The Possibility of Forgiveness in International and Internecine Conflict
Greg Moore Wednesday, 17 September 2008
[Note: This essay is an adaptation of an address given April 25, 2007, at the Council of Faculty Fellows, Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida.]
"...Forgiveness is the doorway through which a diversity of humans...can come together to form a new community."
—Donald W. Shriver, Jr.[1]
"Might not the will for identity be fueling a good deal of [the] conflicts around the globe?...It may not be too much to claim that the future of our world will depend on how we deal with identity and difference."
—Miroslav Volf[2]
Hannah Arendt was famous for saying that Jesus' teaching on forgiveness was his greatest contribution to politics.[3] This is true because forgiveness is a practical necessity for anyone when two or more humans live together in community. Human fallibility makes life in community impossible without it.[4] Yet Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel presents us with a dilemma when he observes that while he believes in personal forgiveness, he does not believe in collective forgiveness – because he does not believe in collective guilt. Wiesel elaborated by giving an example of a former guard at one of the Nazi concentration camps who approached him recently and asked him for forgiveness for beating him during the war. Wiesel said he did grant the man forgiveness. However, he says he is not sure he can forgive the German people, for they wronged not only him, but so many other Jews who are not alive today, and he felt it would be unfair to the dead to grant their murderers reprieve on their behalf without their approval.[5] It is apparent by Wiesel's statements that he perceives a difference between personal forgiveness and forgiveness of a group of people, in this case a nation. This essay seeks to consider the special difficulties, the importance, and the possibility of forgiveness in international and internecine conflicts.
The Difficulties Associated with Forgiveness in International and Internecine Conflict
While not committing to Wiesel's position on collective forgiveness, one might agree that Wiesel correctly observes that forgiveness is qualitatively different in personal and collective contexts. Collective contexts here refer to international contexts, such as Japan's invasion of China and the sins the Japanese committed against the people of China, or internecine conflicts, or conflicts within states such as the situation in the former Yugoslavia and Bosnia, where Serbs, Croats and Muslims perpetrated unspeakable acts against each other, but for which Serbs have historically been assigned greater blame because of their control of the levers of state power. Forgiveness in collective contexts such as these is not necessarily easier in collective terms, for a wife who lives with an abusive or unfaithful husband may find it more difficult to forgive him (because of the closeness of the marital relationship and because she sees him every day) than it was for a Chinese citizen who'd experienced abuse at the hands of the Japanese to forgive the Japanese people in general, whom they might not regularly encounter and when they know that the Japanese they encounter today are most likely entirely disconnected with the Japanese invaders they knew in the 1930s. While forgiveness is not always easy, whether it be for individuals or for groups or nations, forgiveness of groups or nations has a number of difficulties associated with it that are unique and worth elaboration.
"Just Following Orders" and the Establishment of Guilt
One problem of addressing forgiveness of sin in a collective context is what I'd call the "I was just following orders" problem. Many of the German concentration camp guards who carried out horrible orders were indeed "just following orders." While they cannot be exonerated from all responsibility (for they could have refused to follow orders and absorbed whatever punishment was meted out on principle), they cannot be held to the same level of accountability as the superiors who conceived, planned, and ordered the criminal activity. In other words, when trying to establish responsibility, it may not be clear where ultimate responsibility lies. Moreover, in the case of Wiesel's repentant guard, or in the case of repentant leftist Japanese Diet members who express apologies to Asian victims of Japan's wartime aggression, while the victims of that aggression may accept the personal appeals and may extend forgiveness, until or unless the authorities of the aggressive state themselves express regret and seek forgiveness as the German government did (what comes to mind is the picture of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt falling to his knees in 1970 in an expression of contrition before the monument to the Warsaw ghetto uprising that was brutally suppressed by German forces in 1943).
