Why forgiveness is overrated

 From the article on Huffington Post:

The current Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has conceded that the sexual abuse of a child is a crime in both civil and canon law. You might, perhaps, think that someone who's read the New Testament might conclude it wasn't a great idea on other grounds, too, but we're clearly not talking about a nation of religious Einsteins. What we are talking about is a state-sanctioned squad of (presumably psychopathic) paedophiles who systematically set about destroying people's lives. But now, luckily, the Catholic Church is sorry.

Six thousand miles away, another prominent Christian is sorry. He's called Kaing Guek Eav, but he's better known as Comrade Duch. As head of Tuol Sleng prison from 1975 to 1979, he was the Khmer Rouge's executioner-in-chief. The prisoners in his care were beaten, mutilated and subjected to electric shocks, and then bludgeoned to death and buried in mass graves. "I am," he calmly told a packed courtroom this week, "solely and individually responsible for the loss of at least 12,380 lives." And then he made an astonishing request. "As for the families," he said, "I am asking you to kindly leave your door open for me to make my apologies. May I meet with you to allow me to share your intense and enduring sorrow?"

There has, apparently, been no great rush. Which, perhaps, isn't surprising. There's hardly a single person in Cambodia who was not affected by the mass manipulation, and mass murder, by the Khmer Rouge. Everyone lost relatives. Many lived in (cramped, filthy, degrading) refugee camps for years and years. When you ask Cambodians about that period in their (very recent) history, they mostly go quiet. On a trip to the country earlier this year, our guide took us to Tuol Sleng, pointed to the torture chambers, and refused to go inside. And why would you want to? Why would you want to see the blood on the floor, or walls, or ceiling, that might be your father's, or your uncle's, or your aunt's? What can you say? That that was then and it's all fine now? But it isn't fine now, and I'm not sure it ever will be.

These fine "gentlemen" are deserving of the eternal and enduring hobnail boot of fate delivered swiftly to the groin.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost