The real battle just begun
To claim the victory Jesus won
On . . .
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Sunday Bloody Sunday
-U2, Sunday Bloody Sunday
Earlier this week David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, apologized for “Bloody Sunday.” On that horrific Sunday in 1972, 14 unarmed civil rights protesters were killed in Northern Ireland by British soldiers. Robert Mackey of the New York Times reported that this was a pivotal event in the history of Northern Ireland because it convinced “many people to turn away from peaceful demonstrations in favor of violence.” Theunis Bates, of AOLNews makes a similar statement, “Believing that peaceful protest in the face of such violence was futile, a flood of young Catholics enlisted in the underground Irish Republican Army – and some went on to commit their own terrorist atrocities on unarmed, innocent civilians.”
Mackey and Bates point to the fundamental problem of violence: its mimetic nature. We each believe our own violence is justified in the name of God, country, or our own version of goodness. The problem is that humans cannot control our violence; rather, once the spirit of violence is unleashed, it controls us. The British soldiers’ violence was futile; it didn’t solve anything. Instead, it created further justifications for violence and revenge. Peaceful protest is no longer an option at this point, as the spiral of imitative violence infects hearts and destroys the world. U2 reveals this dynamic of violence in their song Sunday Bloody Sunday with these words:
And the battles just begun
There’s many lost but tell me who has won
The trench is dug within our heart
and mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apart.
René Girard gives a similar prophetic warning in his new book Battling to the End. Succinctly put, Girard claims, “The worst thing we can now do is believe in violence.” Yet, despite the warnings of U2 and Girard, much of the human story continues to revolve around mimetic violent.
I believe that the only hope for our world is for us to tell a different story. Cameron may have given us a glimpse of that story on Tuesday. 38 years after “Bloody Sunday,” Cameron apologized on behalf of the British Government. “I never want to believe anything bad about our country,” Cameron began. “But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear. There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong.”
After hearing Cameron’s apology, I was reminded of the lyrics at the beginning of this blog. Humanity’s real battle is to claim the victory Jesus won in the face of human violence: to offer peace and reconciliation instead of violent revenge. Indeed, violence has a mimetic nature, but so does the offer of peace and reconciliation. I’ll be discussing that topic in my next blog. I hope you’ll join me for that conversation.
