The film Death Sentence is worth seeing.
As the saying goes “Warning! spoilers below”… I would like to say that I was attracted to the film by the negative review in the Daily Telegraph (which is normally a good sign), buy I had already been to see the film before I chanced upon the review.
I actually agree with one bit of the review. The lead character does learn to use firearms with rather too little time and effort (although it has already been established that he is a man of application and with a decent level of physical strength and coordination – he is also in a rather focussed frame of mind).
However, that is not the real reason that the Daily Telegraph reviewer sneers at the film. It is the ideas and feelings behind the story that would be disliked by a standard media person.
The main character Nick Hume (played well by Kevin Bacon) is shown as having had an athletic youth but also as being a conscientious executive working in the area of the calculation of risk. Indeed Nick Hume’s manner and even appearance whilst in the office (in the early part of the film) reminded me a little of Brit Hume of Fox News (and this is a 20th Century Fox film).
Mr Hume’s son is murdered, and the police can only offer him a few years in prison for the murderer, as Mr Hume is the only witness and, therefore, to risk a jury trial would be unwise (better to settle for a deal with the defence).
The father decides that a year or so in jail is not enough for the death of his son. So he pretends that he is no longer sure that the murderer was indeed the killer of his son – so that the man will be released, so that he (Mr Hume) can kill him.
This killing is quite convincing. Mr Hume messes things up rather badly, and basically wins the fight by luck.
However, Mr Hume has also covered his tracks rather poorly so the gang who the murderer belonged to quickly work out that Nick Hume has killed their comrade (who also happens to be the brother of the leader of the gang).
Unsurprisingly the gang then attempt to kill Mr Hume – who (again more by luck than judgement) manages to survive and to kill another member of the gang.
At this point the leader of the gang decides to kill not just Mr Hume, but also his wife and remaining son. The gang leader also informs Mr Hume of what he intends to do, for whilst the gang leader is an evil man (who later kills his own father) there is also a feeling that he longs to be respected, to be thought of as an honourable warrior – not a pathetic street corner drug dealer.
As a policewomen (who suspects Mr Hume of killing the gang members) puts it “you have started a war, everyone thinks they are right in war – and everyone looses”.
Mr Hume’s wife is also shocked by what Mr Hume is suspected to have done.
Later the gang succeed in killing Mr Hume’s wife and leaving his other son in coma – but Mr Hume (although wounded) does not die.
At this point he gives himself totally to the task of revenge. He changes his appearance (a nice touch is that he shaves his head wrong – he misses some hair, which is what tends to happen when one shaves one’s head for the first time) buys firearms and ammunition (from the gang leader’s own father) and kills the remaining gang members.
Mr Hume’s youngest son may recover from the coma (although, as he was shot in the head, he will not have a happy time) but Mr Hume’s own life is over, if he does not die of his wounds he will spend the rest of his life in prison (the film ends with him sitting watching a home movie of his family – with the police already having arrived at his home).
So far so “liberal” one might think – “taking the law into your own hands” is shown to have terrible consequences (wife dead, younger son brain damaged and only death or prison to look forward to), but that is not the feel of the film (which is the real reason the reviewers will hate it).
The feel of the film is that there is nothing else Mr Hume could have done. Blood calls out for blood (not a year or so in prison) even if the consequences will be terrible. If a father can not save his son, he must still avenge him – even if this leads to other members of his family being killed.
It is not even a matter of hating the enemy. Near the end of the film the leader of the gang who has murdered Mr Hume’s family sits down next to him (the gang leader is bleeding to death at the time) and the two men are almost friendly as they sit there – Mr Hume even asks him if he is ready before shooting him one last time.
And, yes, there is a political message.
Many people say that such things as the Afghan war are pointless because we can not turn the place into a democracy (as the neo-cons want). This may be true – but it misses the point. Just as it misses the point to say that the United States should not be in the Middle East at all – whether the United States should or should not have forces in the Middle East was no longer a relevant question after 9/11.
There is no real distinction between the Taliban and those who launched the attack upon the United States on 9/11. They have the same interpretation of Islam, and they have members who move from one organization to the other without difficulty.
To go after Al Qaeda means to go after the Taliban. And after 9/11 there was no honourable alternative to war, blood calls out for blood.
The consequences of intervention may be bad – but the consequences are not relevant.
