

Pray or pay

Whether it’s the victims of Zimbabwe, or several thousand stranded holidaymakers, when we’ve been wronged (or just feel we have been wronged), then we want someone to pay. If we have suffered, someone else must suffer too. One preacher tells the story of a horrendous plane journey, with delays, lost baggage, slow queues and all the normal frustrations. He was just about to take all his frustration out on the woman behind the airport desk when God (or ‘his conscience’, if you’re an atheist) nudged him to be gentle. So he was, instead of biting her head off. At the end she said “see you on Sunday - I’m a member of your church by the way”. He was, to say the least, relieved that he hadn’t ‘made somebody pay’.

Who Swears, Wins?

That’s part of the problem - sometimes our anger, our desire to make someone pay, floats free from the people it should be directed at. We just want the catharsis, not because it changes anything, but because it makes us feel better. For a few seconds anyway.

And how easy is it, in the act of revenge, to keep a sense of proportion, rather than escalate things? If you’re not sure, just pick a few comment threads at random where there’s a heated debate going on, and track whether people’s reactions to each other get more or less agreeable as the thread progresses.

Awareness of how we tick also helps us work out when people are trying to manipulate it. George Orwell’s ‘2 minutes hate’ is replayed on a regular basis by the tabloid media (and sometimes the broadsheets), to excite our sense of outrage and vengeance against the latest criminal/terrorist/immigrant/politician/Big Brother contestant/delete where applicable.

Last week ‘God on Trial’ aired on the BBC, a drama about a group of Jews in Auschwitz who put God on trial for breaking his covenant. During the piece, the point is made that the Nazi’s can only treat the Jews the way they do because they’ve persuaded themselves that the Jews are less than human.

Dehumanising and caricaturing our enemies makes it easier to exact revenge. But when I pray for my enemy I remember that they’re human just like me, with family, friends, anxieties and gifts. People look more real, and a little bit more like ourselves, when there isn’t a set of cross-hairs in our line of sight.

Must go, my kids are playing with their pretend guns again..