On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 6:23 AM, Kenneth Harrow<harrow@msu.edu> wrote:Hi biko
I have to dig through this a bit to figure out my take on it. My understanding was that the trc set a limit of what was forgiven, with egregious crimes still susceptible to punishment.
I disagree that crimes against humanity are not liable to punishment. Just the opposite: there are laws, and under the right circumstances, those crimes are punished and punishable. I don't distinguish individual crimes vs state crimes where by some revolutionary rhetoric we can apply punishments to one and not to the other. We work toward a future in which state abuses are punished, even if it takes time. We don't always succeed. Idi amin whiles away his millions in Saudi arabia. Dictators are coaxed out of countries so that peace might come to ravaged countries. I understand the logic, even if I am left hungry. But to call justice a fetishism of bourgeois law means, to me, that you are ensconced in an ideological viewpoint I don't share. My own ideological commitments include a notion of justice grounded in both legal and moral values, and ideally inscribed in some legal frame. But I put the moral imperatives pretty high, when laws that don't seem just remain in place.
Ubuntu means collective values, not injustice.
Justice for me doesn't mean forgiving the unforgivable. I suppose I could sacrifice justice for peace, why not? War is probably worse than injustice for most people, and the point of justice is to serve the needs of the people, all the people.
The interesting point in your comments, as I wish to translate them, is the impunity of the state. not all states can get away with it. Eventually the Chileans were able to call in the chips on the horrible govt that replaced Allende with torture and murder. State terrorism should be the term we use, not abusively, but with precision to attack the major powers in the world today who use "terrorism" to justify their abuse of power, while using "collateral damage" to mystify their use of state terrorism. Obviously I am thinking of drones, bombing to assassinate opponents, which murder innocent people, like the wedding party in yemen only a day or two ago, bombed by Saudi or u.s. planes. State terrorism.
I want to use my complaints from earlier postings to apply here: same logic.
In the end, I am trying to also protect the very thing you accuse me of attacking: the revolutionary state, the state whose goals are to end injustices, be they class based or race based. How can the revolutionary state be protected from self-destructing by abusing its power? That is the question of the 20th century. Maybe in our age ofg globalization it will become as irrelevant as states. States, not ubuntu or states that preach ubuntu while practicing biopolitics.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 25 April 2018 at 20:21
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - human rights issues
Ken, no one who believes in fundamental human rights will disagree with your assertion that torture, slavery, apartheid, and genocide are indefensible especially as state policy or the policy of freedom fighters.
The disagreement arises from your implied punitive policy versus the philosophy of Ubuntu and the forgiveness of the unforgivable. Since the state that carries out torture, slavery, apartheid, and genocide enjoys almost total immunity against penalty, why should we buy into the commodity fetishism of bourgeois law by attempting to make the punishment fit the crime to make individual offenders pay a calibrated price when no punishment would ever fit the crimes against humanity?
The answer is that the same impunity granted the criminal state should be extended to individual law breakers the way that the TRC did in SA to pave the way for the withering away of the law as the best response to deviance under capitalism.
Help us to ask Sachs why he did not support the legalization of dagga when he sat on the Constitutional Court despite the fact that the prohibition law was made under apartheid to protect monopoly commodities that kill millions of people worldwide while dagga never hurt a fly? Ask him whether he would support justice for the victims of slavery and apartheid by advocating reparative justice given that punitive just desserts are deplorable and undesirable? Above all, extend our hearty congratulations to the scholar-activist on his deserved honorary degree. Yi Africa.
Biko
On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 1:12 PM, Kenneth Harrow
<harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
Hi all
In a recent thread, where I was inveighing against torture and human rights abuses, moses ochonu spoke to the Eurocentric issues involved in basing an argument on enlightenment values, and instruments like the un conventions on human rights.
He is right that those notions were framed during the enlightenment in states that sanctioned slavery, although we could trace notions of human rights law back to the ancient period.
He is right that the ideals were contradicted by actual practice.
But I do not want to concede that they are not crucial for Africa, or anywhere else, no matter how imperfectly they are administrated. The international criminal court has indeed focused on African miscreants, although the Balkan leaders came in for their knocks too.
But I would want to argue that regardless of their original, they are absolutely crucial for us, today, in any country.
In my university, albie sachs is about to visit. The announcement says,
We are writing to offer you and your students a rare opportunity to meet one of the keenest legal minds in South Africa and arguably one of the most important architects of its 1994 post-apartheid Constitution. On Friday, May 4, we have arranged a faculty-student conversation with Albie Sachs, retired judge and author, who will be on campus to accept an honorary degree from Michigan State at the Spring Commencement celebration. Please share this invitation with your colleagues and students interested in Southern Africa, human rights, restorative justice and constitutional law.
Albie was one of the architects for the legal instruments that gave us one of th most progressive constitutions in the world, that of south Africa.
Regardless of how one thinks about gender issue, sexual orientation, individual rights, the limits on the state, etc., this constitution is the essence of what should be adopted everywhere, and it matters very little that it was framed in south Africa rather than in another country.
I would not call rights universal, but general; not god-given, but human crafted, and therefore in need of constant revision given changing needs and times.
But, but, who would argue that torture, extrajudicial killings, and the like ought to be banned?
That the laws are applied unequally doesn't mean we abandon the ideal of applying it, but that we fight for the long run to institute them.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
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