There is no real distinction between the United States’ citizens and those who starved hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children during the embargo. They vote the government into power, and they have members who move from citizen to politician without difficulty.
To go after the US means to go after its citizens. And after US support of Saddam Hussein, there was no honourable alternative to 9/11, blood calls out for blood.
The consequences of terrorism may be bad – but the consequences are not relevant.
I don’t agree with that logic, but that’s where this death cult thinking gets you.
There is no real distinction between the United States’ citizens and those who starved hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children during the embargo.
Didn’t happen.
Baseless smear.
1, The embargo was a UN embargo, imposed by the security council.
2, These deaths did not happen.
3, Where there was real suffering, the oil for food program was in place to alleviate it. Saddam and his mates at the UN subverted this program, siphoning off cash for corruption and palaces.
Any other smears you want to make? Other ignorances you want to parade?
It’s not my intention to be accurate, it’s to show the general craziness of this death-cult logic. “Blood calls out for blood”? We must have bloody vengeance, regardless of the consequences? Nevermind that the “vengeance” is supposed to be based on an attack on a “country”, to add the adjective “collectivist” to the death-cult part.
Replace the hundreds of thousands of dead iraqi children of any of the many horrors committed by the US gov’t, and you can get the same result. Do you have a link to a refutation, Counting Cats?
Kenobi,
Oh do please shut up. If you want to blame someone blame Annan and Son, blame Saddam. It had sod all to do with the US government. The UN may be venal, corrupt and just plain stupid but the only “death-cults” I see in this are the nut-cases running around Iraq enacting nihilism, chaos and Islam.
Personally, I would say that Afghanistan was required. It’s purpose was not to make Afghanistan into a democracy, it was to get bin Ladin. Bin Laden needed to be gotten … well, since we’ve been wasting time in Iraq, sadly, bin Ladin STILL needs to be gotten.
To me it is not a matter of revenge, it is a matter of destroying the ability to make war. That is why it is absurd to invade a country that lacks the ability to make war in the first place.
Nick M,
Again, it is not my intention to pinpoint blame for select tragedies in the aforementioned region, it is to turn mr. Marks’ logic around on things dearer to samizdatistas’ hearts to show how mad, consistently applied, it really is.
That notion that “we” must go out and get revenge for “our” losses–oddly enough, I don’t recall anyone asking me whether any of my property was damaged in 9/11 or whether I wanted to fund the war in Afghanistan–against an entire group which is guilty by association with each other is exactly the logic of Islamic statism and any other given death cult I can think of.
As you want to talk in generalities, lets do that. Your whole thesis assumes moral equivalence to outwardly similar actions (which involve people ending up dead). Your “consistency” is misapplied and suggests all sorts of errors. If you attack a legitimate target and innocents are killed as a consequence, that is regrettable but not necessarily immoral. If you simply target innocents, that is necessarily immoral. Just because both things may involve dropping a bomb and killing people, it does not mean “consistency” indicates moral equivalence.
As for your notion “they did not blow up my house so I don’t care”, well fair enough, I can understand that. I do not really want to pay to defend you either, but until we have have a more dispersed and customisable way of doing things (via PMCs, protection agencies or whatever libertarian pipe-dream you want to trot out), we are stuck with the armies of nation states and a real world to deal with.
Thus sadly I am forced to pay for the military which protects also you too (and I realise neither of us really want that). Oh well. Still if I am going to get taxed, I am fairly pleased to see my tax money spent dropping bombs on certain people, which is vastly preferable to corrosive ‘social’ spending. We live in an imperfect world.
I take it Obi One that you are not a fan of the scene in the Untouchables where Sean Connery’s character outlines his stratagy for dealing with bad guys either?
Dropping bombs on “certain people” happens to have more serious consequences than any kind of social spending, and those consequences are felt more collectively. Welfare is as much the life of the state as war, but war invites a good deal more indiscriminate violent retribution against people who may or may not agree with it.
Dropping bombs on “certain people” happens to have more serious consequences than any kind of social spending, and those consequences are felt more collectively. Welfare is as much the life of the state as war, but war invites a good deal more indiscriminate violent retribution against people who may or may not agree with it.
Dropping bombs on “certain people” happens to have more serious consequences than any kind of social spending, and those consequences are felt more collectively. Welfare is as much the life of the state as war, but war invites a good deal more indiscriminate violent retribution against people who may or may not agree with it.
