Seeking Justice in Norway

One hundred and twenty-three years ago today, a boy was born in the Austrian town of Branau am Inn. Fifty years later, the man that boy became launched the bloodiest, most destructive war in the history of the world. Tens of millions died trying to bring him to justice, but in the end he took his own life beneath the ruins of Berlin before justice could catch up to him. There's no physical trace of him left today - the Soviets made sure of that - but in spirit, Adolf Hitler will always be with us; a midnight presence just beyond our vision, an echoing reminder of what humans can do when they sacrifice their humanity. We can't forget him, because to do so would be to invite him back into the light and allow his cycle to start all over again.

I can't help but think of Hitler when I read of the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the self-proclaimed "Justicar Knight" responsible for the murder of seventy-seven people last summer because, in his fundamentally broken mind, he was fighting "anti-European racism" generated by "media and the Marxist elites." I can't recall if the media had enough power by the 1920s for Hitler to fulminate against it in Mein Kampf, but it nevertheless sounds starkly familiar. During his latest day in court, Breivik described hunting down teenagers on Utoya, specifically searching for ones hiding themselves away.

What's clear enough is that Breivik is cold and Breivik is remorseless. There's no question on the verdict that will be handed down at the end of the trial. On Wednesday, articles began to surface that Breivik only sees two "just and fair" ways for it to go; either acquittal, which is about as likely as Germany deciding to celebrate Adolf Hitler Day, or execution.

Hey, just because they said you're going to hang by the neck until dead, it doesn't mean you can't do it in a colorful way. Also, I suspect this might actually be a shoelace.

Norway, like most of the world, has rid itself of capital punishment - for peacetime cases such as Breivik's, judicial executions have been off the books for more than a hundred years, but exceptions were made for cases such as Vidkun Quisling, leader of the collaborationist Norwegian government during the war. Nevertheless, when I first heard of this, my first thought was that Breivik was right in his way, that the only just thing would be to execute him. That he was no longer fully human by virtue of his actions, that he was a monster, a thing that walked and talked and looked like us but was not one of us anymore and could never be one of us again, and that it became our responsibility to deal with him the way one would deal with a rabid dog.

But--I had forgotten that old Klingon proverb, that revenge is a dish best served cold. To say that there will be no measure of revenge in the punishment that's handed down on Breivik would be to ignore the way humans work. But to feed his twisted idea of what is "just and fair" would only let him win, the way Hitler "won" all those years ago. Execution isn't justice, not really. Execution is revenge, and execution enables the condemned to escape justice.

Let's go back to the end of the Second World War. Imagine if things had gone just slightly different... if Adolf Hitler had been captured alive by the Allies. He would have been brought to Nuremberg, he would have been the main event of Nuremberg, and there's absolutely no question that when it was over, Adolf Hitler would hang. Understandable, really - but not full justice, either.

Imagine a different world, where Hitler was captured, tried, and imprisoned for the rest of his life - say a fortress in Scotland or on St. Helena. If Hitler lived to be eighty, he would have died in 1969 - time enough to see the division of Germany, the rise of the Warsaw Pact, the construction of the Berlin Wall. He would not only have seen his dream of a thousand-year empire crumble, he would see Germany ground down and have to live with the knowledge that it was his fault - and only then would he die, an solitary old man, broken and powerless, hated and mocked but never forgotten.

To give Breivik what he wants would be a miscarriage of justice. The only just thing is to do what the law already sets down - to imprison him, and once he's behind bars he won't ever see freedom again. What he will see is a country and a world that goes on, that moves beyond him... that forgets about him. Breivik is no Hitler; while those who died at his hands deserve to be remembered and memorialized, the only just punishment for Anders Behring Breivik is for him to grow old knowing that he was a failure and that he will be forgotten.

Taking Chances, Making Mistakes, Getting Messy

A lot of people, it seems, have come to believe that the world is a fundamentally just place where good things happen to good people and if something bad happens to you, you must have done something to deserve it. It's called the Just World Fallacy and it's been with us for as long as can be remembered, because the alternative is living in a world where bad things can just happen to us no matter how much we've tried not to be an asshole. A great deal of people have would have difficulty living in this kind of world; nevertheless, one of the earliest lessons children learn is that life isn't fair.

