Mercy

Mercy: It Isn’t What You Think it Is

Mark Noonan33 Comments

Dan McLaughlin – a man of the Right but whom I often disagree with – posted a Tweet the other day saying we should have hung Jefferson Davis after the Civil War; this has sparked a bit of a debate with most people disagreeing with McLaughlin. I was one who supported the assertion. Not only Davis, but Lee; in fact, all elected officials of the Confederacy; all cabinet officials; all general and flag officers; all governors of seceded States; all elected officials of seceded States – all should have variously been hung or if mitigating circumstances were found, imprisoned for long terms, most for life. Additionally, all members of the Confederate States armed forces should have been permanently disenfranchised if no other punishment was warranted for actions during the war.

Harsh, huh?

But not really. For the longest time I went along with the agree-upon post-Civil War Narrative that Grant’s “let ’em up easy” terms were best as it was asserted it quickly restored national unity and ensured against a repeat. But upon long reflection, I have concluded that this Narrative is as much drivel as the former Confederate’s Lost Cause Narrative.

First off, there wasn’t going to be a repeat. The war was over. The South was utterly crushed. They had no means with which to wage war. The huge armies that the South managed to field in 1863 were gone and couldn’t be remade. It was more than a generation before the physical damage was repaired. The concept that the South – having just been wiped out – would resort to arms if we weren’t nice to the Confederates is just nonsense on stilts.

Secondly, the former Confederates weren’t in the least moved by mercy. Their sole purpose once we decided to let them go was to restore as far as possible the supremacy of the Planter Class which had engineered secession and lost the Civil War at massive cost to those Southerners who had no stake in the Planter Class. The Klan was formed six months after the last battle; and it’s purpose was to beat down any person, black or white, who might strive for a new direction in the South. Anyone who wanted blacks voting, getting educated, owning property was targeted. Yes, most of the direct violence was against black people…but plenty of white people felt the fury as well; to intimidate them into looking the other way when the Klan went out to murder. The only thing which prevented the former Confederates from reimposing slavery was the 13th Amendment – and with the Klan they imposed a system which was all but slavery.

Davis, Lee and a few other top people hanging from a gallows and you don’t get this. Disenfranchised Confederate soldiers means black Southerners united with those whites who resisted the Confederacy (and there were a lot of them) would control the future of the South. There would have been a real Reconstruction; a real re-integration of the South into the national political system…not this bastard, hybrid system we had from 1865 to 1965 where in parts of the country American citizens were routinely denied basic rights because of their skin color. There was more shame in Jim Crow than slavery, when you really think about it – we inherited slavery; we made Jim Crow…or if not made it, tolerated it. Looked the other way; pretended it wasn’t happening or wasn’t a problem. It was a poison injected into our society after the most glorious moment in our history – the end of slavery. And think of all the people who died or were brutalized because of Jim Crow. Set that against twenty or thirty people hung…people who had, no matter how you sliced it, levied war against the United States, and so were traitors by the strict definition of the Constitution.

Mercy, you see, isn’t softness. It isn’t a refusal to acknowledge what happened and demand an accounting – it is a decision to remit full punishment for transgression. In other words, you do not exact your pound of flesh. But this doesn’t mean you don’t take an ounce or two. After the Hungarian rebellion against Austrian rule in 1848, one of Bismarck’s friends bemoaned the repression the Austrians were dealing out to the defeated Hungarians. Bismarck asked in reply words to the effect of, “what about all the people who died in the rebellion? Doesn’t their blood cry out for justice?”. What Bismarck was hitting upon is that anyone who resorts to arms bears responsibility. To be certain – and Bismarck would agree – at times you can be in a position where resort to arms is the only way out. But even if you are fully justified in fighting, people are going to die…and it will be the most innocent who suffer the most because you decided to fight. The Hungarians felt they had to fight (I’ve thought about it and I don’t think they were justified; there were vitally necessary reforms but there was no reason to fight; given the nature of the world at the time, the Austrians weren’t being oppressive brutes and there was a great deal of willingness to reform in the government); fine – fight. But they lost. And now the instrument of government must exact a reckoning on those who resorted to arms. Schwarzenberg, the Austrian Prime Minister (in effect) was alleged to have said, “certainly, there must be mercy. But first, some hanging.”. You can’t just start a war, lose it, and expect everyone to act as if nothing had happened. So there was some punishment – and some mercy. In the long stream of history, one of the Hungarians condemned to die for rebellion was eventually pardoned and rose to be Prime Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; but there still had to be the hanging.