Once, twice, three times
A wassock!
I find as you get older, you just cut to the chase.
Thanks for the response, Mr. Haviland.
As you want to talk in generalities, lets do that. Your whole thesis assumes moral equivalence to outwardly similar actions (which involve people ending up dead). Your “consistency” is misapplied and suggests all sorts of errors. If you attack a legitimate target and innocents are killed as a consequence, that is regrettable but not necessarily immoral. If you simply target innocents, that is necessarily immoral. Just because both things may involve dropping a bomb and killing people, it does not mean “consistency” indicates moral equivalence.
I’m not sure about this “legitimate target” idea. If one has to literally cross an ocean, or more broadly if one would not otherwise be under threat, then firing a shotgun into a crowd or otherwise directly endangering innocents even to get at Bad Guys does not strike me as being justified. If they wanted to put their lives at risk, they would be fighting back; it’s certainly acceptable to defend other people, but deliberately risking their deaths directly by your actions is not your choice to make.
I agree that, other things being equal, using stolen money to kill coercers is preferable to spending on corrosive social programs, but in practice I don’t know of a country where the two do not come together, or where the former (war being a racket and all) does not encourage more of the same.
If I must limit myself to the realistic relative to what one can currently do given the extent of violence in the world, I may as well not get out of bed.
RAB,
I’ve never seen The Untouchables. I of course don’t care for the government cracking down on tax evasion.
Seems like Mr. Ken Obi has missed the whole point of his own argument.
If the character in the movie had lived in a world where “society” had been able to sanction the original murderer effectively, then the whole plot of the movie would have been irrelevant. Mr. Hume would merely have witnessed swift justice being done for the benefit of “society” by “society” — as would his friends, neighbors, and local gang members.
Unfortunately, in the movie’s world (as in our real world), “society” is no longer able to offer security & justice to its citizens. Just as the “international community” is not able to offer security & justice to nations, since supra-national bodies like the UN are corrupt to the core and crippled by self-absorbed, self-seeking parties like the French pursuing their own narrow short-term self-interest. The parallels to what passes for today’s legal system in the West are obvious.
If there is a global message that Mr. Ken Obi should have drawn from this movie, it is that he should cease pouring scorn on adults who step up to their responsibilities; instead, he should be leading the attacks on those weak fools who have crippled the ability of adults to come together and act for the long-term common good.
Alice,
The projection of Hume’s near manichean right-ness onto the real world is exactly my problem. In the real world, “Hume” is not stepping up for the common good, he’s part of the problem.
The glorification of violence, the disregard for its consequences, the idea that entities which confiscate and spend the equivlent of 2900 people’s lifetimes every day could be as justified as Hume–it’s a deadly illusion, washed red.
Sorry but you do not get to use that argument if you are calling for the ostrich approach to dealing with the barbarians of the world.
Many of these barbarians were created in the first place by far more polished barbarians in Washington, London, and any other capital city that supports the Americans aggresive wars. I’d hardly call it an “ostrich approach” to not want to involve oneself in a distant overseas war wih a country that never provably acted in aggression against the United states or the U.K. (Dont give me the “Saddam funded 911 crap” or if you are going to, at least show some evidence for it) Does anyone seriously believe that if the United states Army were to remove itself from all foreign countries, return to its native soil, and scale back to one 20th of its current size, that there would exist a serious threat of foreign invasion from the arab countries or their friends? Or from anyone else for that matter? Furthermore, to equate one mans personal vengeance solely against someone who was directly responsible for the killing of his son, with the massive, destructive wars of the World’s nation states is simply idiotic.
Perry claims that, if violence is not intentionally enacted against innocents, it is then different from that which is intentionally enacted. However, what if you know for certain that the violence you are planning on causing will also kill civilians and innocents who had done nothing against you, and that knowing this you go ahead with it anyway? I would argue that that is indeed as immoral is any other kind of murder.
And no, unintentionally killing civilians by dropping explosives all over a city or countryside, isnt really much different then throwing a grenade into a crowd of people at a shopping mall just because the man who just stabbed your wife ran through it. Is the latter something all you war lovers here would condone?
Late to this discussion, I’d like to go back to the original post.
Paul,
Are you saying that vendetta is legitimate, if an individual or group is unsatisfied with rule of law? That is of a piece with your call for the law to be administered in line with popular sentiment in comments here, but seems to go a bit further. What is the point of criminal law at all if those who (even correctly) deem themselves aggrieved may take revenge by violence to suit themselves?
