But You Did.

“I should never have surrendered," 

Geronimo, still a prisoner of war, said on his deathbed. 

"I should have fought until I was the last man alive."

Six Indians visited Roosevelt in the White House and Geronimo took the opportunity to beg for a pardon. 

“Great Father, I look to you as I look to God,” he said, speaking through a translator. “When I see your face, I think I see the face of the Great Spirit. I came here to pray to you to be good to me and to my people.”

It was an amazingly obsequious opening. Was the wily old warrior truly feeling humble or was he just putting on a show to hustle Roosevelt?

“When I was young, many years ago, I was a fool,” 

Geronimo continued. 

“Did I fear the Great White Chief? No. 

His people desired the country of my people. 

My heart was strong against him….

When the soldiers of the Great White Chief drove my people from our home, we went to the mountains. 

When they followed, we slew all we could….

We starved but we killed. 

I said that we would never yield, for I was a fool. 

So I was punished and all my people were punished with me.”

Now, he told Roosevelt, his people lived in an unhealthy place where they sickened and died. He begged for permission to return to Arizona. 

“Great Father, my hands are tied as with a rope,” he said. 

“My heart is no longer bad. 

I will tell my people to obey no chief but the Great White Chief. 

I pray you to cut the ropes and make me free. 

Let me die in my own country, an old man who has been punished enough and is free.”

“Geronimo, I don’t see how I can grant your prayer,” the president responded. 

“You speak truly when you say you have been foolish. 

I am glad that you have ceased to commit follies. 

I am glad that you are trying to live at peace and in friendship with the white people.”

Roosevelt reminded his guest that not all Americans were so forgiving. 

“You must remember that there are white people in your old home. 

It is probable that some of these have bad hearts toward you. 

If you went back there, some of these men might kill you, or make trouble for your people….

There would be more war and more bloodshed. 

My country has had enough of these troubles.”

Fort Sill is not a prison, Roosevelt said. The Apaches were free to grow crops and sell them at a profit. 

“I feel, Geronimo, that it is best for you to stay where you are,” he concluded. “I do not think that I can hold out any hope for you. 

That is all I can say, Geronimo, except that I am sorry and I have no feeling against you.”

Yggdrasil

Ratatoskr (Old Norse, generally considered to mean "drill-tooth"or "bore-tooth”) is a squirrel who runs up and down The World Tree, Yggdrasil to carry messages between The Eagle perched atop Yggdrasil, and The Serpent Níðhöggr, who dwells beneath one of the three roots of The Tree. 

“The Tree of Europe is finally lost. Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument. Those in power seem persuaded that it would not matter if the people and culture of Europe were lost to the world. Some have clearly decided (as Bertolt Brecht wrote in his 1953 poem ‘The Solution’) to dissolve the people and elect another because, as a recent Swedish conservative Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt put it, only ‘barbarism’ comes from countries like his whereas only good things come from outside. There is no single cause of the present sickness. 

The culture produced by the tributaries of Judaeo-Christian culture, the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and the discoveries of the Enlightenment has not been levelled by nothing. 

But the final act has come about because of two simultaneous concatenations from which it is now all but impossible to recover. 

The first is the mass movement of peoples into Europe. In all Western European countries this process began after the Second World War due to labour shortages. Soon Europe got hooked on the migration and could not stop the flow even if it had wanted to. The result was that what had been Europe – the home of the European peoples – gradually became a home for the entire world. The places that had been European gradually became somewhere else. So places dominated by Pakistani immigrants resembled Pakistan in everything but their location, with the recent arrivals and their children eating the food of their place of origin, speaking the language of their place of origin and worshipping the religion of their place of origin. Streets in the cold and rainy northern towns of Europe filled with people dressed for the foothills of Pakistan or the sandstorms of Arabia. 

‘The Empire strikes back’ noted some observers with a barely concealed smirk. Yet whereas the empires of Europe had been thrown off, these new colonies were obviously intended to be for good. All the time Europeans found ways to pretend this could work. By insisting, for instance, that such immigration was normal. Or that if integration did not happen with the first generation then it might happen with their children, grandchildren or another generation yet to come. Or that it didn’t matter whether people integrated or not. 

All the time we waved away the greater likelihood that it just wouldn’t work. This is a conclusion that the migration crisis of recent years has simply accelerated. 

Which brings me to the second concatenation. For even the mass movement of millions of people into Europe would not sound such a final note for the continent were it not for the fact that (coincidentally or otherwise) at the same time Europe lost faith in its beliefs, traditions and legitimacy. Countless factors have contributed to this development, but one is the way in which Western Europeans have lost what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno famously called the ‘tragic sense of life’. 

They have forgotten what Zweig and his generation so painfully learnt: that everything you love, even the greatest and most cultured civilisations in history, can be swept away by people who are unworthy of them. Other than simply ignoring it, one of the few ways to avoid this tragic sense of life is to push it away through a belief in the tide of human progress. That tactic remains for the time being the most popular approach. 

