Liam Neeson: Rape, Revenge, and Race Relations

[Rev. Rye]

Well, here’s Trevor Noah’s take on the incident, and honestly, literally the only thing I think he should have done differently (besides the fact that I’m not sure an Oprah interview would have gone the way he described), is that he should have had that Better Call Saul clip from the OP ready.





The impulse that drives cancellation culture makes sense on some level; if someone’s unrepentant about their wrongdoing (or if their repentance comes from a context where it’s very likely to be insincere), it’s understandable that one wants to take power from bad people with the power, especially if they’re just going to use that power to hurt other people. Harvey Weinstein, R Kelly, even Mel Gibson, that shit makes sense.

But the case of Liam Neeson makes the severe backlash far less defensible. Unlike those three men, Hell, unlike in the vast majority of scandals like this, he wasn’t caught out and his remarks about it are just him trying to cover his ass. Nobody of any consequence knew about it before he told the press about it, and in that interview, even as he described it, he sounded horrified that he ever thought that way. While his understanding of it in the context of American race relations is clearly less than perfect, it seems clear to me that he’s fully aware that what he did was horrible and it’s very likely he feels remorse for it, even though he had the good sense to stop before the worst actually happened. And, if this is true and our response is to treat him the same as those people who aren’t sorry, then, in terms of actually trying to fix our broken race relations, what the fuck are we even doing?

These are huge, systemic problems, and there’s almost certainly a lot of people who felt the way Liam did at some point. This absolute zero tolerance policy only makes sense if our main goal is, to paraphrase Ninotchka, “fewer and better Americans.” That line was making light of the Stalinist purges that were going on at the time of the film’s release, and even in comparison to that, at least Stalin’s purges made sense in terms of cause and effect: take the people undermining Stalin’s ideals and get rid of them. Kill them. If at all possible, erase them from existence. In this case, it’s what, socially ostracizing them and leaving them to just fester? How does this make sense, especially given that now, we have a thriving movement of literal Nazis with almost no standards (I would call them vultures, but I have far too much respect for vultures to do such a thing; no, that isn't an exaggeration) willing to stick up for them just to spite you? I can’t be sure that if this shit keeps happening, he’ll become one of those Alt-Righters out of obligation to the people who defended him, but given the choice of accepting that he might actually have reformed, and the prospect of him deciding “if a racist monster is all they’ll bother to see, then why bother being anything else?” The choice is clear to me.

Society needs to change, and for that to happen, the people within it need to change, and the only way people really change is if they want to change. And the zero-tolerance approach that social media hive minds seem to have towards wrongdoing (treating the repentant the same as the unrepentant) seems to destroy any incentive to even want to change.