It sounds to me as if the filmmakers might be having it both ways, playing with a popular violent revenge fantasies but tacking on a moral. The idea that Bacon’s character is authentic in an existentialist sense, or compulsive, following his conscience regardless of consequence, or the puppet of uncontrollable urges, just might be an interesting psychological study, but I’m not optimistic enough about movies to go and sit through a violent story to find out.
I’d take quite the opposite lesson from the film plot you outline in the individual case, and am unwilling to accept constructive tribal identity as having any moral validity let alone analogise from individual to familial group to abstract collective. I don’t think I could call myself an individualist if I thought that there is inherent collective responsibility for the actions of others borne by people who think broadly similar things, or that “blood calls out for blood”.
It’s not my intention to be accurate,
If the premise is not accurate then the conclusions are worthless – Logic 101.
We must have bloody vengeance, regardless of the consequences?
No, but when one country (Afghanistan) commits an act of war against another country (the US) a response is not simply justified, but required.
Replace the hundreds of thousands of dead iraqi children of any of the many horrors committed by the US gov’t, and you can get the same result.
Specific examples please. Actions, dates, places, numbers. Otherwise known as facts.
Do you have a link to a refutation,
I am under no obligation to provide one, and you are requesting me to prove a negative. You made the original assertion, it is up to you to provide the evidence. Not me (again Logic 101). If you are unable to do so then I suggest you cease indulging in baseless smears.
Regarding Oil for Food fraud? Google the terms, you will find approx. two million, four hundred thousand responses.
“Does anyone seriously believe that if the United states Army were to remove itself from all foreign countries, return to its native soil, and scale back to one 20th of its current size, that there would exist a serious threat of foreign invasion from the arab countries or their friends?”
Yes.
Islamic law requires the Caliph to wage an aggressive war against dar al harb to bring it under Islamic rule. If he doesn’t, he gets replaced. The only allowable excuse for not doing so is if the enemy is too strong, when a temporary truce or hudna is allowed only until the Muslims are strong enough to win. That’s where we are at the moment.
[Refs. Umdat al Salik, al-Misri, section o9.8-9.9, o9.15.]
Last time they were strong enough, they got as far as southern France before being turned back.
People are talking as if the US has just been defeated in Iraq. From a military point of view, that’s utter tosh, but from a political point of view the statement might have some merit. The aim of war is not to destroy the enemy, but to break the enemy’s will to fight. If the US has no will to resist, anyone will be able to just walk all over them.
However, the point you make is a strawman argument, since it isn’t foreign invasion that we’re so worried about. That’s a rather 18th century attitude to wars and foreign affairs, if you’ll pardon my saying so. If you want to harness a donkey to your purposes, you do not need to defeat it in battle, merely to cause it enough pain/annoyance that it will do what you want. Do as we ask and you get a nice carrot. Don’t, and you’ll have a stick full of riots and bombs and rapes and killings. Never bad enough or widespread enough that it’s worth waging war (just a tiny minority of extremists…), but enough that it’s easier to just go along with it.
But before they get to that, they need a solid base of operations. They need to restore the Caliphate. They need to unify the Umma under one leader. And they need the US to stop poking its nose in and stopping them doing that by radicalising all the weaker nations of the world into their Shariah-based circle of hell.
The issue today is not military invasion but open borders and immigration. The plan is not to invade, but to immigrate, and when numbers are large enough to force a change on society from within. That’s something we cannot defend against militarily, only politically. It’s an old strategy – they used it to subvert many of the Christian communities across North Africa and Southern Europe. For that matter, it goes right back to Medina, when Muhammed and his tiny band fled Mecca and took shelter with the Jewish tribe living in Medina, where he built his strength and then launched bandit raids against his old city. The Jews who sheltered him from persecution received little thanks for having granted him asylum – they eventually got lined up and their heads chopped off, and their women and children sold into slavery.
The US army is not fighting to defend America from invasion, or even terrorism, it is fighting to defend liberty from Islamist destruction. (And yes, I realise Saddam was a Nazi rather than an Islamist, but it is foolish to assume that liberty has only one enemy. Saddam had common interests and alliances with the Islamists, and was seeking a nuclear capability.) If you will not fight to defend others, there will be none either inclined or able to fight to defend you. I do realise that nationalists and collectivists regard America as more important than an abstraction like “liberty”, and only the liberty of Americans as worth spending any of their money defending, but I would hope even they would understand the strategic advantages of forming alliances, and of not allowing the enemy to gain a firm foothold.
I’d hardly call it an “ostrich approach” to not want to involve oneself in a distant overseas war wih a country that never provably acted in aggression against the United states or the U.K.
So the Taliban who ruled Afghanistan didn’t give Al Queda a secure, safe haven to train terrorists, spread propaganda and act as a template for modern jihad?
They were in it up to their necks. Remember where Mohammed Atta trained? Far away countries of which we know little and probably care less can be an enormous threat. This has been demonstrated in New York, London, Madrid, Bali…
Perry claims that, if violence is not intentionally enacted against innocents, it is then different from that which is intentionally enacted.
Yes, that seems obvious to me. Civilians are always killed in wars. Does that mean we should never fight? Not even if our cause is just and necessary. I’m glad the people of Britain didn’t feel like that in 1939. Of course we could’ve used passive resistance against the Nazis…
No. (If I may give my version for Paul’s answer.)
Vendetta is inevitable when the rule of law breaks down or is disfunctional.
I you want to prevent a state where vendetta is widespread – see to it that the law performs correctly – that criminals are caught and punished and victims’ rights are upheld more than criminals’ rights.
The film (I didn’t see) is, as all films, a phantasy, but if the moral is: “see what happens when the legal system lets murderers go unpunished” then it is a good moral. I agree with Paul.
Jacob: you almost took the words out of my mouth. But here is where the “almost” comes: I have not seen the film either, but as Paul describes it, and as it actually happens quite often in real life, the criminal in question could not be proven to have committed the crime beyond reasonable doubt. The “reasonable doubt” condition is not there for nothing, it is there to make sure that innocent people don’t get convicted. No law enforcement system is perfect, and it cannot be perfect. If we as individuals want to live in a society that abides by the rule of law, we have no choice but to accept its inevitable shortcomings.
At the same time, people who take the law into their own hands, are (or should be) well aware of both the legal and the moral consequences. Presumably, this was the line of thinking (if there was thinking involved) of this Hume character. I don’t have a problem with this. As to “blood calls out for blood”: I don’t really know, and hope to never find out.
As to analogizing the movie with an international situation, it is quite valid, in my view. The movie depicts a situation in which the legal system fails, as it is bound to do from time to time, so it is essentially non-existent as applied to that particular case. There is no effective international legal system in place as of now, and none seems possible in the foreseeable future, so basically it is every man (i.e. state) for himself, and those who have the biggest stick (and those that are allied with it) rule.
Should have used the baby-sitter from Little Britain.
“Comrade Stalin sends his regards!”
And you would be wrong because your moral theory is badly flawed. Intention and reasonable expectation are essential aspects to any moral calculation.
All war, even a hypothetical war involving defending New Hampshire from an occupying Uzbek army (which presumably you would think was a clear cut ‘legitimate’ war of defence) will involve attacking your enemy in the knowledge that some of your operations will almost certainly kill innocent people as well as valid military targets.
The alternative is not only fighting in such a way innocents are not killed, because that is manifestly impossible because it is technically impossible. One can (and should) attempt to minimise the collateral death, but your moral theory as presented is not weighing numbers or intentions, it is only looking at outcomes (as expressed in death) and it is talking absolutes: the death of one or the death of 10,000 (i.e. you are a functional pacifist because no war is possible on the terms your would appear to find acceptable).
No, the alternative is between fighting a war in which civilian deaths are accepted as a regrettable cost and not fighting at all, i.e. surrendering to your less squeamish enemy who has no such inhibitions.
If civilian death are always illegitimate, why is it not illegitimate if they are caused defending your own home town? If the Uzbek army in occupation of New Hampshire is going to be attacked, do you have explicit permission from all the members the occupied population to place them at risk by dropping bombs on nearby Uzbek soldiers? Or perhaps you think that because you have cultural affinity with people in New Hampshire (as opposed to, say, Iraqis, with whom you have none) that this give your anti-Uzbek Freedom Fighters more right to kill them as collateral damage during military operations? An interesting tribal notion. If you want to argue the pacifist position, then do so, but based on the moral theory you have advanced that really is your only option.