Yet all the time we skate over, and sometimes fall into, terrible doubts of our own creation. More than any other continent or culture in the world today, Europe is now deeply weighed down with guilt for its past. 

Alongside this outgoing version of self-distrust runs a more introverted version of the same guilt. For there is also the problem in Europe of an existential tiredness and a feeling that perhaps for Europe the story has run out and a new story must be allowed to begin. 

Mass immigration – the replacement of large parts of the European populations by other people – is one way in which this new story has been imagined: a change, we seemed to think, was as good as a rest. 

Such existential civilisational tiredness is not a uniquely modern European phenomenon, but the fact that a society should feel like it has run out of steam at precisely the moment when a new society has begun to move in cannot help but lead to vast, epochal changes. 

Had it been possible to discuss these matters some solution might have been reached. Yet even in 2015, at the height of the migration crisis, it was speech and thought that was constricted. 

At the peak of the crisis in September 2015 Chancellor Merkel of Germany asked the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, what could be done to stop European citizens writing criticisms of her migration policy on Facebook. ‘Are you working on this?’ she asked him. He assured her that he was. 

In fact the criticism, thought and discussion ought to have been boundless. Looking back, it is remarkable how restricted we made our discussion even whilst we opened our home to the world. A thousand years ago the peoples of Genoa and Florence were not as intermingled as they now are, but today they are all recognisably Italian and tribal differences have tended to lessen rather than grow with time. 

The current thinking appears to be that at some stage in the years ahead the peoples of Eritrea and Afghanistan too will be intermingled within Europe as the Genoans and Florentines are now melded into Italy. The skin colour of individuals from Eritrea and Afghanistan may be different, their ethnic origins may be from further afield, but Europe will still be Europe and its people will continue to mingle in the spirit of Voltaire and St Paul, Dante, Goethe and Bach. 

As with so many popular delusions there is something in this. The nature of Europe has always shifted and – as trading cities like Venice show – has included a grand and uncommon receptiveness to foreign ideas and influence. From the Ancient Greeks and Romans onwards the peoples of Europe sent out ships to scour the world and report back on what they found. 

Rarely, if ever, did the rest of the world return their curiosity in kind, but nevertheless the ships went out and returned with tales and discoveries that melded into the air of Europe. The receptivity was prodigious: it was not, however, boundless. 

The Question of where the boundaries of The Culture lay is endlessly argued over by anthropologists and cannot be solved. 

But there were boundaries. Europe was never, for instance, a continent of Islam.

Yet the awareness that our culture is constantly, subtly changing has deep European roots. The philosophers of Ancient Greece understood the conundrum, summing it up most famously in the paradox of the Ship of Theseus. 

As recorded in Plutarch, the ship in which Theseus had sailed had been preserved by the Athenians who put in new timber when parts of the ship decayed. Yet was this not still the ship of Theseus even when it consisted of none of the materials in which he had sailed? 

We know that the Greeks today are not the same people as the Ancient Greeks. We know that The English are not the same today as they were a millennium ago, nor the French the French. And yet they are recognisably Greek, English and French and all are European. In these and other identities we recognise a degree of cultural succession: a tradition that remains with certain qualities (positive as well as negative), customs and behaviours. 

We recognise the great movements of the Normans, Franks and Gauls brought about great changes. And we know from history that some movements affect a culture relatively little in the long term whereas others can change it irrevocably. 

The Problem comes not with an acceptance of change, but with the knowledge that when those changes come too fast or are too different we become Something Else – including something we may never have wanted to be. 

At the same time we are confused over how this is meant to work. While generally agreeing that it is possible for an individual to absorb a particular culture (given the right degree of enthusiasm both from the individual and the culture) whatever their skin colour, we know that we Europeans cannot become whatever we like. 

We cannot become Indian or Chinese, for instance. And yet we are expected to believe that anyone in The World can move to Europe and become European. 

If being ‘European’ is not about race – as we hope it is not – then it is even more imperative that it is about ‘values’. This is what makes the question ‘What are European values?’ so important. 

Yet this is another debate about which we are wholly confused.”

Something That Could Never, Ever Possibly Destroy Us

I knew that Santino was going to have to go through all this. 

And Fredo -- well -- Fredo was -- well -- 

But I never -- I never wanted this for you. 

I worked my whole life, I don't apologize, to take care of my family. 

And I REFUSED -- to be A Fool -- dancing on the string, held by all those -- bigshots. 

I don't apologize -- that's My Life -- but I thought that -- that when it was your time -- that -- that you would be the one to hold the strings. 

Senator - Corleone. 

Governor - Corleone, or something... 

It’s The Daddy Problem.

In a crisis, voters want 

Somebody to Tell Them What To Do.

Even if it’s The Wrong Thing.

Unless it’s a jobs crisis, in which case, they want 

Someone to hug them, give them hot chocolate and marshmallows.

