The Dark Web Murders

CHAPTER EIGHT

Tuesday, 14th August. Late afternoon 

A number of laptops and computers in houses and apartments all over  Northern Ireland and, indeed, over much of mainland Britain and further afield, pinged around five o'clock that Tuesday afternoon.Many hard-core users, forever glued to their electronic devices, stopped what they were doing when they saw the name on the message that had appeared at the lower corner of their screens and immediately clicked on it. 

ΝΕΜΕΙΝ'Σ ΒΛΟΓ 

Ϝενγεανξε 

Nemein calling. Hello again, and welcome to my blog. I am pleased to see from the number of 'hits' and 'likes' accorded to my last modest post that I am beginning to acquire a sizeable following. I do hope that you find today's post of equal interest. As usual, I feel initially obliged to clarify some philosophical issues that, properly understood, will explain and vindicate the course of action upon which I subsequently embarked.  

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Yet the Good Book says, 'An eye for an eye.' Food for thought. Imagine if someone causes irreparable harm to someone you love. Would you seek revenge? Would you rely on the justice system? Think before you answer. If we had a perfect justice system that meted out consistent punishments, there might be a case for patience. But,is not that a huge IF? Would you leave the aggressor's fate to the Lord, or would you exact an eye for an eye here on earth? Or would you simply follow the New Testament and turn the other cheek? We are called on to forgive, not seek revenge, are we not? Hah!!! 

Let us look at that. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up on the understanding that Restorative Justice can help victims to forgive, perpetrators to find remorse, and both parties to find lasting peace. But I ask, how genuine is offender rehabilitation? How realistic is the concept of restorative justice in which BOTH the offender and the offended are genuinely willing to—in the one case seek, and in the other offer—forgiveness?Forgive me if I bristle with scepticism. I see people. I observe people. I know people. I work with the best and the worst of people. And this concept makes me sneer. Liberal idealists cannot force forgiveness on others. What do they know? Life experience, as Dewey would claim, has so much more to teach us about the truth and reality of things than empty ideologies and liberal posturing. And the reality is that people do not forgive. It is not in their nature. So, which path does one take? Do we seek vengeance? Or do we attempt to walk the path of forgiveness? 

Simone de Beauvoir, French writer and existentialist, writing after the Second World War, talks about the rage and the hate experienced by the ordinary French citizen during the occupation of their country by the Germans. She wrote that one does not hate plague, or hailstones, because they do not consciously cause evil. One only hates man, because only man has the will to do evil. The French swore that the Germans would 'pay' for their atrocities. De Beauvoir argues cogently, and to my mind with sound justification, that the word 'pay' reflects the human desire of victims to visit upon their tormentors a pain and brutality equal to the pain and brutality inflicted upon them.In other words, they seek the Law of Retaliation, the biblical eye for an eye. De Beauvoir sees so clearly that where there has been a great injustice, a terrible dehumanisation, there follows also a primal desire to seek vengeance upon the wrongdoer. 

Thus a balance must be restored by making the perpetrator experience,or, to use De Beauvoir's psychology, to make him 'viscerally understand'what he has done, by forcing him to undergo an equal and brutal victimhood. He viscerally understands the pain he has caused by undergoing it. But then, incomprehensibly, De Beauvoir drifts into a banal and spiritless questioning of the morality of the desire for revenge. She suggests that vengeance has a 'disquieting character', and thus the idea of vengeance becomes suspect. How could she have drifted so erroneously from the inevitable conclusions of her earlier argument? Oh, it is wonderful to sit in an ivory tower and philosophise intellectually without experiencing the compulsion of emotional involvement. But how one's view can change,how fragile becomes one's intellectually held beliefs, in the face of the actual and dehumanising experience of injustice and pain.