Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair - Rilegato

Minow, Martha; Rosenblum, Nancy L.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691096627 ISBN 13: 9780691096629

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 2002

Riassunto

Violence so often begets violence. Victims respond with revenge only to inspire seemingly endless cycles of retaliation. Conflicts between nations, between ethnic groups, between strangers, and between family members differ in so many ways and yet often share this dynamic. In this powerful and timely book Martha Minow and others ask: What explains these cycles and what can break them? What lessons can we draw from one form of violence that might be relevant to other forms? Can legal responses to violence provide accountability but avoid escalating vengeance? If so, what kinds of legal institutions and practices can make a difference? What kinds risk failure?



Breaking the Cycles of Hatred represents a unique blend of political and legal theory, one that focuses on the double-edged role of memory in fueling cycles of hatred and maintaining justice and personal integrity. Its centerpiece comprises three penetrating essays by Minow. She argues that innovative legal institutions and practices, such as truth commissions and civil damage actions against groups that sponsor hate, often work better than more conventional criminal proceedings and sanctions. Minow also calls for more sustained attention to the underlying dynamics of violence, the connections between intergroup and intrafamily violence, and the wide range of possible responses to violence beyond criminalization.


A vibrant set of freestanding responses from experts in political theory, psychology, history, and law examines past and potential avenues for breaking cycles of violence and for deepening our capacity to avoid becoming what we hate. The topics include hate crimes and hate-crimes legislation, child sexual abuse and the statute of limitations, and the American kidnapping and internment of Japanese Latin Americans during World War II. Commissioned by Nancy Rosenblum, the essays are by Ross E. Cheit, Marc Galanter, Fredrick C. Harris, Judith Lewis Herman, Carey Jaros, Frederick M. Lawrence, Austin Sarat, Ayelet Shachar, Eric K. Yamamoto, and Iris Marion Young.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Martha Minow is Professor of Law at Harvard University. Her books include Partners, Not Rivals, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, Not Only for Myself, and Making All the Difference. She recently served on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. Nancy L. Rosenblum is Professor of Government at Harvard University. She is the author of Membership and Morals, editor of Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith, and coeditor of Civil Society and Government (all Princeton).

Dalla quarta di copertina

"Minow's essays embody great strength, clarity, and coherence. She manages to move far beyond her own earlier pathbreaking work. What makes this volume unique is the fascinatingly wide variety of connections and insights triggered by Minow's first-rate contribution. The book surely will be of great interest to general readers as well as to specialists in diverse fields such as law, political science, feminist studies, international affairs, and cultural studies. The multidisciplinary inquiry about cutting-edge human rights issues adds depth to the marvelously lucid analysis provided in Minow's essays. From a broad range of perspectives, the various authors actually enact some of Minow's powerful points in the very process of their exploration of previously undeveloped linkages."--Aviam Soifer, Boston College Law School

"This book is an excellent contribution to a newly emerging and potentially very valuable way of thinking about hatred and violence."--Susan Okin, Department of Political Science, Stanford University

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

"Minow's essays embody great strength, clarity, and coherence. She manages to move far beyond her own earlier pathbreaking work. What makes this volume unique is the fascinatingly wide variety of connections and insights triggered by Minow's first-rate contribution. The book surely will be of great interest to general readers as well as to specialists in diverse fields such as law, political science, feminist studies, international affairs, and cultural studies. The multidisciplinary inquiry about cutting-edge human rights issues adds depth to the marvelously lucid analysis provided in Minow's essays. From a broad range of perspectives, the various authors actually enact some of Minow's powerful points in the very process of their exploration of previously undeveloped linkages."--Aviam Soifer, Boston College Law School

"This book is an excellent contribution to a newly emerging and potentially very valuable way of thinking about hatred and violence."--Susan Okin, Department of Political Science, Stanford University

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

BREAKING THE CYCLES OF HATRED

Memory, Law, and RepairBy MARTHA MINOW

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2002 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09662-9