Something That Could Never, Ever Possibly Destroy Us —

Nine Inch Nails

I seen through junkies, 

I been through it all

I seen Religion 
from Jesus to Paul
Don't let them fool you 
with Dope and Cocaine
No one can harm you,
 feel Your Own Pain

Worf: 

I prefer Klingon Beliefs.

Kira: 
I suppose Your Gods 
aren’t as cryptic as Ours.

Worf: 

Our Gods are Dead —

Ancient Klingon Warriors slew them a millennium ago. 

They were More Trouble than They were Worth.

No Man or Woman can be too Powerful or too Beautiful without Disaster befalling.

They laugh when you rise too high and crush everything you've built with a whim.

What Glory They give, in The End, They take away.

They make of us Slaves.

Truth is in Our Hearts, 

and none will tell you this but Your Father.

Men hate The Gods.

The only reason we worship any of them is because we fear worse.

What's worse?

The Titans.

If they were ever to be set free, it would be Darkness such as we have never seen before.

Could They ever come back?

Can Zeus imprison The Titans forever under Mount Olympus?

It's said that when Zeus burned them to dust with his lightning bolt they took the Titans' ashes and, in a cold revenge, mixed it with those of Mortal Men.

Why?

Who Knows These Things?

One day, Things will Change.

Men will Change.

But first, The Gods must Change.

But all this you'll forget, Alexander.

That's why we call them Myths.

We can't bear to remember them.

“God is Dead,” said Nietzsche. 

“God remains dead. And we have killed him. 

How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? 

That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that The World has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. 

Who will wipe this blood off us?”

The central dogmas of the Western faith were no longer credible, according to Nietzsche, given what the Western mind now considered Truth. 

But it was his second attack — on the removal of the true moral burden of Christianity during the development of the Church — that was most devastating. 

The hammer-wielding philosopher mounted an assault on an early-established and then highly influential line of Christian thinking: that Christianity meant accepting the proposition that Christ’s sacrifice, and only that sacrifice, had redeemed humanity. 

This did not mean, absolutely, that a Christian who believed that Christ died on the cross for the salvation of mankind was thereby freed from any and all personal moral obligation. 

But it did strongly imply that the primary responsibility for redemption had already been borne by The Saviour, and that nothing too important to do remained for all-too-fallen human individuals. 

Nietzsche believed that Paul, and later the Protestants following Luther, had removed moral responsibility from Christ’s followers. They had watered down the idea of the imitation of Christ. 

This imitation was The Sacred Duty of The Believer not to adhere (or merely to mouth) a set of statements about abstract belief but instead to actually manifest The Spirit of The Saviour in the particular, specific conditions of his or her life — to realize or incarnate the archetype, as Jung had it; to clothe the eternal pattern in flesh. 

Nietzsche writes, 

“The Christians have never practiced the actions Jesus prescribed them; and the impudent garrulous talk about the ‘justification by faith’ and its supreme and sole significance is only the consequence of the Church’s lack of courage and will to profess the works Jesus demanded.”

Nietzsche was, indeed, a critic without parallel. Dogmatic belief in the central axioms of Christianity (that Christ’s crucifixion redeemed the world; that salvation was reserved for the hereafter; that salvation could not be achieved through works) had three mutually reinforcing consequences: First, devaluation of the significance of earthly life, as only the hereafter mattered. This also meant that it had become acceptable to overlook and shirk responsibility for the suffering that existed in the here-and-now; Second, passive acceptance of the status quo, because salvation could not be earned in any case through effort in this life (a consequence that Marx also derided, with his proposition that religion was the opiate of the masses); and, finally, third, the right of the believer to reject any real moral burden (outside of the stated belief in salvation through Christ), because the Son of God had already done all the important work. It was for such reasons that Dostoevsky, who was a great influence on Nietzsche, also criticized institutional Christianity (although he arguably managed it in a more ambiguous but also more sophisticated manner). 

In his masterwork, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has his atheist superman, Ivan, tell a little story, “The Grand Inquisitor.”

A brief review is in order. 

Ivan speaks to his brother Alyosha — whose pursuits as a monastic novitiate he holds in contempt — of Christ returning to Earth at the time of The Spanish Inquisition. 

The returning Savior makes quite a ruckus, as would be expected. He Heals The Sick. He Raises The Dead. 

His antics soon attract attention from The Grand Inquisitor himself, who promptly has Christ arrested and thrown into a prison cell. 

Later, the Inquisitor pays Him a visit. 

He informs Christ that he is no longer needed. His return is simply too great a threat to the Church. The Inquisitor tells Christ that the burden He laid on mankind—the burden of existence in Faith and Truth — was simply too great for mere mortals to bear. The Inquisitor claims that the Church, in its mercy, diluted that Message, lifting the demand for Perfect Being from the shoulders of its followers, providing them instead with the simple and merciful escapes of Faith and the afterlife. 

