Monday, May 16, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
So, as you might have heard, Osama bin Laden got killed a couple weeks back.
In the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death, there were a number of people, largely on the left, arguing that it was an injustice, and that he ought to have been arrested, tried and convicted (including Glenn Greenwald, Ken Livingstone, the Germans, and the ever ridiculous Noam Chomsky*). I wonder, though, under whose laws? It reminds me of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s trial for crimes against humanity. Though attached to the mechanisms of legal justice (trial, jury, defense lawyers, etc.) Arendt is skeptical of the justice of prosecuting a man for “crimes against humanity,” a category that didn’t exist at the times of Eichmann’s implementation of the Holocaust.
*I apologize to Greenwald, Livingstone, and the Germans for lumping them together with Chomsky. Okay, maybe just to Greenwald and the Germans.
I think there’s a similar question issue of justice in the bin Laden case. It seems to me that there would be no more justice in kidnapping him and trying him by the laws of a hostile nation, laws that he does not acknowledge, in a trial with a predetermined outcome (to say nothing of the endless complications that capturing, housing, trying, and executing him would cause the United States at every level). Arendt wanted to solve the problem by having the court to, rather than convicting Eichmann of retroactive crimes, tell him that because he and his superiors had acted as if he "had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world--we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to share the world with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang."
Thus, as much as Arendt embraces the trappings of judicial justice, that final judgment is extralegal, or maybe a-legal. The sentence is not that you are in violation of the laws or that you have committed a crime. It's that we humans here feel that your existence is intolerable. It's finally not legal, but political justice. We vs. you. And we can kill you because you lost and we won and you are in our power and we don't like you because of what you have done. So I don't think that, in the end, shooting bin Laden in the head is any different than trying him, at least in terms of justice. They're both forms of political violence, but the latter seems to me in some way dishonest. Arendt extends the mechanisms of law beyond the sphere of the legal and into that of the political, which leaves her in kind of an odd space.
The way I figure, there are two kinds of justice here: the one that we think about in terms of law (the justice of a process), and the one that we think about when we think about just wars (moral and political warrant). I think that bin Laden's killing is just in the second sense. The attacks of September 11 were meant as, and certainly understood as, an act of war. The problem for us (us theorists, anyway) is that it was an act of war by a non-state actor, which I think contributed to our long series of blunders and transgressions in its aftermath. But the thing that was always clear was that al Qaeda was an enemy*, with bin Laden as its face, as he wanted to be.
*In a concrete way that "terror" could never be, which is what makes the War on Terror as stupid as the War on Drugs. It's an abstraction that legitimates excess because you can't point to it, capture it or shoot it. It had no logical endpoint.
I think that we ought to view the spontaneous celebrations that greeted bin Laden’s death through this lens. Some people found it really upsetting that people would celebrate the death of even an evil man (thus the popularity of that partly-fake MLK quote), but I think that to see the celebrations in that way is overly simplistic. People were celebrating something complicated, for which they had no clear script. I think that it was as if our armies had captured the enemy capital, but that capital was this guy hiding in Pakistan. It's not just a death, it's a victory in a long and grinding war that everybody thought would never end, with nothing to show for it. Maybe it's THE victory. I think that a lot of the celebration (and I could be very wrong about this) was because people felt that in an important way, the war was over. We finally did what it was we set out to do. Maybe it wasn't worth it, and it was too much and too long, but now it can be over. Maybe now we can get out of Afghanistan some day.
*I apologize to Greenwald, Livingstone, and the Germans for lumping them together with Chomsky. Okay, maybe just to Greenwald and the Germans.
I think there’s a similar question issue of justice in the bin Laden case. It seems to me that there would be no more justice in kidnapping him and trying him by the laws of a hostile nation, laws that he does not acknowledge, in a trial with a predetermined outcome (to say nothing of the endless complications that capturing, housing, trying, and executing him would cause the United States at every level). Arendt wanted to solve the problem by having the court to, rather than convicting Eichmann of retroactive crimes, tell him that because he and his superiors had acted as if he "had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world--we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to share the world with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang."
Thus, as much as Arendt embraces the trappings of judicial justice, that final judgment is extralegal, or maybe a-legal. The sentence is not that you are in violation of the laws or that you have committed a crime. It's that we humans here feel that your existence is intolerable. It's finally not legal, but political justice. We vs. you. And we can kill you because you lost and we won and you are in our power and we don't like you because of what you have done. So I don't think that, in the end, shooting bin Laden in the head is any different than trying him, at least in terms of justice. They're both forms of political violence, but the latter seems to me in some way dishonest. Arendt extends the mechanisms of law beyond the sphere of the legal and into that of the political, which leaves her in kind of an odd space.
The way I figure, there are two kinds of justice here: the one that we think about in terms of law (the justice of a process), and the one that we think about when we think about just wars (moral and political warrant). I think that bin Laden's killing is just in the second sense. The attacks of September 11 were meant as, and certainly understood as, an act of war. The problem for us (us theorists, anyway) is that it was an act of war by a non-state actor, which I think contributed to our long series of blunders and transgressions in its aftermath. But the thing that was always clear was that al Qaeda was an enemy*, with bin Laden as its face, as he wanted to be.
*In a concrete way that "terror" could never be, which is what makes the War on Terror as stupid as the War on Drugs. It's an abstraction that legitimates excess because you can't point to it, capture it or shoot it. It had no logical endpoint.
I think that we ought to view the spontaneous celebrations that greeted bin Laden’s death through this lens. Some people found it really upsetting that people would celebrate the death of even an evil man (thus the popularity of that partly-fake MLK quote), but I think that to see the celebrations in that way is overly simplistic. People were celebrating something complicated, for which they had no clear script. I think that it was as if our armies had captured the enemy capital, but that capital was this guy hiding in Pakistan. It's not just a death, it's a victory in a long and grinding war that everybody thought would never end, with nothing to show for it. Maybe it's THE victory. I think that a lot of the celebration (and I could be very wrong about this) was because people felt that in an important way, the war was over. We finally did what it was we set out to do. Maybe it wasn't worth it, and it was too much and too long, but now it can be over. Maybe now we can get out of Afghanistan some day.
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