Memory, Historic Injustice, and Responsibility

W. James Booth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000702262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is it to do justice to the absent victims of past injustice, given the distance that separates us from them? Grounded in political theory and guided by the literature on historical justice, W. James Booth restores the dead to their central place at the heart of our understanding of why and how to deal with past injustice. Testimonies and accounts from the race war in the United States, the Holocaust, post-apartheid South Africa, Argentina's Dirty War and the conflict in Northern Ireland help advance and defend Booth's claim that caring for the dead is a central part of addressing past injustice.

Memory, Historic Injustice, and Responsibility is an insightful and original book on the relationship of past and present in thinking about what it means to do justice. A valuable addition to the currently available literature on historical justice, the volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, philosophy, history, and law.

1
Justice between Past and Present

To frame the following discussion of the bonds of justice between dead and living persons, between the past and the present, let us begin with an illustration: examining responses to the events of Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972. On that day, British soldiers in Derry, Northern Ireland, opened fire on a civil rights march, shooting to death thirteen civilians.¹ One of those victims was Kevin McElhinney, a shop clerk, age 17, killed shortly after 4:00 pm. In the moment of his death, McElhinney became someone with only a past, or more radically he became in Electra’s words “dust and nothing.” Over the years, his death-caused absence was joined by a related kind of distance, that of being historical, of belonging to a time very different from the present. Nearly four decades later, on June 15, 2010, the Saville Bloody Sunday Inquiry, established by then Prime Minister Tony Blair and led by Lord Saville, published its findings. The wounded and dead, it concluded, were shot without cause; their names were cleared of wrongdoing. Prime Minister David Cameron spoke before Parliament, accepting the Report and apologizing on behalf of the British Government. Family and community members, some carrying photographs of the dead, gathered at the Derry Guildhall to learn of the Report’s findings and to hear the Prime Minister’s response to them. Upon being informed of the complete exoneration of the deceased, family members addressed the crowd, ending their statements with “Innocent!” There they witnessed Kevin McElhinney receiving his measure of justice: a conclusion of some twenty-one words in the Report, not to attempt to mend the irreparable but to acknowledge him, to restore his good name, and to say that he was innocent and wronged. “We are sure,” the Saville Inquiry stated, that he “was posing no threat to soldiers when he was shot. He was simply trying to crawl to safety.”² Above the crowd was a large image of McElhinney, his eyes looking out over the throng of people gathered in central Derry (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Derry rally. June 15, 2010

Source: By permission of the Irish Times, Dublin, Ireland.

This banner suggested a kind of presence, as though the victim was there: a persisting member of a community of justice, demanding truth about his fate and recognition of his innocence, and receiving it at last, now the only repair possible for him. His image and those of the other Bloody Sunday dead also pointed to the central place of the absent victims, as if to say that doing justice was principally about them and the wrongs they suffered, that the dead were absent but not therefore nullities.³

Death and the transformations wrought by the passing of time (and by as we shall see a judicial displacement of the victim) combine to challenge the idea that we can address the absent dead of historical injustices. So, for example, the changes since Bloody Sunday: the war in Northern Ireland, then in full flower, now ended; the Unionist political dominance that was a principal target of the civil rights march that day in 1972, largely a thing of the past; many of those immediately concerned, family members and so on, dead; evidence lost and eye-witness memories faded; the concerns of the past now less weighty. In those and other ways, the shooting of Kevin McElhinney is a historical injustice, and dealing with it involves difficulties common to doing justice in relation to events which occurred at another time and under circumstances sharply different from the present. At the same time, and relatedly, there is (as we have suggested) another distance, more radical still, a pastness not of calendar time but one introduced by death, which seems to make it impossible to reach those victims. For the Catholic faithful at the funeral Mass for the Bloody Sunday victims, there was the certainty that McElhinney and the others killed that day would in fact confront their killers in the next life. In the words of Hebrew Scripture (Book of Wisdom, ch. 5, lines 1ff), read at that Mass, “The upright will stand up boldly to face those who had oppressed him.” But how are we to translate such a faith-grounded calling-to-account into a this-worldly idiom? And what would it mean to say that the Saville Inquiry gave a measure of justice to the dead of January 30, 1972? What is it to do justice to the dead who, though once persons and thus capable of demanding and receiving justice, are now (it appears) nothing more than a handful of dust? Perhaps, like other rites associated with caring for the dead,⁴ addressing historical injustice is simply a gesture on the part of the present and living, who (it might be urged) constitute the only real subjects in this drama, and whose interests and perspectives alone steer these dealings with the past. And with that, we might conclude that “doing justice to the past” is in the end simply a manner of speaking, the real meaning of which lies elsewhere, in the present or future, with the living and perhaps those who one day will have life.⁵

