How To Say This?

“Forgive but don’t forget” may sometimes be trite, maudlin, pious nonsense, even offensive. 

At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitburg is an account of the debacle surrounding President Ronald Reagan’s 1985 visit to the German military Kolmeshohe Cemetery near Bitburg, Germany. Intended by the President and the German Chancellor as a gesture of healing between bitter, deadly foes forty years after World War II, the visit created an uproar of protest because of 32 rows of headstones, 49 members of Hitler’s Waffen SS were buried there. The SS were central in the Holocaust in which more than six million Jews and other innocent human beings were systematically murdered by the Nazis. Many, many people and groups, including Jewish groups, protested the visit. The Wikipedia article describes the event fairly objectively.

At the time, an Episcopal priest who was a friend of mine preached a sermon in which he asserted about the Holocaust that after forty years it was time to forgive and forget. The sermon was well-meaning but trite nonsense. Some offenses are beyond either forgiving or forgetting. And if there is to be forgiveness, the only ones in this life who can forgive are the victims, who include unborn generations to the end of time, of those murdered. Bystanders can neither forgive nor judge those who do not forgive.

Yesterday’s news reported that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is comatose and near death in Tripoli. He has prostate cancer. Megrahi is the Libyan man convicted of the December 1988 atrocity that brought down PanAm flight 103 over Scotland just before Christmas, murdering 259 passengers and crew and eleven people in Lockerbie, Scotland. Murdered passengers on PanAm 103 included college students, American sons and daughters on the way home from schools in England for the Christmas holidays. Victims include those young American children and their loved ones, as well as grandchildren and generations who will never be.

There need be no talk of forgiveness in this life for Megrahi. Nor for the man behind PanAm 103, Muammar Gadaffi, fugitive Libyan dictator on the run from justice. Megrahi will die unmourned. When he is caught in hiding, Gadaffi will follow in the footsteps of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

May the ousting and eventual passing of Muammar Gadaffi help bring some closure to all of his victims of the past four decades. He will be an unforgotten evil tyrant of history. Of forgiving him: some may, none must. 

TW