So there are some mixed messages, of course. Not enough to keep plenty of people convinced of the notion that life is fundamentally fair, that if someone has an advantage it's because they earned it honestly, and if someone charges into a run of bad luck they obviously did something to justify it coming down on them.

This sort of thinking is particularly widespread in the United States, and at no time is it as visible as in the Presidential campaign season. I came to consider this earlier this weekend, when I encountered an article about the modern American political divide in the Toronto Star - specifically, the part hearkening back to a September debate, where Republican candidate Ron Paul was asked about the hypothetical situation of a healthy 30-year-old dude who elected not to hold medical insurance, only to suffer a serious accident that left him needing intensive care for six months.

"But congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" Wolf Blitzer asks. The transcripts and videos I've found don't cover Ron Paul's response; for the purposes of this I'm not particularly interested in what he had to say. What I'm more focused on is the audience's response, members of the peanut gallery hooting and shouting yeah, that society should let that person die.

Because it was his own fault, you see. So the fallacy goes.

Do justice, and so on.

What concerns me is that it's a distinction that would be lost on a lot of people, or could be made to be lost by those in positions of authority who have an interest in making it lost. Right now in the United States, I imagine there are some people who could get health insurance but don't feel the need; I imagine there is a far, far greater number who could get health insurance, but feel that buying food and paying rent is more important. But because of the idea of the Just World, there are those in society that agree that those people should die because obviously they made the wrong choices, made too many mistakes, or otherwise they wouldn't be there.

Yet the world isn't just. Bad things happen to good people, and society is not on an even keel. There must be as many reasons why people believe otherwise as there are people who believe otherwise. Just a recognition of that, a rejection of the fallacy, by more people could do a lot to correct the sort of inequities the world faces today. Even if you think that society should allow a person to die for one simple mistake, that doesn't take into consideration the messes that come whether or not you want them to.

Justice and the Death of Muammar Gaddafi

Recent events in my life have led me to remind myself of a core truth, one that we tend not to think about or try to explain away, but which remains nonetheless - there's no such thing as natural justice. Justice is a fiction invented by humanity to keep society running, just like the concept of a punishing afterlife came about so that people could take comfort in knowing that even if someone dodged the law in life, they would pay for it in death. But there's no justice in death... there's no justice anywhere except where we make it. Nothing in the world, in and of itself, is fair. Nothing is just. It just is. This was one of the themes behind "The Platinum Desolation."

That's what came back to me when I heard the news this morning that Muammar Gaddafi, erstwhile dictator of Libya, has been confirmed killed in the fall of the last loyalist bastion of Sirte - and with his death comes the effective end of the Libyan Civil War, but of a stench of dictatorship that has been in the air since 1969, the brightest bloom yet of the Arab Spring. Whether the new government of Libya will be able to keep a strong hand on the tiller, or whether this will only expose another country to instability and terror, it's too early to say. Nevertheless, what upset me the most is that Gadaffi is dead - shot in the legs and head and not, as first reported, taken into custody.

Because he's escaped. The victims of Gadaffi's forty-two years in power will only be able to find a hollower justice now. There'll be no trial for Muammar Gadaffi, no judgement, and no sentence passed down - there'll only be the people left behind in his wake, struggling to build up what they can, while he went where no justice can ever follow. It's a road that's been impressed with the footprints of many dictators - Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Kim Il Sung, and so on - but that's the hard thing, isn't it? Dictators, by their very nature, are polarizing figures; what sort of justice would Gadaffi have gotten if he'd been brought to it - would it have been a trial like Nicolae Ceausescu's?

Is justice really justice when the result is self-evident? Would justice really have been done if Gadaffi had lived to be brought to trial, or would it be, like in the case of Ceausescu or Saddam Hussein, vengeance under a different name?

Those questions, I think, are way beyond my pay grade - and the themes that underlie them will be debated back and forth for as long as there are humans to wag their jaws at one another. But there's not even a show of justice here, just death - and I still don't like it.

I found this circa 1986 "Khadaffy Duck" T-shirt at a store in Toronto's Kensington Market in 2003. It hung in the kitchen of my last apartment for three years. It is finally, finally topical.