We need to get back to an understanding that a price has to be paid. There is nothing free. And the more disruptive the action, the higher the price. We have turned mercy into mere mushiness; a sentimental unwillingness to make sure that those who dare greatly also understand that failure has its very high cost. Our latest iteration of this is the BLM/Antifa riots and the spate of store lootings. Everyone wants these things to stop – but I might well be the only person in the United States who understands that if you want to be merciful, then some people will have to pay, and perhaps with their lives for the most egregious. And keep in mind that I oppose the death penalty! On the whole, don’t use it…but if we identify, say, twenty people who organized the BLM/Antifa riots which led to so many devastated lives…then four or five of the worst offenders being hung is merciful…because the survivors would never risk a repeat of it, and so we won’t have thousands of people with ruined lives because someone wanted to make a violent political point.

Human life – human civilization – is a precarious balance; everything has its mirror and it is in striking the balance between the two extremes that we find peace, freedom and safety. Tolerance balanced with intolerance. Order balanced with liberty. Justice balanced with mercy. But balanced. No element being allowed to run away with itself; everything kept in check by its opposite. We have lost that balance and so everything gets ever more insane. It is time to revive it.

The Need to Punish

Mark Noonan9 Comments

Just a little while ago I finished watching the movie Narvik. Highly recommend. Five stars. It is a dramatization of the German attack on the Norwegian town of Narvik in 1940 – the Germans invading Norway primary to gain control of Narvik because, during winter, that was the port where a huge portion of Germany’s iron ore came from. Lose that port, lose the war: that was the point for the Germans. It is a Norwegian movie so it is in subtitles for the most part, but it is well done so that you hardly notice that you’re reading the dialogue.

While a war movie, it isn’t centered on war, as such. Certainly there are battle scenes but the story is really about what do you do? Who is right? Who is wrong? What is moral? What is immoral? Collaboration or resistance? Fight on when its hopeless or just quit? The Germans, naturally, are the bad guys – mostly because they really were. But the British are not portrayed very favorably either. Neither are the neutral Swedes. The French (who really did come to fight for Narvik) are given a dose of glory. As I said, definitely recommend. But aside from offering you a couple hours of interesting and moving entertainment, there was something that struck me in the movie.

There is this scene where Gunnar – a young, Norwegian soldier; he, his young wife and child are central elements of the story – finally gets really into the fight and is able to pay out the Germans in their own coin. He shoots two Germans manning a machine gun nest. As he’s turns to leave, he notices that one of them has started moving. He quickly goes over to the man and turns him over: he’s just a kid (like Gunnar) but he’s also no threat: he’s dying and the lad’s dying eyes plead with Gunnar, “help me!”. But all Gunnar does is shove him a bit and, as the kid dies, ask “why are you here?”. No answer is provided: and for Gunnar and his dead enemy, no answer is ever going to really be provided.

The scene bore in on me the crime that is war. Don’t get me wrong: if you’re fighting to defend yourself, you commit no crime – but to start a war is a crime. There is never a justification to start shooting, or set up a situation where the other side feels it must start shooting or die. That player in the movie dying at his post represents millions – and even though, in this case, it was a young German, we do feel the sadness; the loss. The pointless waste of a life. But as we really consider it, we must never forget that it was a crime – and the attacker from the youngest little soldier in the ranks to the top military and political leaders are guilty.