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Memory, Law, and Repair NANCY L. ROSENBLUM..........................................................................................................11. Breaking the Cycles of Hatred...................................................................................................................................142. Justice and the Experience of Injustice NANCY L. ROSENBLUM.....................................................................................................773. Righting Old Wrongs MARC GALANTER..............................................................................................................................1074. Reluctant Redress: The U.S. Kidnapping and Internment of Japanese Latin Americans ERIC K. YAMAMOTO.............................................................1325. Memory, Hate, and the Criminalization of Bias-Motivated Violence: Lessons from Great Britain FREDERICK M. LAWRENCE.............................................1406. Collective Memory, Collective Action, and Black Activism in the 1960s FREDRICK C. HARRIS.......................................................................1547. Beyond Memory: Child Sexual Abuse and the Statute of Limitations ROSS E. CHEIT AND CAREY JAROS.................................................................1708. Peace on Earth Begins at Home: Reflections from the Women's Liberation Movement JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN............................................................1889. The Thin Line between Imposition and Consent: A Critique of Birthright Membership Regimes and Their Implications AYELET SHACHAR................................20010. When Memory Speaks: Remembrance and Revenge in Unforgiven AUSTIN SARAT........................................................................................23611. Power, Violence, and Legitimacy: A Reading of Hannah Arendt in an Age of Police Brutality and Humanitarian Intervention IRIS MARION YOUNG.....................260Notes on Contributors..............................................................................................................................................289Index..............................................................................................................................................................291

Chapter One

Breaking the Cycles of Hatred

MARTHA MINOW

Memory and Hate: Are There Lessons from Around the World?

As we settle into this new century and this new millenium, it is time to take stock. I do not think this era will be remembered particularly for its wars, its mass atrocities, even its genocides. Sadly, these are not so distinctive in the history of humankind, although the emergence of technologies of destruction and mass media does seem to deepen the horror. What I think, and hope, is distinctive of this age is the mounting waves of objections and calls for collective responses to mass violence. Notably, people have turned to the language and instruments of law, casting genocides and regimes of torture as subjects for adjudication, a framework of human rights, reparations, and truth-telling. After the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., calls for international adjudication rivaled public discussions of military responses.

I recently served on an international commission on Kosovo that reported to the United Nations in the fall of 2001. In the course of that work, I met with the ambassadors to the United States from Albania, Macedonia, and Croatia. In the most emphatic terms, they placed the establishment of an independent and operational judiciary in Kosovo as the highest priority—for peace and stability in the region. Yet I know from my informants in Kosovo how remote and challenging this task is. Not only is there a profound shortage of trained individuals; there is barely an agreed-on set of legal rules. And there are such high levels of distrust across the lines of ethnic division that many people think it is futile to even bring cases involving Serbs before judges of Kosovar Albanian identity—and vice versa. Petty crime and organized crime are both rampant. Property disputes are profound. To establish an operational court system that can secure the respect of the people is indeed the crucial first step for rebuilding the nation, but to call it difficult is to drastically understate the problem.

We complain a lot in this country about too much of human life becoming the subject of legal disputes. Yet, on the global scale, extending law to deal with collective violence is a vital step toward making a better world. Someone once said that a civilization progresses when what was once viewed as a misfortune comes to be seen as an injustice. I think the world's civilizations progress when horrors that were once seen as beyond human response become targets for international criminal tribunals, reparations, and truth commissions. Don't get me wrong: I'm deeply skeptical about the ability of any of these legal forms. Yet, they represent genuine efforts to do something in response to horror, something that does not repeat violence but instead seeks to condemn it, and end it.

In this essay, I will focus on memory and hatred, and in particular whether there is anything to be learned from the growing use of innovative legal practices in response to mass violence. Genocide, mass rapes, forced disappearances, and that ghastly antiseptic phrase "ethnic cleansing" each signal how animosity toward a group can either ignite or fuel horrific harms. Mass violence—even the seemingly isolated crimes of hatred directed at particular groups—has many ingredients, but invariably one is the dehumanization of a group of people who become the targets of violence and abuse. Cycles of violence sometimes then make perpetrators and their supporters victims of new waves of vengeful responses. How those who survive understand and remember what happened can have real consequences for the chances of renewed violence.

This essay will address criminal trials—conducted internationally and domestically—against perpetrators of mass violence; and about reparations, truth commissions, and nongovernmental advocacy organizations, which are each prominent responses to contemporary mass atrocities. But before delving into these issues, let me emphasize this: the search for a mode of response is profoundly doomed, because nothing after the event can be adequate when

—your son has been killed by a police order to shoot into a crowd of children —your brother who struggled against a repressive government has disappeared and left only a secret police file —your niece watches militia members assault and murder her father —you have been dragged out of your home, interrogated, and raped by police —whole peoples have had their life chances taken away by others.

Lawrence Langer, a scholar of the Holocaust, observes, "the logic of law will never make sense of the illogic of genocide." Of course he is right. Legal responses are no more adequate than any others.

