The Forum Furies.
Orestes pursued by the Furies by Adolphe-William Bouguereau
In the Eumenides there is a passage redolent of the current trend for avenging ‘wrongs’ that are perceived not to be addressed by the legal system.
If this legal action triumphs,
if now this matricide prevails,
then newly set divine decrees
will overthrow all order.
Mortals will at once believe
that everything’s permitted.
From now on parents can expect
repeated blows of suffering
inflicted by their children—
now and in time yet to come.
Fundamentalist Muslims gather on the Jihad sites wailing for a Western head on a platter in compensation for their dead brethren; vigilantes congregate on the Baby ‘P’ ‘mourn porn’ sites demanding self-righteous retribution against those not perceived to have been sufficiently punished by the law; an hysterical mob flits from forum to forum in salivating pursuit of the latest rumour that the McCann’s have been at least insulted, perhaps defamed, poked, prodded, or otherwise disturbed as Madeleine waits patiently for justice.
The ‘Furies’ that pursued Orestes claimed that most ancient of legal concepts, Natural Law, as do the Forum Furies, but it is not a law that they claim to take into their own hands, but lawlessness. The lawlessness of the lynch mob in the Southern States, the knee capping of renegade mobsters in Northern Ireland, the burning tyres placed round necks in Southern Africa. We condemn these acts as being those of primitive societies, in truth, Natural Law is no more than private vengeance.
The language of the Forum Furies is invariably that of religion. ‘in Allah we trust‘, ‘an eye for an eye‘, phrases like ‘have faith’, ‘God willing‘ punctuate the calls for physical violence – ‘I’d castrate them‘, ‘Burn their house down‘ – in seeming ignorance of the fact that the Bible was an early supporter of the need to protect wrongdoers from the vengeance of the mob. It was God himself (allegedly!) who said to the frightened Cain, banished to the land of Nod for murdering his brother, ‘Therefore whoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold’ – and the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.
The Forum Furies claim ‘free speech’ as their talisman to guide their righteous path, but free speech will never encompassed defamation and libel. Free speech is protected in most Western countries to allow you to express an opinion, not to express someone else’s opinion as fact. It is a dividing line that appears little understood.
Prior to the invention of the Internet, and the concurrent media fuelled circus that followed the death of Princess Diana, there was little opportunity, outside of the snug bar of your local public house, for the hate-fuelled, psuedo-emotional display of invective that is now routinely swapped on the Internet.
Reason replaced by emotion, behind the twitching international net curtains of Internet anonymity.
Inevitably, there will be someone who will make the journey from forumland to direct action; from armchair Jihadist to Assiette de la tête; from pyjamahideen to suicide bomber; from exponent of free speech to evangelical slayer of negligent parents.
Athena, the goddess appointed to mediate between Orestes and his avenging, pursuing Furies, said to them “You wish to be considered righteous, but not to act with justice.”
The Eumenides continues:
But these Furies also have their function.
That’s something we just cannot set aside.
So if they fail to triumph in this case,
they’ll spread their poisonous resentment—
it will seep underground, infecting us,
bring perpetual disease upon our land,
something we can’t bear. So stands the case.
There is a place for campaigning free speech, to continue to illustrate the injustices which can occur under our fallible legal system. It is one that we conduct outside of the rules of our legal system at our peril. The law exists to protect all of us from the antics of criminals, we cannot pick and choose who are the criminals – the criminals are those who break the law for whatever reason.
Baroness Scotland and the Labour Government would do well to ponder why we have this growing tide of individuals who have no respect for the law.
3,000 new laws in 10 years, many created to promote a social ideology, and an Attorney-General who feels that breaking them is ‘an administrative matter’ will not turn back the tsunami of individuals who feel that the only recourse open to them is to support a return to the mores of primitive society.
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September 29, 2009 at 4:02 pm -
Is watching Gordon Brown’s conference speech a return to a more primitive way of life?…..
Gotcha…I wouldn’t watch Brown if he was taking the last penalty in the World Cup Final with a grannie on each arm and baby sat on his head – multitasking ya know – I’d rather die. You make a good point though!!
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September 29, 2009 at 4:18 pm -
A case of lighting the blue touchpaper and retiring a safe distance, perhaps? The inability to police and control the net effectively has been p’ing off the powers-that-be, since its inception – that’s why we continue to have a constant stream of scare stories, designed to convince us that greater governmental control of cyberspace is a “good thing” and in our best interests. Total loblocks, of course, but highlighting the extreme has always been a key tactic in this campaign – the vast majority of the virtual world stay well within the legal framework, just like in the real world. Personally, I’m with Neil Young, when describing “the middle of the road”: “Travelling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.”