Another problem is in establishing guilt, right and wrong. At least three points arise here. One is the potential issue of due process and lack of applicable juridical authority over the participants/combatants in the conflict. If the conflict is internecine, the party with state power also controls the court system, so this court system would not seem impartial to the other party/parties, except in cases such as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where the Apartheid regime had been dismantled and a new majoritarian government had taken power. In international conflict, the same problem juridical authority arises, though the Nuremburg Trials or the (from the perspective of many in the US government stillborn) International Court of Justice are possible solutions. Second, and related, is the matter of "victor's justice." When in reality most international or internecine conflicts entail atrocities committed on both/all sides, someone has said correctly that the victors write the history book, and, consequently, establish guilt, and matters such as the assignment of the distinction between freedom fighter and terrorist. The third problem here is in what might be called universal culpability or in other quarters the problem of original sin, or even more recently, "the Lucifer effect." In other words, no one is above committing sin in the right (wrong) circumstances, as Philip Zimbardo's remarkable work has shown. I refer here to the "Stanford experiment" recorded in his book, The Lucifer Effect, in which seemingly normal Stanford college students are put into an experimental situation in which some are assigned the role of prison guards, and some the role of prisoners. The experiment was stopped abruptly after six days because the "guards" had become quite sadistic and Zimbardo feared for the safety of the "prisoners." Zimbardo's conclusion in a nutshell was that seemingly "good" folks, put into certain situations, can be capable of truly heinous evils. Abu Ghraib seems to have proved him right.[6] The lesson here is that assignment of "good" and "evil" and "perpetrator" and "victim" are often not as clear cut as they were in the case of the Nazi program against the Jews.
Jean Elshtain has discussed another matter of pertinence to matters of international and internecine forgiveness in the problem of restitution. While restitution is not necessary or possible in every instance where forgiveness and reconciliation are at work, it certainly is an important way a contrite soul or government can make right what as been wrong as a result of his or her actions. Matters of restitution are certainly more complicated in situations entailing collective guilt and multiple victims, as Jean Elshtain has noted.[7] For instance, as Wiesel noted, how can he forgive all Germans for the acts of a few on behalf of so many dead? How can restitution be done to them? How can a government today, who in most cases has no connection to the government of the past whom committed said crimes, be held responsible?
Identity, the Construction of Difference, and Dehumanization
Making things yet more complicated is the positive and negative aspects of identity, the negative being implicated in what Miroslav Volf calls "'the new tribalism' that is fracturing our societies, separating peoples and cultural groups, and fomenting vicious conflicts?"[8] Identity is something every human being has at the personal level, and at various collective levels as well, whether that identity is religious, racial, ethnic, national, regional, class-based or something else. Identity is important and healthy in one respect in the sense that a person or a people with no identity would be socially dysfunctional, unable to relate to others without a sense of self. "The new tribalism," however, is a phenomenon many have observed since the fall of the Soviet Bloc and the end of the Cold War as ancient rivalries and modern rivalries long held still under the Soviet boot were released to be reinvigorated, and others were constructed that had never existed before. "Balkanization" was a word revived literally and figuratively as the former Yugoslavia broke up and erupted into violent internecine and international conflict in the early 1990s. As a Bosnian Croat Volf was a careful observer of this process, and was intimately tied to it.[9] As he returned to Croatia after it had declared independence from the former Yugoslavia, he found that
...The new Croatia, like some jealous goddess, wanted all my love and loyalty. I must be Croat through and through, or I was not a good Croat. It was easy to explain this excessive demand of loyalty. After forced assimilation under communist rule, the sense of ethnic belonging and cultural distinctness was bound to reassert itself. Moreover, the need to stand firm against a powerful and destructive enemy who had captured one-third of Croatian territory, swept it clean of its Croatian population, and almost completely destroyed some of its cities, left little room for the luxury of divided loyalties. The explanations made sense and they gave reasons to believe that the disturbing preoccupation with the national self was a temporary phase, a defense mechanism whose services would no longer be needed once the danger was past...[10]
After years of being subjected to education and propaganda reifying Yugoslav identity, the newly assertive Croats were constructing a new identity. This is illustrative of the fact that identity is not organic, but rather is socially constructed. In cases such as this one, it is instrumentally done, in other cases it is more "natural" in the sense of the normal ebb and flow of identity accumulation and maintenance via common language, history, religion, geography, etc.
