Beware the Forgiveness Fascists

We’ve just passed the time of year when people find themselves contemplating christian thoughts, even if they have no interest in christianity whatsoever.

A few weeks ago, an acquaintance was getting very misty-eyed about Martin and Rachel Ridall, who declared that they had forgiven the woman, Hannah Saaf, who killed their 11-year-old son Sam in a hit and run accident last year.

‘Aww, isn’t that amazing,’ said the acquaintance, ‘I wish everyone could just forgive each other and put all their differences behind them.’ She was a bit miffed when I pointed out that forgiveness is not always an ideal position, and I half expected her to wheel out that Mandela quote that goes ‘Blah blah is like drinking poison and thinking it will kill your enemy,’ in this case, inserting ‘Not forgiving someone’ in place of the ‘blah blah’. I’ve seen several different versions of these words on the web and have no idea which the real one is, but this makes no difference at all to the forgiveness fascists. They think themselves terribly clever for quoting it, and feel very smug.

These are the kind of people who blithely invite sworn enemies to the same party, stand well back from the fireworks, and then say, ‘I just want everybody to get along.’ These are the kind of people who, when you are foolish enough to mention your problematic relationship with someone, will lecture you about having compassion for them. In fact, I once had the misfortune to share a tube journey home with one particular new-age ninny, who was very keen to tell me that my feelings about a close relative of mine were somehow misguided, and that if I could somehow take a video camera and make a film about the relative’s own childhood, somehow I would be able to understand them and it would all make it better.

These are also the kind of people who talk about cancer sufferers being ‘fighters’, and insist that positive thinking will cure all ills.

What is so irritating about these people, and ultimately so toxic, is that they are implying that these situations involve choices, and that you are somehow lacking if you don’t make the ‘correct’ one. There is something profoundly coercive about being told that your feelings are somehow wrong; that you somehow haven’t ‘got it’. Blaming the victim is the ultimate goal here – forgiveness fascism is part of a very cheap, sentimental black-and-white universe which really doesn’t exist.

What the FFs refuse to acknowledge is that feelings cannot be bought and sold like a pair of shoes. Forgiveness isn’t something you can work at. It’s like falling in love. It comes from deep inside and you can’t tell it when to appear. It’s not like a tap you can turn on and off.

Before Christmas I read Alice Miller’s The Body Never Lies – The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting. Her thesis, in brief, is that cruelty to a child by a parent will manifest as physical illness later on in life, if not acknowledged. She asserts that a lot of the pain people go through as adults is caused by the lingering effects of the fourth commandment, ‘Honour thy father and mother,’ and the obligation to accept whatever they did, simply because they were your parents. This rang a lot of bells with me. I know many people who have never been able to forgive a parent for their actions. They may deperately want to be free of the past, but forgiveness is never that easy, and feelings can’t be glibly written off or bullied away. Constantly being told how you ought to feel or behave does nothing to help.

It’s all part of our ugly media-led culture of comparison, which of course can be happily ignored until a forgiveness fascist turns up on your own doorstep. I truly hope the Ridells are sincere – during a time of terrible crisis, we must clutch at anything that stops us going mad – but for most of us it’s not a matter of choice.