But inaction is worse. In the absence of a collective response to mass atrocity, victims lack the basic acknowledgment of what happened that is essential for mental health and political integrity. In the absence of a collective response, the dehumanization preceding and accompanying the violence is left uncondemned and uncorrected. In the absence of collective responses, individuals are left with what some describe as either too much memory or too much forgetting.

There's an old Russian proverb: "Dwell on the past and you will lose an eye. Forget the past and you will lose both eyes." Dwelling on the past, for victims of hatred and abuse, can lead to depression, disassociation, hopelessness; or the tendency to blame entire groups and the fantasy, or reality, of revenge.

For victims and survivors, failure to deal with the incidents wreaks its own damage: painful secrets can lead to a freezing of individuals' capacities to love and act. Unaddressed trauma can produce wounded attachments to devastation itself and contribute to what psychologists call the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Failing to remember hurts bystanders, too, because then they do not face their own choices about action and inaction nor redress the boundaries between groups that helped give rise to the atrocities. In the absence of collective responses to violence, perpetrators and their supporters may seem—unacceptably—like victors or people who got away with it. As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard put it, "Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself." But with societal response, perpetrators may also become targets of new intergroup hatreds. Thus, some people will always remember what happened, but if there are no collective efforts to remember, a society risks repeating its atrocities by failing to undo the dehumanization that laid the groundwork for them.

The question, then, is not whether to remember, but how.

Two kinds of responses, in particular, are not sufficient to guide social action: The first is vengeance. A sense of vengeance is understandable, even justifiable, after one has been wronged. Indeed, it is the wellspring of the moral notion that motivates justice. As philosopher Jeffrie Murphy puts it: "A person who does not resent moral injuries done to him ... is almost entirely a person lacking in self-respect."

Yet vengeance can unleash a response beyond proportion, beyond reason, beyond justice. Laurel and Hardy episodes offer a humorous gloss to the sadly widespread pattern of destructive retaliation. Even a trivial slight triggers a less trivial response, and sets in motion escalating tweaks, punches, and waves of destruction.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., noted that "Hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and so go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense ... [and] ... cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil."

In a remarkably similar vein, Polish Solidarity activist Adam Michnick surprised his colleagues by opposing a purge of communist collaborators from state-run enterprises after the fall of communism. He explained that the logic of revenge is "implacable. First there is a purge of yesterday's adversaries, the partisans of the old regime. Then comes the purge of yesterday's fellow oppositionists, who now oppose the idea of revenge. Finally there is the purge of those who defend them." The thirst for revenge is implacable. It cannot guide responses to mass violence.

Even if revenge could be confined to a response commensurate with the harm, what is to be done when the harm itself defies human scale, when it is grotesque torture, mass killing? No just response can be administered in kind. For by retaliating, you become what you hate.

Transcending the temptation to retaliate is a way of describing the second, inadequate kind of response to broad-scale violence. This alternative is forgiveness. Let me acknowledge that it is admirable. But it is often unachievable, and it cannot be ordered.

Forgiveness involves the one who was wronged in renouncing resentment, stepping out of the wave of repeating rage, and welcoming the wrongdoer into the circle of humanity, reconnection, and even reconciliation. By forgiving the wrongdoer, the victim recognizes their common humanity and breaks the cycle of revenge. One who forgives can avoid the self-destructive effects of holding on to pain, grudges, and victimhood. The act of forgiving can reconnect the offender and the victim, and establish or renew a relationship. It can recognize or prompt contrition. People can forgive while still expecting and demanding punishment, but sometimes forgiveness means forgoing punishment. Official forgiveness usually means amnesty, exemption not only from punishment but also from communal acknowledgment of the harms and the wrongs. Public forgiving also risks public forgetting. Once the public apology is performed, the government—and the community—may well assume that the topic is closed and no more need ever be said about it.

So here are the problems with forgiveness. Many, perhaps most people, find it difficult or impossible to forgive. Perhaps the philosopher Benjamin Spinoza—himself an object of hatred for many in his time— was right when he said that "Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love." But loving one's enemies is a very difficult task; it cannot be forced or commanded. I myself find it difficult to forgive the driver who cut me off on the highway this morning. Where the violations are brutal, severe, and intimate, it can be a new assault to expect the victims to forgive. Individuals respond uniquely and differently to horror. Their responses are among the last powers of selfhood they have retained. To demand different ones may be yet another form of degradation and denial of their very being. Fundamentally, forgiveness must remain a choice by individuals; the power to forgive must be inextricable from the power to choose not to do so. It cannot be ordered or pressured. Forgiveness requires the individual's own reach to embrace the wrongdoer. Forgiveness cannot be arrogated from the survivors without inflicting a new victimization. As human rights activist Aryeh Neier warns, when governments or their representatives "usurp the victim's exclusive right to forgive his oppressor," they fail to respect fully those who have suffered.

