The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.” When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as “whataboutery” took hold. Must it be the case that how one perceives a tragedy will forever depend on where one sits? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. Of course, even if one were to concede, for the sake of argument, that McConville was an informer, there is no moral universe in which her murder and disappearance should be justified. To others, she was not a victim at all, but a combatant by proxy, who courted her own fate. To many, Jean McConville was the perfect victim: a widow, a mother of ten. “According to one scholar, the “ideal victim” in the Troubles was someone who was not a combatant, but a passive civilian.
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