Rwanda and forgiveness

I've been, in odd moments, trying to reflect on forgiveness, with a view to producing a bottom-up theology of the cross which takes in the realities of human forgiving and anger. I intuit that this may help us to get beyond the current atonement wars. Anyway, here's another case-study to add to those I've already blogged about. Nothing new in many ways except that it's a tragedy for yet someone else. It contrasts somewhat with that I blogged about following watching the 'Miracle in Rwanda' play in Edinburgh a couple of years back. It's a long article from the Guardian. Ros Wynne-Jones meets R�v�rien Rurangwa whose family was slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide | World news | The Guardian: "He has no forgiveness to offer the man who killed his family. He is not interested in convenient western constructs such as closure.
'How could one pardon someone who has never asked to be pardoned?' he says. 'It's not up to me to propose this to them; people who killed night and day for three months. People who were tired from killing. People who still want to kill me today. People who don't have any regret. How can one pardon these people?'
Nor has he found any peace or salvation in the Catholicism he was born into. 'My mother died praying to God. Where was He? Why didn't He do anything?' He laughs, a dry sound in his throat. 'When you see the local priests coming with the machete and killing ... When you see a church where 25 Tutsis died is cleaned up, and that the ones who pray in that church are the ones who killed ... I am finished with God.'"
All very understandable and very saddening.
The thing that it brought home to me was the sheer eventually mundanity of genocide: it takes hard work: it's not a crime of passion; it has to be sustained by ideology and indoctrination (supported by a willingness to grant the premises) in order to sustain in turn the systematic and close-to-the-victim 'work' of killing. It seems from the outside so alien and so distant from our experience. Yet we should recall that supported by various plausibility structures, most of us westerners are quite comfortable with buying goods that are produced by slave labour (in effect) or with continuing to pollute the life out of the planet. Okay, not as direct, but similar social-psychological mechanisms support our complicity. And that's a disquieting thought because it really means that, given the 'right/wrong' circumstances, it really could be us.