Returning to the problem of identity and its relation to forgiveness in international and internecine conflict, an important point can now be made. Volf raises it by the above illustrations followed by a question. Speaking of the post-Cold War wars of the mid-nineteen nineties, he asks, "Might not the will for identity be fueling a good deal of those 50 or so conflicts around the globe?"[11] Is identity a reason to go to war? For some, it is. Some Croats, Uighurs in Western China, Taiwanese, Kurds, Basques, Chechens, Irish and many others are willing to fight and die if necessary to have the freedom to construct and maintain their own identities, even when (in the case of Taiwan, for example) they have little to gain in a utilitarian sense from true independence over and above the status quo.
Key to identity is "difference," and the concomitant construction of and/or juxtaposition against "other." One cannot have one's own identity unless one can juxtapose it against an "other." If an "other" does not exist, it must seemingly be created. The tragic example of Rwanda comes to mind here, a place where Hutus and Tutsis were at one time one people group but became two classes of people over time. This class distinction was reified under Belgian colonialism and the people given labels which came to be associated with the theretofore non-existent ethnicities, Hutus and Tutsis. In 1994 a genocidal terror broke out as majority Hutu militias began killing minority Tutsis, resulting in nearly a million deaths by some accounting. This "politics of difference" leads to a process of "exclusion," which is to say that identity production and maintenance requires exclusion at some level, a social process that makes forgiveness and reconciliation much more difficult between groups.
Toward the end of constructing and maintaining these identities and difference is another related issue, one that makes collective forms of sin "easier" to commit (and seemingly more "rational") and forgiveness more difficult. I speak here of the process by which warring sides dehumanize the other. In times of war or other conflict between groups, it is politically and strategically expedient to belittle and dehumanize "the other" as much as possible, so as to make one's own cause appear more just, and the other's appear more base. Derogatory terms such as Yids, Nips, Krauts, Cockroaches, Gooks, and Spooks, as well as phrases such as "the only good X is a dead X," or "better dead than red," are constructed to "aid" in the process. As Donald Shriver has said, "Those we would kill, we first make subhuman."[12] He notes also that the Nazi doctors who conceived of and administered the various means of exterminating the Jews did the same, for otherwise they could not have done their jobs and then returned home to their families with clear consciences. They deemed their Jewish victims, "lebensunwertes Leben," or "life unworthy of life."[13] In deeply entrenched, long-running conflicts such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, this mutual dehumanization (at least in certain quarters) has made forgiveness and reconciliation extremely difficult as tit for tat actions and reactions have hardened hearts and deepened the rifts between these people groups for decades, even centuries.
The Politics of Memory
Another dimension of international and internecine conflict and the possibility of forgiveness is what has been called the "politics of memory" or the "problem of memory." In United States history we have "Remember the Alamo," "Remember Pearl Harbor," and in reference to the events of September 11, 2001, a campaign saying "We will never forget." Holocaust Museums and memorials (seventeen in the US based on an informal count), the Hiroshima Peace Park, the Nanjing Massacre Museum, and many others make sure that people do not forget. While it may be true, as philosopher and poet George Santayana has reportedly said, that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," ethicist Jean Elshtain responds, "But perhaps the reverse is more likely, namely, that it is those who know their history too well who are doomed to repetition."[14] This may be considered by some to be a rather "conservative" position, and it can be, but it need not be. Remembering an epochal event such as the Holocaust is vital, and Holocaust museums in the US also provide a place where discussions of other genocides, such as the one presently in Darfur, can take place.[15]
Yet, while recognizing the importance of not forgetting, "we will never forget" campaigns have at least two potential problems. First, is it possible that emphasizing painful memories can be a cause of bitterness and even future violence rather than a bulwark against such bitterness and future violence? I have met young Chinese who were too young to have been personally effected by the Japanese invasion of China, and who themselves had never met a Japanese person, who told me they "hated the Japanese devils." It would be understandable if Wiesel hated the Germans. Yet why do these youth hate and why are these past events so real to them? The answer is that they have been taught to be bitter about the past, not only to remember it. Are they taught about Ienaga Saburo, a heroic Japanese professor whose textbook was rejected by the publisher and censors because it referred to Japan's atrocities at Nanjing, its rape of countless women, or the biological warfare detachment called Unit 731 in North China, which performed cruel experiments on human subjects?[16] No, but they are still taught that the Korean War was started not by North Korea but by a US invasion of North Korea. In this case, history production and not forgetting are parts of an aggressive campaign by the government to foment anti-Japanese fervor so as to legitimate the rule of a government that is itself not entirely upright. For whatever reasons governments inculcate remembrance campaigns as it regards past grievances, they often serve to reinforce difference, exclusion, and bitterness, rather than to bring healing and reconciliation.
