And no mention of the innocents who died before, during and after the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland 20 years ago.
Aren't half-truths just lies by another name?
'Fighting like hell' seems like an apt metaphor for those who endorse terrorism in Northern Ireland and other parts of the world.
I commend with all my heart the work of the Irish Famine/Genocide Committee. And I regret that I shall be unable to attend the forum on May 1-2. I shall be in Harrisburg, PA, speaking at a rally against the barbarity of capital punishment.
Frequent trips to Ireland in the dark days of the hunger strike and since, have strengthened my work for peace, here and elsewhere.
No peace without justice. An ingredient of that elusive justice for the Irish people, is a direct, lucid confrontation with the myths concerning the Great Hunger.
One asks, and rightly, who owns the memories? How is it that the perpetrators of crime seize on memory, sanitise it of guilt, and turn it to their own advantage?
It must be understood: the tactic enables the guilty to perpetuate a fiction of absolute power over the victim.
We must seize the memory, correct the record, name the criminal, deny the myth of victor and victim, of powerful and powerless.
And this is not solely or even primarily for our own sake; the process belongs to all people, those who have survived this tormented century, and those who have not.
The reclaiming of memory belongs to everyone who has known gulag and death row and torture chamber, fast unto death, disappearance and slavery and intimidation, racism and sexism and homophobia.
Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living! Reclaim the memory! So doing, we reclaim our own humanity.
Daniel Berrigan, S. J.