"I find it absolutely incredible that people who were not even born at the time are asking for forgiveness," declared Jean-Marie Le Pen the other day in response to the French bishops' declaration of repentance for the complicity of the Catholic Church in the extermination of 320,000 Jews. Well, he might be a brute, but he does prompt interesting questions (so far as I know, he has not condemned the murder of France's Jews).
Is condemnation or forgiveness at this remove a mere pose, without any useful effect other than on the ego of the person concerned? What good results come from saying we seek the pardon of somebody else for something not done in our lifetime? What good issues from a comparable condemnation? The questions are worth asking in the Irish context, because memories have repeatedly fuelled conflict through the generations (though as it happens, Le Pen's remarks were woefully inappropriate, for the French Catholic Primate, Cardinal Lustiger, is himself Jewish - a Catholic convert whose entire family vanished in the Holocaust, as did the families of many of those at last week's ceremony at Drancy).
IRA apologies
One problem is that apologies themselves do not count for much. The oops-sorry of the IRA over the decades removed much of the value of such apologies, as the oops-sorry mantra rang over shop and bomb, arcade and mission hall and the years rolled by. Oops-sorry, oops-sorry, oops-sorry. A firm purpose of amendment - as Catholics say - is necessary. And more than that: what has been going on - at least internationally - for which we might be reproached in another 50 years' time?
That question was asked by another French churchman, Monsignor Jean-Charles Thomas of Versailles, at Drancy. We know the answer to that, actually: Srebenica has been going on. This generation was given its holocaust to deal with, though the non-Christians of our time were not Jews but Muslims; and being Muslims, were permitted to go to their doom under the careless eyes of the United Nations, whose officials vetoed Nato requests for permission to launch air-strikes against the Serb einsatzgruppen.
It was an ignoble moment; was it also an inevitable one? Is there any reason why soldiers from uninvolved countries should have perished in the incomprehensible wars of Bosnia? The answer to that, I'm sorry to say, is yes, just as there is a good reason why Irishmen have laid down their lives in southern Lebanon. Soldiers are no longer merely bodily instruments of their nation's foreign policy. The dissolution of borders and the internationalisation of conflict resolution has meant that soldiers of many nationalities died in Bosnia. And maybe it would have been better if more had died, only that the men of Srebenica would not have been so cheerfully slaughtered.
So it might be said that if apologies are in order from the French church, they are just not for the Jews whom Catholics either conspired to murder, or whose murder they were silent about, but also for the Muslims killed so recently in Bosnia. If silence be a matter of apology, then who is to be free from apology over that? What did any of us do to stop the rape of Bosnia by the huge Serb army? And what is the moral superiority which attaches to those who choose neutrality and stand by while the murder pits fill and the ovens clank shut?
Powerlessness
Maybe we could have done nothing, of course; but powerlessness should not be a source of pride, merely a statement of condition. Yet the truth is that many of us find pride in that condition, as if unarmed impotence were synonymous with virtue. That is possibly how the Czechs felt when they capitulated to Hitler in 1939.
They were not wrong to capitulate. They could not foresee the Holocaust. Nor could Marshal Petain when he took the brave, hideous but civilised decision to accept the inevitability of defeat in 1940. Further war with the certainty of defeat would have been wicked. But France does not thank Petain, because of what this senile and feeble old man permitted 57 years ago this month: the Law on the Status of Jews.
And the Czechs did not foresee the massacre at Lidice by German troops 55 years ago last June, a foretaste of Srebenica, which, strangely enough, occurred in the very week that the United Nations was founded. One might have thought that in 55 years, the UN could have learned something. Apparently not.
Srebenica and Lidice have something else in common. Both massacres were public affairs, the former almost before the television cameras of the world, the latter announced triumphantly by the Nazi regime. The world's newspapers were full of it - except, as far as I can see, in Ireland. I have been unable to find any mention of this massacre in The Irish Times of the time; presumably it was excised by the censor.
Nazi admissions
This is surely remarkable. It is one thing to censor propaganda falsehoods; but to censor a belligerent's admissions of atrocities suggests a virtuous vigour that was determined no unnecessary fault should be found with the Nazis. How differently might the people of Ireland have thought and behaved if Nazi admissions were publicised?
Of course, at the time we had our own ancestral disagreements to sort out. The IRA, in league with the Nazis, had its latest campaign underway. As Lidice was being destroyed by fire, three Cork IRA men appeared in the Special Criminal Court in Dublin, charged with the heroic deed of trying to blow up the Great War memorial; and we were about the selfsame disagreements 50 years later when Srebenica was put to the sword.
The French hierarchy was, of course, right to speak out about its silence during the Holocaust; but we have no right to judge the French. Our censor seems to have been more vigorous in keeping the truth about the Nazis from the Irish people than were the Nazis themselves; and not even the Vichy regime was guilty of that. So should we say sorry too?