That work took centuries, says the Inquisitor, and the last thing the Church needs after all that effort is the return of the Man who insisted that people bear all the weight in the first place. 

Christ listens in silence. 

Then, as the Inquisitor turns to leave, Christ embraces him, and kisses him on the lips. 

The Inquisitor turns white, in shock. 

Then he goes out, leaving the cell door open. 

The profundity of this story and the greatness of spirit necessary to produce it can hardly be exaggerated. Dostoevsky, one of the great literary geniuses of all time, confronted the most serious existential problems in all his great writings, and he did so courageously, headlong, and heedless of the consequences. 

Clearly Christian, he nonetheless adamantly refuses to make a straw man of his rationalist and atheistic opponents. Quite the contrary: In The Brothers Karamazov, for example, Dostoevsky’s atheist, Ivan, argues against the presuppositions of Christianity with unsurpassable clarity and passion. Alyosha, aligned with the Church by temperament and decision, cannot undermine a single one of his brother’s arguments (although his faith remains unshakeable). Dostoevsky knew and admitted that Christianity had been defeated by the rational faculty—by the intellect, even—but (and this is of primary importance) he did not hide from that fact. He didn’t attempt through denial or deceit or even satire to weaken the position that opposed what he believed to be most true and valuable. He instead placed action above words, and addressed the problem successfully. 

By the novel’s end, Dostoevsky has the great embodied moral goodness of Alyosha—the novitiate’s courageous imitation of Christ—attain victory over the spectacular but ultimately nihilistic critical intelligence of Ivan. The Christian church described by the Grand Inquisitor is the same church pilloried by Nietzsche. Childish, sanctimonious, patriarchal, servant of the state, that church is everything rotten still objected to by modern critics of Christianity. Nietzsche, for all his brilliance, allows himself anger, but does not perhaps sufficiently temper it with judgement. This is where Dostoevsky truly transcends Nietzsche, in my estimation—where Dostoevsky’s great literature transcends Nietzsche’s mere philosophy. The Russian writer’s Inquisitor is the genuine article, in every sense. 

He is an opportunistic, cynical, manipulative and cruel interrogator, willing to persecute heretics—even to torture and kill them. He is the purveyor of a dogma he knows to be false. But Dostoevsky has Christ, the archetypal perfect man, kiss him anyway. Equally importantly, in the aftermath of the kiss, the Grand Inquisitor leaves the door ajar so Christ can escape his pending execution. Dostoevsky saw that the great, corrupt edifice of Christianity still managed to make room for the spirit of its Founder. That’s the gratitude of a wise and profound soul for the enduring wisdom of the West, despite its faults. It’s not as if Nietzsche was unwilling to give the faith—and, more particularly, Catholicism—its due. 

Nietzsche believed that the long tradition of “unfreedom” characterizing dogmatic Christianity—its insistence that everything be explained within the confines of a single, coherent metaphysical theory—was a necessary precondition for the emergence of the disciplined but free modern mind. As he stated in Beyond Good and Evil: The long bondage of the spirit … the persistent spiritual will to interpret everything that happened according to a Christian scheme, and in every occurrence to rediscover and justify the Christian God in every accident:—all this violence, arbitrariness, severity, dreadfulness, and execution. Dostoevsky saw that the great, corrupt unreasonableness, has proved itself the disciplinary means whereby the European spirit has attained its strength, its remorseless curiosity and subtle mobility; granted also that much irrecoverable strength and spirit had to be stifled, suffocated and spoiled in the process.

For Nietzsche and Dostoevsky alike, freedom — even the ability to act — requires constraint. For this reason, they both recognized the vital necessity of The Dogma of The Church. 

The Individual must be constrained, moulded — even brought close to destruction—by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before he or she can act freely and competently. 

Dostoevsky, with his great generosity of spirit, granted to The Church, corrupt as it might be, a certain element of mercy, a certain pragmatism. He admitted that The Spirit of Christ, The World-Engendering Logos, had historically and might still find its resting place — even its Sovereignty — within that dogmatic structure. 

If a Father disciplines his son properly, he obviously interferes with His Freedom, particularly in the here-and-now, He put limits on the voluntary expression of His Son’s Being,  forcing him to take his place as a socialized member of The World. 

Such a father requires that all that childish potential be funneled down a singly pathway. In placing such limitations on his son, he might be considered a destructive force, acting as he does to replace the miraculous plurality of childhood with a single narrow actuality. But if the father does not take such action, he merely lets his son remain Peter Pan, the eternal Boy, King of the Lost Boys, Ruler of the non-existent Neverland. That is not a morally acceptable alternative. 

The Dogma of The Church was undermined by The Spirit of Truth strongly developed by The Church itself.

