print“As a Christian,” reasons Thomas Fleming, in his highly recommended Mail-Online blog, “I can say plainly that Afghans have a truer sense of justice than the catechisms of most Christian churches today. As post-Christian savages without a sense of justice, we were quite wrong to conquer this primitive people.”
“The Afghans do not pretend to see beyond the end of their nose or outside the limits of their settlement. Their simple and wholesome ethic is: You kill my people, I kill you. They are demanding nothing less than the transfer of the killer to Afghan jurisdiction. After a speedy trial and conviction, he will be turned over to the relatives of the victims to kill in whatever way they see fit.”
“Americans may pretend to understand this demand as a temporary outburst of grief and rage, but, when they do not relent, in a few weeks we can expect to hear condemnations of the primitive Afghan understanding of justice. We shall be reminded of the Talibans’ mass executions in sports stadiums. ‘They don’t want justice,’ we shall cry, ‘only vengeance,’ and no one will spend half a minute explaining what the difference is.”
“Here in the enlightened West,
we know that the purpose of a criminal justice system is two-fold: to rehabilitate the criminal and protect the public. It was not always so. The ancients believed that a criminal act–murder, assault, robbery, rape–put the universe out of joint. The purpose of punishment was to put it right again. Killers are killed, robbers robbed, beaters beaten.
It was not always so simple as “an eye for an eye,” and Roman and Christian law made allowances for motives, circumstances, and appropriateness of punishment, but they never forgot the primary purpose of punishment was retribution or, to use a simpler word, vengeance.
Leftist Christians will howl in protest, citing, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” little understanding that the same Lord, according to St. Paul, delegates the power to punish evil to the rulers of the world. Not in vain, Paul declared in an authoritative chapter of Romans, does the ruler hold the sword, nor is it a terror to the good but only to the wicked. It follows that a ruler who casts away the sword on a humanitarian whim is no longer a legitimate ruler. The Church always begged for mercy in specific cases, but never disputed the right and duty of kings and parliaments to execute criminals.
Even Imanuel Kant, who got most things wrong, saw through the lies of all the liberal theories of punishment:
“Judicial punishment can never be used solely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for society, but instead must in all cases be imposed on a person solely on the ground that he has committed a crime….woe to him who rummages around in the winding paths of a theory of happiness looking for some advantage to be gained by releasing the criminal from punishment or by reducing the amount of it….
that’s ahistoric demagoguery. ahistoric because in all societies that achieved anything worthwhile, like, computers, space travel and stuff, the trend has been towards a greater centralization on who can dispense violence for it to be legitimate (the state), and towards a greater “gentleness of manners.” you can’t make microchips when people, upon meeting, enumerate their ancestors to find a common one, in order to have a reason not to kill one another (like Somalia). demagoguery because of the appeal to emotions. maybe the western system justice failed the person by not punishing someone as hard as they wished it did, but that’s no reason to condemn it as a whole and reiterate noble savage myths. Anyway, I think societies where a simple fender bender type of accident becomes a thing between everyone in the extended families of both drivers involved are, in a way, primitive.
If you’re asking me, the criminal justice systems focuses too much on retribution, rather than restitution. What good does it to me if the man who robs me ends up in prison, but my stolen things are neither returned, nor am I paid a sum of money in their stead?
Ten years of occupation of this pseudo-country has done nothing. In fact, the US was mucking around 1946 – 1978 spending much and accomplishing little:
http://www.institute-for-afghan-studies.org/Foreign%20Affairs/us-afghan/helmand_0.htm
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/marja-50-years-ago-model-villages-and-american-money/
http://scottshelmandvalleyarchives.org/docs/evl-88-14.pdf
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA518306
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/marja-from-usaid-to-u-s-marines/
but without the killing. Now, we send brain damaged soldiers on their 4th tour of duty into that sinkhole and get shocked when one of them murders people “ad hoc” instead of the traditional “drone – collateral – damage – oops!” approved method.
Fleming is right from the Afghan point of view but there is NO WAY that our military will stomach handing over a soldier to the local mob to lynch. The demoralization of the troops watching a fellow soldier getting strung up would be immense.
Getting out of Afghanistan would make sense but 98% of delegates to the 2012 conventions support candidates who want our troops to stay there, getting mentally demoralized while absorbing mortar attacks daily and risking lives and limbs on daily patrols of a land where their throats would be slit if they were captured by most of the so-called “friendly” Afghans.
An excellent point by Lew Rockwell blog in what goes around comes around …
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/108309.html
The criminal justice system in the U.S. serves two primary purposes.
1. It is used as yet another means for the government to plunder our wealth. Examples would be traffic tickets and their ever increasing ability to take your car and sell it and keep the money for themselves. [url=http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/traffic/counties-hunt-for-fake-inspection-stickers-031912]Here[/url] is a perfect example. The whole point to the story is summed up in one line: “The vehicles will go through the courts and the constable will try to seize them because of their fake inspection stickers.”
2. To enforce submission of the masses. Eric Peters has a good [url=http://ericpetersautos.com/2012/03/15/not-even-your-backyard-is-safe-from-them/]example[/url] of this.
Spare the troops: transfer Bush and Obama to Afghani jurisdiction.