If vengeance risks a ceaseless rage that should be tamed, forgiveness requires a kind of transcendence that cannot be achieved on command or by remote control. So, as I have come to see it, the search is for responses to collective violence that etch a path between vengeance and forgiveness.

I have encountered inspiring examples of individuals who have walked that path. Jadranka Cigelj is one. She was raped, repeatedly, after being abducted and confined for months in a gruesome detention camp in Bosnia. After international media exposed the camp, she was released, and essentially crawled her way, starving and devastated, home. She began to talk with other survivors, and decided to gather their stories to submit to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Her prior training as a lawyer no doubt influenced her sense that this would be an appropriate response. She described how she had initially been filled with hatred and a desire for revenge. But she met an eighty-six-year-old woman whose fourteen family members had been murdered, and she had to bury them all with her bare hands. That woman said to Jadranka: "How can you hate those who are so repulsive?" And Jadranka reflected, "I realized that the people I was directing my hatred toward were not worth that; they were only machines for murdering people.... [Y]ou realize what is important is to work toward a way to hold these people responsible and punish them. Then one day you wake up and the hatred has left you, and you feel relieved because hatred is exhausting, and you say to yourself, 'I am not like them.'" Her efforts succeeded in generating the first indictments for rape as a crime of war. The focus on prosecution, punishment, and documentation of victims' stories can offer a way past revenge, for some people, in some times and places. But must individuals be so extraordinary as to forge this path? Or can collective efforts create armatures for pain and structure paths for individuals to move from grief and pain to renewal and hope?

Collective efforts, notably growing in legal idioms during the past fifty years, include criminal prosecutions, reparations, and truth commissions. Each has strengths and weaknesses in forging a path between vengeance and forgiveness. Of course, there are other paths: the creation of artistic memorials; stripping former officials of their pensions and offices; developing educational programs for children and for the entire society; declaring days of commemoration. With criminal prosecutions, reparations, and truth commissions, there is a special emphasis on accountability and truth-telling. It remains to be seen whether alone or together they can also help particular societies build stable democracies or a climate conducive to human rights. But they each offer forms of collective memory, carrying the chance—just the chance—of rebuilding societies rather than stoking hatreds.

Prosecutions

As horrific as was the Great War near the start of the twentieth century, World War II introduced violence and degradation of human beings both on a scale and in a form that defied comprehension. Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin each urged summary execution of the Axis leaders. Nonetheless, the Allies decided to hold trials and in so doing, establish a body of international legal rules. The rules aspired to recognize human rights with institutions sufficiently strong to enforce them. What emerged was an international military tribunal, empowered to prosecute major war criminals of the Axis countries for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

The invention of a tribunal composed of judges from each of the four major Allied powers departed from a prior military court involved in enforcing the laws of war. The category, crimes against humanity, lacked much definition and precedent. The tribunal itself tried to confine its prosecutions of crimes against humanity to those committed in conjunction with a war of aggression, and to norms announced in prior treaties against such wars, but still, the norms and procedures for the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials departed from the past. Indeed, the Nuremberg trials are widely credited with establishing the conclusion that there is no injustice in punishing defendants who knew they were committing a wrong condemned by the international community, even in the absence of an international law specifically prohibiting their behavior. The Nuremberg trials also elevated international law so that it clearly takes precedence over claims of state authority and obligation to obey the law of any one state.

It is a bold vision, but the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were imperfect means to advance it. Charged at the time as victors' justice—exempting the Soviets and the other Allies from their wartime abuses—the trials also involved highly limited, even selective prosecution. An initial group of only twenty-four defendants stood in for the thousands who caused the deaths of more than 20 million and the unspeakable suffering of many more. The Tokyo trials generated charges of ethnic bias when its sentences seemed more severe than those issued at Nuremberg.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from BREAKING THE CYCLES OF HATREDby MARTHA MINOW Copyright © 2002 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0691096627
• ISBN 13: 9780691096629
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 264
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile