Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair

Introduction
MEMORY, LAW, AND REPAIR
NANCY L. ROSENBLUM
You ask me to renew
A grief so desperate that the very thought
Of speaking of it tears my heart in two.

But if my words may be a seed that bears
The fruit of infamy for him I gnaw,
I shall weep, but tell my story through my tears.
--COUNT UGOLINO IN DANTE,
The Inferno, Canto XXXIII
Every injustice arouses anger, or should. A capacity to understand and feel injustice is the mark of moral maturity; a taste for oppression is the mark of moral deformation. "To have no idea of what it means to be treated unjustly is to have no moral knowledge, no moral life."1 But of the many faces of injustice, violent hatred stands out. These crimes betray exceptional viciousness and inflict exceptional pain. They evoke especially strong feelings because they exhibit none of the randomness or misfortune of many forms of injury. The intent to terrorize, injure, and degrade is intensely personal. The perpetrator believes the individual deserves to suffer, even though the reason for inflicting suffering is not always tied to the victim's own acts but often to his or her group membership or some ascriptive trait. The deliberate cruelty of the attack is unmistakable. As a result, the injuries suffered on account of one's color or ethnicity, sex or sexual orientation provoke enduring bitterness. The response of victims of hateful violence is a particularly deep resentment--a moral anger. Victims want more than to hold the perpetrators responsible; they want to cause them and their supporters suffering in turn. An unruly longing for revenge is validated by the vindictiveness of the crime. Certain crimes usher in that destructive dynamic: a cycle of hatred.
In Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair, Martha Minow and the other authors of these essays bring within one compass the universe of hatred and violence--from mass atrocities to local hate crimes to domestic violence.
No subject is grimmer or more morally compelling than crimes of hate. They stand out among acts of injustice. Their viciousness instills horror. They are extraordinary, not ordinary crimes. But this does not mean that they are rare. The darkest, most dehumanizing human actions, from genoicide to child abuse, are recurrent. Hate crimes and group-based violence and domestic cruelty are elements of everyday life for many people. There are innumerable perpetrators and victims. Their experience is captured best in memoirs and fiction; it takes eloquence and literary imagination to make these crimes vivid. But their experience is also available to us in sketchy form in almost daily news reports, if only we pay attention.
Martha Minow delivered the Gilbane Fund Lectures at Brown University in 1999. I introduced each lecture by reading from a New York Times story from that week. There was an unceasing string of stories. I had no difficulty finding awful, timely introductions to the lecture themes.
To introduce "Memory and Hate: Are There Lessons from Around the World?," this report from Bazarak, Afghanistan:2
Those who only had their houses burned or crops destroyed often apologize because their story is not bad enough. They are sheepish about complaining.
And so they lead the way to the worse off, the irretrievably broken or unbearably sorrowful--the children of parents who were killed as they watched or the men whose wives were carried off screaming or the old woman whose story no one is sure of, but she has been sobbing for two months now, fingering a red flower embroidered on a pink cloth.
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia, along with thousands of Pakistanis lit with the fervor of jihad, went on a destructive spree this summer, killing wantonly, emptying entire towns, machine-gunning livestock, sawing down fruit trees, blasting apart irrigation canals. It was a binge of blood lust and mayhem described in consistent detail by witnesses.
To introduce "Regulating Hatred: Whose Speech, Whose Crimes, Whose Power?" I read from a report about empaneling a jury in Wyoming for the trial of Russell Henderson, the young man charged with torturing Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, and leaving him to die tied to a fence in a winter field.3
And to introduce "Between Nations and Between Intimates: Can Law Stop the Violence?" there was the article on parents whose children had been shot at school by a classmate who went on to kill himself. This is a story of violence by and against children. It is also about the pain of survivors. Without a criminal trial, the families had no official forum in which to tell their story, and there was no one to hold directly accountable. The victims' parents brought a civil suit against the killer's parents, their neighbors, thinking that something at home--some family failure, some intimate horror--must have caused the hatred, and looking to hold the parents responsible.