The second problem with "we will never forget campaigns" is that they can foster within the victimized side an identity that is wholly or substantially based on the notion of victimization. In some cases, this becomes one of the primary elements holding a community together, and so laying it down and forgiving becomes nearly impossible. Ian Baruma writes that he finds it alarming "...the extent to which so many minorities have come to define themselves above all as historical victims," for he questions whether it is a good thing "when a culture, ethnic, religious, or national community bases its communal identity almost entirely on the sentimental solidarity of remembered victimhood. For that way lie historical myopia and, in extreme circumstances, even vendetta."[17] Peter Gries has coined another phrase which seems apropos here, "the victimization narrative."[18] While the "victimization narrative" is a narrative or discourse that has been constructed by the Chinese Communist Party about China's suffering at Western and Japanese hands since 1839, and it has been used by Gries specifically in the Chinese context, I think it could be transferred to other contexts as well. For Kurds, Holocaust survivors, Palestinians, the Roma, Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bomb survivors and others have such a narrative as well. While public airing and remembrance are an appropriate and important part of the victims' healing process and should be not only encouraged but applauded, "victimization is a growing industry"[19] and a fine line must be actively sought out between remembering so history won't repeat itself, and forgetting so that history won't repeat itself. This is what ethicist Jean Elshtain has called "knowing forgetting," and this will be elaborated upon below.[20]
"Knowing Forgetting" and Conclusions
In considering the differences between personal conflict and forgiveness on the one hand, and international and internecine conflict and forgiveness on the other, it is the collective aspects of forgiveness that are ultimately more complex in most cases, and are the reason "burying the hatchet" is such a difficult task for so many people. When one's very identity as a person or group has become that of victim, to forgive entails completely abandoning or at least radically transforming one's identity. In such cases it also entails transforming one's view of "other" and of the perpetrator(s) in particular. In light of all of this, several things emerge that seem worthy of consideration as possible solutions, or pathways to forgiveness in such complex collective contexts.
In collective contexts, when sins have been committed against one group of people by another group of people, what is most effective in securing forgiveness and reconciliation between peoples seems to be public recognition of culpability by the offending sides' representatives, even when the government has changed, and/or the actual officials have long since passed, politically or physically. Trials such as those at Nuremburg should be sought out where and when possible, but "victor's justice" must be avoided. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals are an unfortunate example of war crimes trials as victor's justice,[21] and this (and Cold War geo-politics, which made it unlikely that the US would do anything to destabilize its conservative anti-communist partners in Japan) may be to blame for the general Japanese refusal to deal effectively with their war-time past, at least in part.
In addition, when feasible the apologizing side should make good faith attempts to rectify injustices done. The attempt to make right is an important sign of contrition and humility. This may or may not entail funds to compensate victims, or other benefits to the victims. This may not be possible in every case. For example, how could the German government today or even 50 years ago, possibly address the needs of every family who lost someone because of Germany's initiation of World War Two, or because of the Holocaust? Or how could today's United States government possibly compensate today's African American or Native American communities for every injustice meted out on their ancestors in this nation's past history? Yet in cases where compensation is feasible, it should be undertaken. Elshtain argues that restitution, while right and desirable in many cases, is not always possible in cases such as those described here, and what can be more meaningful is public acknowledgement of oppression, wrongs done, and expressions of responsibility and remorse by representatives of the perpetrators. This is what West German Chancellor Willy Brandt did at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1970, and this is what Chinese, Korean and other women who were forced to serve as sex slaves during the Second World War ask of the Japanese government (but have not really received to date).
Yet despite the outcome of any trials or the existence or lack of public acknowledgement of guilt and/or contrition, forgiveness must be unconditional, and so granting it cannot be conditional upon the attitude of the other, or the outcome of trials. In other words, holding out until the perpetrators say "uncle" is not the proper approach to forgiveness. Forgiveness is release, a willing laying down of what occurred.
This is what ethicist Jean Elshtain has called "knowing forgetting,"[22] remembering, and yet choosing to forget. To use Gerald Junevicus' term, we speak here not of an "amnesiac" sense of forgiveness, [23] but of the act of forgetting. This is requisite for true forgiveness. "Knowing forgetting" is to say, "I know and remember what you have done, and it is wrong, but I choose to forgive and to lay it aside, in effect forgetting what you did as an act of my will, regardless of your actions or attitude." This is the kind of forgiveness Jesus of Nazareth expressed when he forgave the perpetrators of the crime they were even at that moment committing against him (Luke 23:34 and 46). He did not require them to stop, to repent or to express public remorse or restitution. He forgave while they were still in the act of committing this unjust act against him. Acts of forgiveness such as this are powerful, even beautiful, and most importantly, they are possible. Free of the constraints of expectations, "face," politics and formalism, such forgiveness is not impossible even in situations of extreme, deeply engrained, even centuries-long environments of hostility. Despite the difficulties involved in achieving forgiveness in collective contexts such as these, Shriver is correct in saying, "...forgiveness is the doorway through which a diversity of humans...can come together to form a new community."[24] Conversely, if we do not learn how to better manage identity and difference, and learn how to embrace while practicing "knowing forgetting," the future of the world seems grim indeed.[25]
[1] Donald W. Shriver, Jr., An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 38.
[2] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), p. 17 and 20.
[3] She is right, though it would seem that Jesus did not care much for politics. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
[4] This statement is based on a realist view of human nature, the notion that humans are imperfect, primarily self-interested beings, which aligns with the Judeo-Christian tradition and many others.
[5] I refer here to an address he gave at Eckerd College February 26, 2007.
[6] See Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007). I note that this should come as no surprise to Christians (and arguably Jews) given the Christian (and arguably Hebrew) conception of original sin, that human nature is primarily self-interested, and that "none are without sin, not even one." Volf (1996) is here as well.
[7] Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Politics and Forgiveness," in Nigel Biggar, ed., Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2001).
[8] Volf (1996), p. 37.
[9] In his The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmens, 2006), he discusses his struggle to remain true to his non-violent Christian convictions when drafted into the Yugoslav Army in 1984, and subject to threats, intimidations and seemingly endless interrogations, charged with being a spy because he had married an American and studied in the West.
[10] Volf (1996), p. 16-17.
[11] Volf (1996), p. 17.
[12] Donald Shriver, "Where and When in Political Life is Justice Served by Forgiveness?" in Biggar (2001), p. 36.
[13] Shriver in Biggar (2001), p. 36, referring to Robert Jay Lifton's Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986/2000).
[14] Jean Bethke Elshtain, in Biggar (2001), p. 43.
[15] Such is certainly the case at my local Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg.
[16] Ienaga Saburo, "The Glorification of War in Japanese Education," in Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller, eds., East Asian Security (Boston: MIT Press, 1996).
[17] Ian Baruma, "The Joys and Perils of Victimhood," New York Review of Books (April 8, 1999), as cited in Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. XVII.
[18] Gries, Peter Hays, "Tears of Rage: Chinese Nationalist Reactions to the Belgrade Embassy Bombing," China Journal, 46 (July, 2001).
[19] Barkan (2000), p. XVII.
[20] Elshtain, in Biggar (2001), p. 44.
[21] See John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).
[22] Elshtain, in Biggar (2001), p. 44.
[23] Junevicus, "To Forgive and Forget," presented to the Council of Faculty Fellows, Eckerd College (April 4, 2007).
[24] Shriver (1995), p. 38.
[25] Volf (1996), p. 20.