The Problem of Time

QUESTIONING OF SOLDIER O, DAY 336

LORD SAVILLE: 

A VERY SUBSTANTIAL NUMBER OF SHOTS WERE F IRED WITHIN A VERY SHORT DISTANCE OF YOU AND A NUMBER OF PEOPLE WERE KILLED AND A NUMBER OF PEOPLE WERE WOUNDED, AGAIN WITHIN A VERY SHORT DISTANCE OF YOU—

DO YOU HAVE NO RECOLLECTION AT ALL?

 

SOLDIER O: 

NO, SIR, 

IT HAS ALL FADED AND GONE.

QUESTIONING OF SOLDIER L, DAY 381 :

Q: 

AND THE NIGHTMARES THAT YOU HAVE, ARE THOSE RECURRENT NIGHTMARES?

A: 

YES, YES.

Q: 

DO THEY DISTORT REALITY FOR YOU?

A: 

I DO NOT THINK THEY DISTORT IT, THEY BRING IT OUT MORE VISIBLY, 

DETAILS I MISSED BEFORE, YOU KNOW, SOMETIMES SEEM MORE VIVID.

“During the vast Inquiry some of the riddles of Bloody Sunday were finally answered. 

And plenty more were raised.

This whole search for The truth had a disadvantage : 

The Problem of Time. 

Hearings for the Inquiry started almost three decades after the events of 1972. 

The Report finally came almost four decades after the day. 

A more thorough effort to get to The Truth could not be imagined. 

Yet thirty years on is no time to start getting to The Truth. 

A single, disturbing example relating to the Death of Barney McGuigan may demonstrate The Problem.

In her Saville evidence a woman who was a married mother of four in 1972 testified that the morning after Bloody Sunday a group of children were playing by the place where McGuigan had been shot. 

A small boy had been picking bullets out of the nearby wall. 

He came to her, she said, because he had found something “stuck to the wall." 

‘When I looked I saw that it was part of an eyelid. 

It was stuck on the side, about half a yard down from the top of the seat. 

I realised that it must have come from somebody who had been shot and so I put it into a matchbox. 

Later I gave the matchbox to A Priest who said that he would make sure that it was buried. 

I do not know the name of  The Priest.’

This might only provide one last grim detail of the shooting of Barney McGuigan. 

But even on this relatively simple and certainly memorable detail about one of the victims there is no agreement over What Had Happened or When.

Seamus Carlin testified that on the day of the march itself, after the bodies had been taken away, he saw a blue civil rights banner on the floor steeped in McGuigan’s blood, and that on top of that banner was A Matchbox. 

He testified, 

‘Someone gave me The Matchbox which contained Barney McGuigan’s lower eyelid. 

I took it away and gave it to My Brother who asked A Priest what to do with it. 

The Priest told him to put it on The Ground.’

John Patrick Friel testified that after the shooting (when The Body itself may or may not have still been there, he was not sure) ‘someone pointed out to me that Bernard McGuigan’s eyelid was stuck to the wall of Block 2. 

It was about four or five feet above the pavement, directly below the kitchen window of our flat. 

I had simply never seen anything like it. 

I will stand over this statement until the day I die. 

I definitely saw this but I am still confused as to the exact time. 

It is possible that Barney McGuigan’s body had already been removed from the spot where he died. 

This could have been shortly after my first sight of his covered body or it may even have been the next day.’

Noel Millar said that immediately after the shooting finished, and before the body was covered, ‘I could see the body of the man whom I had seen fall, whom I know to be Barney McGuigan. 

He was not covered by anything at this time. 

Someone drew my attention to the eyelid and eyelash which was stuck to the gable end wall at about head height. 

Someone asked whether anyone had a matchbox. 

I did so I lifted the eyelid off the wall with a matchstick, put it in the matchbox and placed it near Barney McGuigan’s head, on the ground.’

James Patrick McCafferty, who spent the day itself trying to tune in to army radio on the airwaves, testified that he went back down to the Bogside the day after Bloody Sunday and there ‘noticed about five feet up the wall on my right (the gable end) north wall of Block 2 of the Rossville Flats that there was a perfectly formed eyelid complete with eyelashes stuck to the wall. 

There was not a tear in the eyelid; it was so perfect.

‘The eyelid was stuck to the wall about five feet up and approximately halfway along the wall. I cannot recall precisely how far but believe it may have been a little further towards the car park end of the wall… Blood was splattered all around it.

‘I was drawn to the eyelid on the wall, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. 

A small crowd gathered around and some body got a matchbox out and put the eyelid in it. 

Personally I did not think that was the right thing to do, but we did not know what else to do. 

The box was placed on the ground on the civil rights banner which had been used the previous day but which was now saturated with blood and on the floor near the barricade… 

Since then I have learnt that the bullet that killed Mr Bernard McGuigan, the father of my school friend Charlie McGuigan, came out of his eye. 

From this I concluded that the eyelid that I found must have been Mr Bernard McGuigan’s eyelid. 

Although I have talked to Charlie about that day, I did not tell him what I saw.’

