The Whole Hog: Tragedy Hits Boston

What times we live in. At another moment, the death of Margaret Thatcher would have preoccupied everyone for weeks. Likewise the massive earthquake in Iran ten days ago and its successor in Sichuan province in China.

But in Irish news terms, the Iron Lady was quickly buried beneath, to pick just two events, the rejection of the Croke Park deal and the findings of the inquest into the death of Savita Halappanavar. And then there were the Boston bombs.
The Irish have deep links with America, so the Boston bombings have a particularly powerful resonance here. That the one child who died as a result of the assault had an Irish mother, and many Irish were running in the event, cements the bond.
Yet, on the same day as the Boston marathon attack, 37 people died in car bomb blasts across Iraq. Later in the same week, worshippers who were leaving the Sunni mosque of al-Muthana in Khalis, after Friday prayers, were attacked. Seven were killed and 14 injured. On the same day in oil-rich Kirkuk, a roadside bomb targeting Shi’ite worshippers heading home after prayers in al-Tamimi mosque killed two and wounded 14 others.
One could go on. The point is obvious. C’est la vie. It’s natural that we’re selective in what we highlight: that’s in the nature of things. We live in the West and, since the famine, huge numbers of Irish have travelled to the US and stayed there. Many of those affected are our people. Besides, the events in Boston were so compelling and seemed so redolent of movies and TV shows that we’ve all seen, well, you couldn’t but be drawn in.
We know the places so well. Likewise the accents. Jaysus, we even know the procedures, the codes, the abbreviations. The initial reactions of the emergency services, the police statements, the analysis of the CCTV footage… And then, the incidents at a 7/11 store, on the MIT campus, the firefight, grenades, assault weapons, one man down and another on the run…
People say “you couldn’t make it up” – well, this was exactly like someone had made it up. I’d say a few viewers even expected to spot the cast of CSI on the scene. Not to mention Bruce Willis.
So now that the suspects have been tracked down and one of them killed, it moves on to motives: why would two young men like Tamerlan and Dzhozar Tsarnaev set about bombing an event like the Boston Marathon, killing entirely innocent people? After all, they had been living in the United States for over a decade. They went to school and college there. They seemed assimilated to all intents and purposes.
One might ask what that means. In Ireland, we regularly and rightly have celebrations where people who have come from far-flung lands receive their citizenship. There is a mutual glow to these events, a sense that people have taken on a new life, as well as retaining the old one. They are Irish now. But they are also of where they came from. Much the same happens when the Irish settle permanently in other countries.
Sensitively handled, this works very well. It can be enriching – literally and culturally – for all concerned. But what happens when the old world reeks of rage and pain – and it comes to life again?
We Irish should understand. For generations of our emigrants, the grievances of Ould Ireland never died. This deep well of collective rage fuelled wave after wave of republican action, even when there was no activity of note on the old sod.
You might say that the Irish were smart enough not to bite the hands that fed them – but this isn’t entirely true. In the Americas, for example, the Fenians launched a series of attacks on Canada between 1866 and 1871. And, of course, there were many attacks in the UK over the years.
But the Brothers Tsarnaev came from Chechnya, one of the Russian republics, where the Russian government has ruthlessly suppressed a largely Muslim independence movement. Chechen rebels have mounted many attacks on Russian targets, so the question then is: why would the two brothers attack an entirely apolitical event in one of the most tolerant cities in the USA? After all, the USA is hardly an ally of Russia’s…
Is this another of those deeply troubling incidents like a high-school shooting? Or was it a political act? Was it, in essence, a random act of inexplicable murder or an ideologically-inspired terrorist gesture of defiance? Are they closer to the Columbine killers than to Anders Breivik – who went on a politically-motivated murder rampage on the Norwegian island of Utøya?
The older brother’s name is Tamerlan. It’s an old name and may hold a clue.
Tamerlan was one of the great warrior kings of Central Asia: few names have inspired as much terror as his. His proper name was Timur. It means iron. He lived up, or down, to it, flattening cities and was not above putting whole populations to death, as he did in Persia. He was also a great patron of the arts!
He conquered Central Asia and invaded Russia, Persia, Iraq, Armenia, Georgia, India, Turkey. He even, fatally, had a go at China. They say his tomb was inscribed with the words, “When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble.”
It is said that Tamerlan Tsarnaev didn’t, as it were, really bond with America and engaged increasingly with militant Islamists. Perhaps he wanted to live up to his name: to make the world tremble. Whatever the motive, the Boston bombings are already so crowded with meanings and interpretations that the intent behind them may never be known. But that shouldn’t stop everyone from trying, for the sake of the future as well as of history. We live in interesting times. But they are also, far too often, tragic ones.