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Human Wrongs and the Tragedy of Victimhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Catherine Lu
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Extract

No serious student of victimhood and injustice can fail to appreciate their complicated origins and problematic legacies. For individuals and societies emerging from communal violence, oppression, and atrocity, the quest for moral regeneration–through acknowledgment, understanding, and transformation–is as difficult and perplexing as it is pressing. Challenging moral questions abound in the aftermath of human wrongs that admit no easy answers. Indeed, the ethics and politics of transition have been widely contested in theory and practice, by people who share the same basic moral/political concerns to redeem the suffering of victims and to forge a future that never again repeats the violations of the past.

Type
Debate
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , September 2002 , pp. 109 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2002

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References

1 Auden, W H Musée des Beaux Arts in Selected Poems 1989 New YorkVintage Internationalp.79Google Scholar.

2 For a more thorough treatment of these themes, see my Justice, Reconciliation and the Project of Moral Regeneration: Lessons from the Treaty of Versailles International Studies Review 2002 4 no. 3Google Scholar).

3 For a defense of the South African TRC as an institution of restorative justice, see Kiss, ElizabethRot-berg, Robert IThompson, Dennis Moral Ambitions within and beyond Political Constraints: Reflections on Restorative Justice in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions 2000 PrincetonPrinceton University PressGoogle Scholar). For an opposing view, see Mamdani, MahmoodReconciliation without Justice South African Review of BooksNov/Dec 1996 46 35Google Scholar.

4 By crookedness, I mean a condition of disjointedness, where the moral reality on the ground eludes the grasp of settled and coherent moral and political perspectives.

5 On the enduring legacies of injustice, see Paris, ErnaLong Shadows: Truth, Lies and History 2000 TorontoKnopfGoogle Scholar).

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9 Bettelheim, BrunoThe Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age 1960 Glencoe, Ill.The Free PressGoogle Scholar).

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11 As Schmitt himself explained so well,“The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger.”Schmitt, CarlSchwab, GeorgeThe Concept of the Political 1976 New Brunswick, N.J.Rutgers University Pressp.27Google Scholar, emphasis mine.

12 See Shklar, Judith NRosenblum, Nancy The Liberalism of Fear in Liberalism and the Moral Life 1989 CambridgeHarvard University PressGoogle Scholar).

13 Ibid., pp.2831Google Scholar.

14 From the text of the statement issued by the Irish Republican Army in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, New York Times, July 17, 2002, p.A3.

15 As Nelson Mandela remarked after his release from prison,“I could not wish what happened to me and my people on anyone.”Quoted in Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions,”in Truth v.Justice, p.42.

16 See Helena Cobban,“The Legacies of Collective Violence: The Rwandan Genocide and the Limits of Law,” Boston Review, April/May 2002; available at bostonre view.mit.edu/BR27.2/cobban.html.

17 Aeschylus, Lattimore, RichardThe Eumenides, line 892. In Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides 1953 ChicagoThe University of Chicago PressGoogle Scholar).

18 See Minow, MarthaBetween Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence 1998 BostonBeacon PressGoogle Scholar).

19 As Cynthia Ngewu, mother of Christopher Piet, put it, “This thing called reconciliation…if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed Christopher Piet, if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all ofus, get our humanity back…then I agree, then I support it all.”Quoted in Krog, AntjieCountry of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa 1999 New YorkThree Rivers Pressp.142Google Scholar.

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