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September 29, 2009 at 4:56 pm -
At first glance I took the illustration to be Sharon Osborne, Paula Abdul, Danniiiiiiiiiiii Minogue and Cheryl Cole all exasperatedly giving Simon Cowell the benefit of their superior fashion-sense and dragging him off for some better fitting trousers; good job I put my glasses on…..
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September 29, 2009 at 6:50 pm -
Until you’ve been closely involved with children being hurt you cannot know nor understand the natural emotion that replaces reason – not from a genuine loving person wronged- as there are (plenty) -when that happens reason can just f*ck RIGHT off
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September 29, 2009 at 7:46 pm -
People who cannot control their emotions gain nothing by losing their reason.
It is a fact of life that most acts of so called Natural Justice are perpetrated in Prisons by people who are themselves criminals. Very elevating I must say, especially when committed on the behalf of more reasonable people who likely don’t want such a thing.
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September 29, 2009 at 10:04 pm -
When a child smacks her doll for being naughty it’s obvious that the inanimate doll did nothing to cause the smacking and therefore the child must be acting out some inner drama. It’s not so obvious that the same process is occurring if I hurl death threats at Ian Huntley over the internet, but when I think about it I have to admit that I’ve never met the bloke, he’s no more than an illusion to me, and that I’m really just using him to project my own emotional garbage onto.
I think that was what Jung was writing about with his concept of the Shadow – a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts which is prone to project, thus turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else.
The flip side of us projecting our bile onto convenient villains is our urge to empathise with the victims of those villains. Empathy is a virtue that evolved at a stage in human development when the average person only knew of people in their immediate vicinity, and empathy benefited the group as a whole by moving individuals to help each other survive. Now, in an age of world-wide communication we find ourselves reflexively feeling empathy for people that we will never meet and nearly always can do nothing to help.
Where television is the perfect medium to evoke mass empathy for people that we don’t actually know well enough to truly care about, so the internet has become the perfect medium to project bile onto people who we imagine are deserving of it and so it becomes a public toilet for the emotionally incontinent. This is not to say that villains aren’t evil or that victims don’t deserve sympathy, but just that our emotional reactions to remote dramas are synthetic and say more about us than those they are aimed at.
People who think that an emotional reaction is self-justifying – “I feel strongly therefore my emotion must be right” – merely enslave themselves to the torrent of bad news that hits us 24/7, and offer themselves up for every manipulative conspiracy theorist to tinkle on like a pub piano.
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September 29, 2009 at 10:20 pm -
Convicted and guilty people like Ian Huntley deserve our contempt, be it psychobabble or not. It is the fact that we pamper them during their incarceration that says a lot more about how they are viewed by the justice system.
Do I think he should be a public toilet for the emotionally incontinent? Let me cast the first turd.
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September 29, 2009 at 10:22 pm -
Good comment, Bloke with Nadgers. Just as I suspect that those of us who are outraged by the bile, in some way enjoy being outraged. It’s a thought that crosses my mind from time to time. But it is comforting to know that I am outraged, although God knows why. I am still trying to work that one out. But I keep on coming back to Camels and Needles.
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September 29, 2009 at 11:05 pm -
Oh thank goodness for the furies – imagine a world without them. Eumenides is right – so is the bloke with nadgers. But, Sabot, I wouldn`t say it was enjoyment, more satisfaction.
I totally own up to the satisfaction gained in living out my own inner drama/anger in seeing `my bad guys` get their cumuppence. Its transference or projection (I get confused over this difference).
My own furie is with so called authority figures (parents, priests, politicians, bosses or anyone who has responsibility to or for others) who think they can get away with abuse and lies. I`m aware of my own inner drama – I wish others were too. But its no bad thing – imagine a world where there was not outrage.
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September 29, 2009 at 11:51 pm -
I can’t say I’ve ever done “furious” – “somewhat peeved” perhaps, or “slightly narked” maybe, but “furious” seems such a waste of energy, somehow. Some folk must enjoy it, though, given the amount of righteous indignation flying around out there – I just can’t be arsed, myself.
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September 30, 2009 at 12:13 am -
Thank you, Idacyder. I feel somewhat better now. I shall go back to feeling satisfied in an outraged sort of way.
Just so long as I don’t have to get a life. I think I’ve forgotten how.
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September 30, 2009 at 12:45 am -
The Furies were also the Just Ones or Justice-doers. Sometimes the pursuit of wrongdoing needs anger to energise it.
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September 30, 2009 at 12:47 am -
And give it courage perhaps. The Welsh say that anger is as good as courage in a fight.
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September 30, 2009 at 12:52 am -
You think you had a lucky escape Gloria, I thought it said furries before I put my glasses on!
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September 30, 2009 at 11:42 am -
Interesting stuff, and it (sort of) touches on why I am so vehemently opposed to the death penalty. If I kill you, that’s a terrible crime, but if the state kills me afterwards, that’s “justice”? No – it’s revenge.
The judicial system is so important for precisely that reason; if it was left to those who have suffered (eg the parents of a murdered child) to hand out the penalties, we might as well legalise lynch mobs. (Actually, they probably WOULD be lynch mobs).
The Soham case also illustrated how public anger can distort reality; Huntley was widely reported to have worked as a caretaker at the girls’ primary school. Wrong – he worked at the local secondary school, a completely different institution, and had already met Maxine Carr in a different part of the country before moving to Soham, so no amount of vetting procedures would have prevented the deaths of those girls.
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September 30, 2009 at 1:59 pm -
To The Dean. I don’t know enough about The Soham Murders to comment, but I can’t help feeling that if there was a central register, then more lives might be saved, although which lives, we would never know. But they are all so involved with guarding their own patch.
Ian Huntley, was however, never charged with a crime before hand, so would suspicion be even justifiable?
But none of this will ever change my mind on The Death Penalty. I don’t even want to quantify it, or offer excuses against it. It is simply inexcusable. I knew that when I was sixteen years old.
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September 30, 2009 at 3:30 pm -
Hi Sabot,
Thanks for the thoughtful comments.
The point I was making about Huntley was merely to state that, even if there had been some sort of register of ‘unsuitable persons’ (or whatever), and even if Huntley had been on that list and had therefore been prevented from working at a school, he was already living with Carr in a girlfriend/boyfriend relationship and might still have been at home when the girls visited that day (they were regular vistors to Carr at her home).
Monstrous killers, or would-be killers, are out there and not even vetting procedures and so on will necessarily prevent them committing their evil crimes.
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September 30, 2009 at 3:50 pm -
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September 30, 2009 at 10:50 pm -
god forbid that we should watch our children ‘all the time’…
we don’t conduct our lives on the expectation that the worst will happen at any second, and neither should we.
its bad enough that we berate the victim when it does.
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September 30, 2009 at 10:51 pm -
good post at 10.04 from bloke with nadgers.
this is my main objection to the mccann haters. all i ever hear about is their pathology. nothing about the case itself.
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September 30, 2009 at 11:21 pm -
Exactly!
A 3 year old is perfectly capable of babysitting a couple of two year olds.
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September 30, 2009 at 11:54 pm -
I’m with you, Saul. A 3-year-old could look after dogs and water the plants too, if there would be any.
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October 1, 2009 at 8:48 am -
Speaking of the internets: if you google “Cilla” in Guido Fawkes’, you get a lot fo Error 404’s although you can still find a lot of “McCanns” comments and not all of them very kind. Autumn cleaning?
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October 1, 2009 at 9:31 am -
“A 3 year old is perfectly capable of babysitting a couple of two year olds.”
unfortunate behaviour under any circumstances. however it doesn’t come anywhere near providing a motive, means or opportunity to implicate them in a crime, far less one of the rather improbable and gothic proportions suggested by the mccann haters.
except for the international conspiracy and cover up of course. probably intergalactic by now.
back to basics. as they say.
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October 1, 2009 at 9:37 am -
I disagree on lack of motive (for “corpse occultation” and faking abduction) . Loss of custody of remaining children, loss of career, loss of livelihood. People have faked abductions for a lot less.
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October 1, 2009 at 10:28 am -
If you don’t like the contents of these forums – there’s a simple answer don’t read ‘em.
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October 1, 2009 at 11:40 am -
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October 1, 2009 at 7:05 pm -
“I disagree on lack of motive (for “corpse occultation” and faking abduction) . Loss of custody of remaining children, loss of career, loss of livelihood.”
why would any of those things have happened?
now you’ve got to invent a motive for the motive.
cos there sure isn’t any evidence for one.
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October 1, 2009 at 7:07 pm -
“If you don’t like the contents of these forums – there’s a simple answer don’t read ‘em.”
yeah well jez, simple things please simple minds.
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October 1, 2009 at 8:19 pm -
Simply don’t leave your children unattended.
Simple.
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October 1, 2009 at 8:42 pm -
So, you think the parents or one of their friends was there when Madeleine was abducted?
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October 1, 2009 at 8:45 pm -
“So, you think the parents or one of their friends was there when Madeleine was abducted?”
who are you asking, and what are you suggesting?
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October 1, 2009 at 8:48 pm -
“Simply don’t leave your children unattended.
Simple.”yeah. simple saul.
like tragedies and unforseen events just couldn’t happen then?
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October 1, 2009 at 9:11 pm
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