The story has a number of other variants from numerous other sources. 

Some claimed to have taken the eyelid down themselves. 

Others claimed that they were with the person who did but name different people. 

One said her daddy took it down, others a friend. 

For some it happened straight after the shooting, for others the next morning, some late the next day. 

Others claimed that they saw two eyelids. 

No two stories match and if you named all the number of people who claimed to have been the person or to have been with the person who did this small act, the list would run to more than twenty.

Were any of these people wrong? Certainly. 

Possibly all of them. 

But were they lying? Almost certainly not. 

They were Saying What They Remembered.

Perhaps one of them was the person who placed the eyelid by the body. Or perhaps whoever it was that carried out this small, stunned act of kindness has been dead for years. 

In any case very many people transferred something they had either seen or heard about and took it into their own memory. 

When The Call went out for those with evidence about the day to come forward, the day itself was a long way back in memory.

In the intervening years some people embellished or invented small parts of what they did on that day. Some consciously. Some entirely unconsciously. 

Some must have come to the Inquiry and decided that they were not willing to backtrack on a story they had been telling for years. 

Others may have told the story so often in pubs and at gatherings that the invented or elaborated memory had become a real one – as accurate a description of what was in their mind’s eye as anything that they actually saw. 

Still others may never have intended to mislead anyone. 

Some witnesses admitted that they feared their memory might have become contaminated over the years by images they saw subsequently on film or television.

If The Truth of what happened on Bloody Sunday was already messy, over the course of decades it became far messier. 

Memories had amalgamated, shifted and in some cases been remade. 

And of course for some, who had never had any intention to mislead, the subconscious and indeed the conscience played a consoling trick.

There were many people who had helped those who were dying. But under the circumstances not only was there little they could do; for most people, like the Knights of Malta first-aid volunteer tending to McGuigan, there was nothing they could do even when they wanted to. 

The guilt of those who saw neighbours, family friends and community figures killed before them, and the knowledge that at a central point in their own lives as well as in the life of their city they could not save somebody, meant that their consciences consoled them with facts – even created ones.

One man who was with a local priest who went to the aid of a dying boy said with rare candour, ‘I had the normal human instinct to stay and see what I could do to help, but another part of me was telling me to get away to safety as soon as I could. 

I think that one of the reasons that Father Daly is so remembered from that day is that he stayed with Jack Duddy while he died, and did not think about his own safety. 

I wanted to get away.’ 

That is a perfectly normal instinct. But it is a rare one to express. Extraordinary acts of bravery by ordinary people were carried out that day, Barney McGuigan’s efforts to aid a dying man among them. But most people are not heroes and have to find ways to comfort themselves in the meantime.

The case of McGuigan’s eyelid is just one relatively unimportant example. But it is a reminder of something crucial about this search for justice. Even during everyday incidents, people come up with wildly different versions of what they have seen. Place people amid deeply traumatic events, with crowds fleeing down narrow lanes, bodies lying in familiar streets and shots ricocheting in all directions, then try to recreate what people think they saw three decades later, and arriving at a truth becomes, if not impossible, then certainly extremely hard.

Yet this was exactly the task that Lord Saville and his Inquiry had been set. It was their task to sift through the evidence. It would take twelve years to try to find the complex and upsetting truths about what had happened in the space of a few minutes, one day in 1972.”

Excerpt From

Bloody Sunday

Douglas Murray

Mere Words

It's only words, 

and words are all I have

To take your heart away

The Author,

JOSE CHUNG: 

What is your opinion of hypnosis?

The Skeptic,

SPECIAL AGENT DANA SCULLY: 

I know that it has its therapeutic value, but it has never been proven to enhance memory. 

In fact, it actually worsens it since, since, since people in that state or prone to confabulation.

The Author,

JOSE CHUNG: 

When I was doing research for my book "The Caligarian Candidate..."

SCULLY: 

One of the greatest thrillers ever written.

The Author,

JOSE CHUNG: 

Oh...

(He chuckles.)

Thank you. I was, uh... 

interested in how the C.I.A., 

when conducting their MK-Ultra mind control experiments back in the '50s, 

had no idea  — How Hypnosis Worked.

SCULLY: 

Hmm.

The Author,

JOSE CHUNG: 

Or, What it Was.

SCULLY: 

No one still knows.

The Author,

JOSE CHUNG: 

Still, as A Storyteller, I'm fascinated how a person's sense of consciousness can be... so transformed by nothing more magical than LISTENING to WORDS. 

Mere. Words.

mere (adj.)

late 14c., of a voice, "pure, clear;" mid-15c., of abstract things, "absolute, sheer;" from Old French mier "pure" (of gold), "entire, total, complete," and directly from Latin merus "unmixed" (of wine), "pure; bare, naked;" figuratively "true, real, genuine," according to some sources probably originally "clear, bright," from PIE *mer- "to gleam, glimmer, sparkle" (source also of Old English amerian "to purify," Old Irish emer "not clear," Sanskrit maricih "ray, beam," Greek marmarein "to gleam, glimmer"). But de Vaan writes "there is no compelling reason to derive 'pure' from 'shining,'" and compares Hittite marri "just so, gratuitously," and suggests the source is a PIE *merH-o- "remaining, pure." 

