Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Under the Special Powers Act, it was legal to hold someone indefinitely without trial, and internment had been used periodically in Northern Ireland.

The borders between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods were still inscribed in the concertina wire and steel of the so-called peace walls that vein the city, like fissures in a block of marble.

Tribalism and its trappings remained so potent in Belfast that the various sides could not agree on how to govern the display of regalia.

Scappaticci was still in hiding, reportedly living under an assumed name, in a witness protection program administered by the very government that now claimed to be investigating him.

to do so would thoroughly implicate the British state.

“hierarchy of victims.” Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator.

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. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.”