Like other efforts to address historical injustice, the work of the Saville Inquiry was guided (and challenged) by multiple interests and their claimants. In the present tense, the politics of a now largely peaceful Northern Ireland were at play, as unionist and nationalist parties adopted their positions on its mandate and findings. So likewise, the British government and its stake in stabilizing peace in Northern Ireland were central to the creation of this Inquiry. Again, and characteristic of an array of devices to deal with past injustices, the future too had its claims represented to the present. Indeed, Prime Minister Tony Blair, in establishing the Inquiry, said of it: “I believe that it is in everyone’s interests that the truth [about Bloody Sunday] be established and told. That is also the way forward to the necessary reconciliation that will be such an important part of building a secure future for the people of Northern Ireland.”⁶ The Northern Irish situation, and the role of the Saville Inquiry and other processes searching into the past surely are not unique. Similar present and future-driven orientations towards historical injustice can be found in responses to Argentina’s 1976–1983 “dirty war,” in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process, Nunca Más inquiries in Central and Latin America, and their counterparts in de-communizing Central and Eastern Europe. For the moment, I want only to observe that the injustices of the past, their victims and perpetrators, are not themselves typically the central guiding threads in reflections on these processes but rather are brought within the horizon of present and future motivations and interests.

What is often missing in our treatment of the absent victims then is a consideration of the status of past persons as possible claimants on justice, and of the orientation our action ought to have in relation to those events and persons. At first glance, this might seem perplexing.⁷ For how can understanding, and acting on, historical injustices not be (at least in central part) past-oriented, in the sense of motivated by the imperative to recognize the absent victim, the injustice done her, and to give her whatever repair is now possible? Of course, the very presence of the qualifier “historical” signals that this class of phenomena is characterized by its pastness and radical separateness, but whether pastness and death are sealed wells or sites of ongoing (if limited) interchange with the present is a crucial question. One might have expected that at the core of our understanding of how to address historical injustice in its pastness stand just those crimes, their victims and perpetrators. It is striking that by and large this is not the case, and perhaps more striking still is that the question itself of justice to the absent dead seems to have been largely forgotten in the literature or, when it is raised, recast as an issue of how to address in a liberal society the presence of religious belief about death.⁸ Although there is an extensive work done on our responsibility to future generations, the question of whether we have obligations to earlier generations (or persons) receives relatively little attention.⁹ This tells us, I think, something important about the underlying and profound difficulties involved in answering historical injustice, and about the need at least to raise the question of the status of the dead as possible enduring subjects of and claimants on justice.

Allow me to begin here by mapping out a few characteristic present and future-oriented approaches to dealing with the past. For some, addressing historical injustices is politically and socially therapeutic and as well personally healing for survivors and loved ones. As such, it can be an important device for breaking with a violent and oppressive past.¹⁰ Unacknowledged past injustices, on this view, are open wounds for the living, injuries unanswered, and what is perhaps more damaging still, unrecognized. As we saw in Ellison’s Invisible Man, an unacknowledged history of injustice amounts to a denial of the equal worth of the victim, and of the equal status of her surviving community in the present. A public rendering of accounts about that past is a path to justice and reconciliation for present persons, and thereby to the building of a stable and just future grounded in recognition and acknowledgment of the past.¹¹ Dealing with the past dispels the shadow cast by having a group’s history of unjust treatment left invisible.¹² Note that the purpose and direction of the varied efforts to address the past are set by the needs of the present and the future, e.g., reconciliation for the sake of constructing a stable and just democratic society. It is less the historical injustice itself, or its original victims, that are the compass here than the manifold needs of the present and future.

Another approach sees the principal purpose of acknowledging past wrongs to be a type of education towards a more just civic culture.¹³ The governing concern here is shaping civic identity, understood to include accepting responsibility for historical wrongs.¹⁴ A third way of understanding why we address past injustice focuses on both the pedagogical and deterrent functions of trials and other comparable instruments.¹⁵ In practice, of course, and in much of the relevant theoretical literature (including those studies cited here), these strands (truth and reconciliation, civic identity-formation, historical education and deterrence) are intertwined. And in all of them, the past of historical injustice, its victims and perpetrators, have an important place. What is central to them, however, is that this past is embedded in an orientation to the present and future, the interests and needs of which provide th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An Archipelago of Absence
• 1 Justice Between Past and Present
• 2 Is the Past a Foreign Country?
• 3 Doing Justice to the Dead
• 4 Conclusion
• Index