 

The English sense of "nothing less than, in the fullest sense absolute" (mid-15c., surviving now only in vestiges such as mere folly) existed for centuries alongside the apparently opposite sense of "nothing more than" (1580s, as in a mere dream).

mere (n.1)

"pool, small lake, pond," from Old English mere "sea, ocean; lake, pool, pond, cistern," from Proto-Germanic *mari (source also of Old Norse marr, Old Saxon meri "sea," Middle Dutch maer, Dutch meer "lake, sea, pool," Old High German mari, German Meer "sea," Gothic marei "sea," mari-saiws "lake"), from PIE root *mori- "body of water." The larger sense of "sea, arm of the sea" has been obsolete since Middle English. Century Dictionary reports it "Not used in the U.S. except artificially in some local names, in imitation of British names."

mere (n.2)

"boundary line" (between kingdoms, estates, fields, etc.), now surviving in provincial use or place names, but once an important word, from Old English mære "boundary, object indicating a boundary," from Proto-Germanic *mairjo- (source also of Middle Dutch mere "boundary mark, stake," Old Norse -mæri "boundary, border-land"), related to Latin murus "wall" (see mural (n.)).

The Rule of Three

Folie à deux (‘madness for two’), also known as shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD), is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations, are transmitted from one individual to another.

[Cage]

(Time’s Champion is practising his juggling with Mags.) 

CAPTAIN: 

Mags. 

MAGS: 

What? 

CAPTAIN: 

It's not going to work. 

I remember when I was on the baleful plains of Grolon, I —

MAGS: 

I don't care. 

TIME’S CHAMPION :

Ready? 

(Mags and the Doctor go to the cage door, where a pair robot clowns stand guard.) 

TIME’S CHAMPION :

I believe I'm on first. 

MAGS: 

No, I'm ahead of you. 

TIME’S CHAMPION :

No, you're not. 

MAGS: 

No, I am. 

TIME’S CHAMPION :

I insist on going out first. 

MAGS: 

Oh no, you don't. 

TIME’S CHAMPION : 

Oh yes, I do — Look, I insist I’m going on first. 

MAGS: 

I told you, I am. 

TIME’S CHAMPION : 

I am! 

(The clowns come over and the door slides up. 

The Doctor and Mags knock them out with the clubs —

Now, you might start to think to yourself something along the lines of : 

“Hang on, wait a minute — The Escape Plan was to stage a fake argument in the waiting area to lure the guards into unlocking the gate, in order to enter with them to investigate all the commotion, whereupon they club the two clowns over their heads with the juggling clubs to render both unconscious, while they made their escape....

How does that work, just simply hitting them on the head with a heavy object, seeing as how the guards are both android drones...?

Simple — Comic Timing.

They are Robot Clowns [Not Clown Robots]

So, in which case, 

TIME’S CHAMPION : 

Join the club. Captain? 

CAPTAIN: 

No thanks, old boy. 

I'll sit this one out. 

Goodbye, Mags. 

MAGS: 

Bye, Captain.

John Frederick Parker

He became one of Washington’s original police officers when the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia was created in 1861.

During his time as an officer, he was charged with dereliction of duty and conduct unbecoming an officer several times for being drunk on duty, sleeping on streetcars while at work, and visiting a brothel (Parker claimed the madam had sent for him). Parker was typically reprimanded for these acts but never fired.

On April 14, 1865, President Lincoln, his wife Mary Todd Lincoln, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris were attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre. Parker was assigned to guard the entrance to the President’s box where the four were seated. He is known to have, at first, stayed at his assigned post, but he later told family members that he was then released by Lincoln until the end of the play. During the intermission, Parker went to a nearby tavern with Lincoln’s valet and coachman.7

It is unclear whether Parker ever returned to the theater, but he was not at his post when John Wilkes Booth shot the President. Parker was charged with neglect of duty and tried on May 3, 1865, but no transcripts of the case were kept. The complaint was dismissed on June 2, 1865. Despite leaving his post the night Lincoln was shot, Parker was still assigned to work security at the White House. Before Mary Todd Lincoln moved out of the White House following her husband’s death, Parker was assigned as her bodyguard. Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley overheard Mrs. Lincoln yell to Parker, “So you are on guard tonight, on guard in the White House after helping to murder the President.”

Parker attempted to defend himself stating that he “could never stoop to murder much less to the murder of so good and great a man as the President. I did wrong, I admit, and have bitterly repented.” 

Mrs. Lincoln told Parker that she would always think he was responsible for the President’s death and angrily dismissed him from the room.

