The Ghosts of a Dirty War with Patrick Radden Keefe

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

MS NOW, Chris Hayes

News, Versant Media, Versant, Ms Now, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2019

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

No war can last forever, and when peace comes, those who lived through the horror of violence and hatred have to find a way to live with each other. So it is in Northern Ireland, where since 1998 Catholics and Unionists have lived side by side in a tenuous peace despite the three decades of bloodshed, violence and oppression that tore it apart from 1968 to 1998. But just because peace arrives doesn't mean old dark secrets disappear. This week Patrick Radden Keefe discusses his brilliant new book "Say Nothing", that traces the history of The Troubles in Northern Ireland through the tale of just one atrocity: the murder of a single mother of ten children, and the efforts to find out who did it. Keefe describes the process by which people become so radicalized they are able to commit war crimes, as well as what it means to the victims, the perpetrators and an entire traumatized society once peace actually comes, and dark mysteries remain. The book is a masterpiece and the lessons Keefe draws apply to any society anywhere trying to reckon with its past. RELATED READING: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe Email us at [email protected] Tweet using #WITHpod Read more at nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good Friday, agreement 1998, piece of a tenuous intense sort takes hold.
0:06.1	There are still sectarian tensions and political conflict and occasional outbreaks of violence,
0:12.3	but Geri Adams is now a resolutely mainstream political figure.
0:17.5	Right.
0:18.0	And rumors start to circulate that in a Boston university, there's a big archive of taped
0:26.1	confessions of war crimes that implicate Geri Adams.
0:29.6	Yeah.
0:33.4	Hello, and welcome to Why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
0:37.1	So you may or may not be following the Hopper Exit situation.
0:39.8	I have a weird perverse obsession with it.
0:42.3	I think partly because I live in the cluster that is our news cycle here in the United States of America.
0:47.7	And I just think, well, the plow line in there is something else that's even more screwed up than American politics at the moment.
0:54.8	But even if you haven't been following it, it's possible that, and by the way, if you want to get a good rundown,
0:59.4	Medi Hassan and I had a conversation about it on the with pod,
1:02.8	that one of the real sort of, you know, there's a lot of things about whether the UK will leave the European union
1:10.1	and under what terms that are dicey in terms of trade and immigration, free flow of people.
1:15.2	But there's one specific thing that's dangerous.
1:18.0	There's one specific part of it that people worry about creating the conditions of violence.
1:24.0	And that has to do with the fairly durable, but at the same time, 10 US peace in Northern Ireland.
1:30.0	Right? So you've got six counties in the north of Ireland that are part of the UK, although
1:36.0	they're governed under a kind of power sharing agreement.
1:38.5	That's pursuant to a peace deal called the Good Friday Accords, which is struck in 1998.
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