Therefore, you are without excuse, every one of you who passes judgment. For by the standard by which you judge another you condemn yourself, since you, the judge, do the very same things. – Romans 2:1

Any 18 year old Fritz in the German army, if asked, would say that it would be wrong if a foreign army suddenly descended on his home town and started confiscating, ordering about, oppressing and such. And so, the Germans who landed at Narvik knew they weren’t supposed to do that. No citizen of Narvik or Norway had in any way offended any German in the least. You have no excuse. You may obtain forgiveness, but you have no excuse.

And that thought, in turn, brought me to think about our larger crisis, domestic and foreign. The way the world is really in bad shape. And it occurred to me this is because, after more than a century of incredible evil done by nations and ideologies, nobody was ever sufficiently punished for their transgressions. Justice must always be tempered by mercy, but it still must be justice. Because we must apply mercy, after WWII we wouldn’t line the Germans up and shove them into gas chambers…but hanging a few Nazi leaders hardly atoned for the crime. And this leaves aside the fact that nothing was done about the Soviets, who were only marginally less bad than the Germans.

It is said – and generally accepted – that after WWI the punishment of the Germans was too harsh. The reality is that it was too light. Remember: they attacked France, Belgium and Luxembourg without the slightest provocation. And this led to four years of miserable, slogging warfare where untold numbers of young men died when, with just an ounce of decency on the part of the Germans, they would have lived. All the Germans had to do to save the lives of millions was…not attack people who offered no offense in any way. Quite honestly, for a century after that, the Germans should have been de-jure shackled to plows to pay back those they attacked. And WWII was even worse…and all we did was hang a few Nazis and then let the Germans get rich building cars and then we sat there, slack jawed, as they complained about what we did during the war. And, remember: no excuse. Any German asked in 1939 would have answered “no” to the question “should Nation X attack Germany unprovoked?”. They knew what they were doing was wrong. And they gloried in it…and only rejected it when it was all over. Germans want to complain about Dresden? They should feel lucky that every city and town in Germany wasn’t razed to the ground.

And I do think that this unwillingness to punish on the larger scale has led to our unwillingness on the lower scale. We’re forever finding excuses. Letting the guilty off. Figuring out how we can turn a blind eye to it. Easier that way, don’t you know? To punish is to take responsibility…and to assert a standard that you, too, must he held to. It is almost as if by letting Nazis and Communists off we then gave ourselves permission to bomb mud huts in Vietnam and drone wedding parties in Yemen. That if we let the mugger and armed robber off in our streets, we can then excuse the politician taking bribes. That if we all smear a bit of sh** all over ourselves, none of us will notice we stink.

It is high time that we got ourselves cleaned up. That we start to punish the guilty. Yes, yes, yes: always tempered with mercy. But mercy is to reduce the punishment either in scope or duration…but there must be punishment. The guilty must feel at least some of the pain they inflicted. And nobody has an excuse – the dictator plotting war and the punk plotting robbery already know they shouldn’t – and they know they shouldn’t because they know they wouldn’t want themselves to be the victim of an unprovoked attack or a robbery. When we think of all those who have been victimized by war and crime over the past century because our failure to punish encouraged the next war or crime, then really no amount of harshness meted out to the guilty is excessive. If the Germans in 1939 had been shackled and working merely to feed themselves and pay back those they attacked, then there would have been no WWII. In Europe, 60 million people would not have died. Try to sell me that brutally humiliating the Germans for, say, 50 years after WWI would have been worse than WWII. And how many in our cities have been robbed, raped and murdered by people who had previously robbed, raped or murdered? You tell me that punishment doesn’t deter crime? Maybe – but I know what a guy breaking rocks in the hot sun for 10 years won’t do for 10 years: rob. That’s at least some people not robbed; and that makes the punishment of the robber just and merciful. And as merciful to the robber as to any potential future victims – by punishing, we are at least for a time preventing the miscreant from sinning, and that’s a good thing.