Parker remained on the police force until 1868 when he was fired for sleeping on duty.

A Woman’s Ego

You know, we're fucked up here. I tell you, Satan's going to have no trouble taking over here 'cause all the women are going to say: "What a cute butt!”

“He's Satan!" 

“You don't know him like I do." 

“He's The Prince of Darkness!" 

“•I• can change him."

And I bet that's true, man. I wouldn't give Satan a snowball's chance in Hell against a woman's ego. 

He'd rule The Earth for a day, then we'd see him outside, mowing the lawn. 

“Hey, aren't you Satan?" 

"Shut up." 

"Ooh, Mr. Prince of Darkness, you forgot the edge back there." 

"Shut up." 

You'll see him at the supermarket buying "Tampons, aisle three …" 

"Aren't you Satan?"

"Shut up." 

"You're pussy-whipped!" 

"No, I'm Satan! Grrr!" 

"You're not Prince of Darkness, you're Pussy-whipped of Darkness!"

FINGERPRINTS

“The flaws in the Schengen Agreement lay not only in the presumptions it made about history. The terrible flaw in Schengen was the way in which its principles were practised. For instance, although member states committed to cooperate in policing the outer borders of the continent, in reality the task was left to the front-line states. Throughout the late 1990s and 2000s Italy, Spain and Greece were abandoned to deal with the inflow alone. 

Even after the creation of the EU border-force Frontex in 2004, the southern states continued to bear the burden. As an exasperated Italian Interior Minister, Angelino Alfano, had to remind his counterparts during the Lampedusa crisis in 2014, ‘The Mediterranean border is a European border.’ 

But it was not only the burden of policing the borders for the whole continent that stretched the Mediterranean countries during this period. These were also the three (to date) iterations of the Dublin Regulation on asylum, an EU-wide agreement that was instituted from the 1990s onwards. 

The aim of the several versions of the Dublin Regulation was to ensure that the EU member state in which a migrant requested asylum was the state that was legally compelled to process that application. In theory it was meant to prevent multiple applications by migrants or their shuttlecocking between states. 

In practice the Dublin Regulation put the onus on the southern states. Given that the boatloads of people with or without documentation were arriving to claim asylum in Italy and Greece rather than Holland or Germany, the Dublin Regulation gave countries like Italy and Greece only a few potential options. 

They could feel impelled to process the asylum applications of every migrant who landed. 

Or they could encourage migrants not to apply for asylum where they landed but instead to head north to find their way to other member states, applying for asylum once there. 

As of Dublin III (which came into force in 2013) the country where fingerprints and asylum claims are stored is the state compelled to see through the asylum process and offer asylum. 

With thousands of people arriving in southern Europe every day, by the time this iteration came in it seems extraordinary that the northern states seriously expected the southern states not to try to find ways to get around this commitment. 

One way in which they did so was by ensuring that the country of arrival did not take the fingerprints of all the new arrivals. If they did so then they would be compelled to see through the rest of the process and potentially offer asylum. 

Far easier to push the migrants north, undocumented, un-fingerprinted and unidentified. The number of people this happened to is unknown and unknowable, but front-line workers privately admit to it happening all the time. 

So Dublin III, which was meant to make the process clearer, in practice incentivised states not to participate in the system at all. 

What is more, migrants coming in 2015 knew that if they gave their fingerprints they would have to stay in the country they were in, and so the migrants themselves increasingly refused to provide them. 

The Italian and Greek authorities could not force them to do so, and as the flow increased both migrants and the southern states had similar reasons not to follow the procedures. If a migrant had expressed a desire to head to northern Europe, it was better for Greece and Italy not to fingerprint them than to do so. Otherwise both migrant and country of arrival would have been faced with another asylum procedure in a country that did not want them and where the migrant did not want to be. The Dublin Regulation, like the Schengen Agreement, turned out to be appealing when migration into the continent was at what had by then become normal levels. But they were catastrophic when migration became the biblical phenomenon it turned into in 2015. Everywhere, feelings seemed to be overriding reality. The German Chancellor, who only a few months earlier had explained to the Lebanese girl that ‘politics was hard’, was reported to have been ‘touched’ by a group of Albanians, Syrians and Iraqis filmed at the train station in Budapest on 1 September as they shouted ‘Germany, Germany, Merkel, Merkel’. Later, as she went to greet arriving migrants in person, Merkel smiled, looking relaxed and happy, as she posed for selfie photos with them taken on their camera phones.”

Knee-Angle

kneel (v.)

Old English cneowlian "to kneel, fall on the knees," from Proto-Germanic *knewljan (source also of Middle Low German knelen, Middle Dutch cnielen, Dutch knielen Gothic knussjan), from PIE root *genu- (1) "knee; angle." Past tense knelt is a modern formation (19c.) on analogy of feel/felt, etc. Related: Kneeler; kneeling.