18 Quotes by Patrick Radden Keefe

Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one's own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the "plastic Paddies" who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.

Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one's own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store.. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the "plastic Paddies" who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.

There is a concept in psychology called ‘moral injury,’ notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done during wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.

Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence? It was a question that was dogging Northern Ireland as a whole.

Dating back to the Iliad, ancient Egypt and beyond, burial rites have formed a critical function in most human societies. Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruelest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty.

The body is a fantastic machine,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College interviews, recounting the grueling sequence of a hunger strike. ‘It’ll eat off all the fat tissue first, then it starts eating away at the muscle, to keep your brain alive.’ Long after Hughes and Price called an end to their strikes and attempted to reintegrate into society, the nursed old grudges and endlessly replayed their worst wartime abominations. In a sense, they never stopped devouring themselves.

Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator. Should the state be accorded more leniency because, legally speaking, it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? Or, conversely, should we hold soldiers and cops to a higher standard than paramilitaries?

It is not those who inflict the most but those who suffer the most who will conquer.

Once, in the summer of 1995, Adams gave a speech at a rally in Belfast. He looked like a politician, in a crisp summer suit, consulting his cue cards. But during a pause in his prepared remarks, someone in the crowd shouted, “Bring back the IRA!” As the audience cheered, Adams chuckled and smiled. Then he leaned into the microphone and said, “They haven’t gone away, you know.