The rest of the world is not just going to mind its own business just because the American state disengages. That is not to say every US involvement overseas is a good idea (far from it), but the notion that every overseas military involvement is always a bad idea indicates a poor grasp on the realities of how a globalised world really works.
Alisa,
There was once, long ago, a French film-noir (in b/w) which goes like this: two criminals kidnap a child for ransom, the police try to ambush them, criminals run away, with the police in hot pursuit, they murder the child, and after a long chase, hide inside an abandoned lighthouse, in a desolate place, at night. The police clearly saw them enter, they besiege the place, call for enforcements, and at first light in the morning three guys emerge from the lighthouse and surrender.
At the trial each of the three claims he just hid inside the building when it began to rain, and only later the other two burst in. The police are positive that there are only 2 murderers, but they cannot identify which they are. (They had shed the upper clothes that they wore at night).
The judge has no way out. He proclaims the three not guilty, because of doubt.
At the end of the film, an outraged mob gets hold of the police car in which the three were taken away from the courthouse, and burns it, killing all three.
I don’t know what the moral is.
Me either. So here is a different way to look at the issue.
One of the interesting sideroads of statistics is Type 1 & Type II errors. Consider a fire alarm — it can work correctly, signalling a fire when there is in fact a fire. It can fail in two ways — false positives (indicating a fire when there is none) and false negatives (failing to indicate a fire in progress). Interesting thing is that it is generally not possible to make a system which always works perfectly, so the designers have to lean towards accepting false positives or false negatives.
In the case of the fire alarm, it is easy to see that the user would rather have false positives than false negatives. But what of a legal system, let alone a matter of international relations?
One could argue that Western legal systems have swung too far in terms of avoiding false convictions. This has inevitably meant the acceptance of wrongful acquittals — which in turn undermines the acceptance of the rule of law [and was that not the point of the movie?]. The Beautiful People end up with guns in their closets (US) or living in class-isolated districts with private security (UK).
The slogan that it is better to let 100 guilty go free than falsely convict 1 innocent sounds nice — but it ignores the societal consequences of that choice.
Well, neither do I, except that “shit happens”, which is a rude way of avoiding repetition and saying that there is no way that the law enforcement and the justice system can be perfect.
However, I do think that the mob, whoever they are, should be punished quite severely, as it is clear that they killed a man innocent of murder (although very likely guilty of conspiring with the killers to obstruct justice). This is different from Paul’s movie, where the man knew for a fact who the specific killer is.
“Death Wish”, staring Charlie Bronson – 1970’s(?). Wouldn’t it be nice if hollywood had an original thought occasionally? Over the last 30 years or so I mean.
Maybe this is a better movie? Death Wish was not much, as far as I can remember, although I do like Charlie.
“I don’t know what the moral is.”
The moral might be that such miscarriages of justice can cut both ways. No doubt every single member of the mob would claim they just got caught up in the rush, and nobody will know who the one person with the matches was. They would all have to be let off.
If you think letting the murderer kill the child and get away with it was wrong, then killing the murderers along with an innocent man was also wrong. If you think letting them go was right, then for consistency you must also agree that letting the mob go is also right. Which is interesting, because you would then be agreeing (or disagreeing) with both the court’s decision, and the mob who overturned the court’s decision. It allows you to contrast your views on criminals and people taking the law into their own hands, on also on justice versus morality – if you condemn criminals but support vigilantes, or if you condemn crimes but support criminals getting away with them, or vice versa. I suspect that such would not pose such a moral dilemma for the audience here, who take a rather different view regarding the moral authority of the law to that the film-makers might have assumed, but it’s interesting nevertheless.
The justice system sets a price on taking the law into your own hands. If you are prepared to pay the price, which may be either probability or certainty of incarceration, it would be wrong to take away the option. If you feel strongly enough about something that you think 20 years in prison is a worthwhile price to pay, then the interests of justice may be better served by allowing the murder, and imposing the penalty afterwards. I don’t think I entirely agree with that (the argument doesn’t work well for the deranged, for example, or suicide bombers), but its an arguable point of view.
In the case that standards of evidence mean letting the guilty sometimes get away – the penalty for crime is the increased probability that you made a mistake and get caught. As with any gamble, sometimes you win. But the fact that you might have lost is a real cost, like free health insurance has real value even if you never use it.
Pa:
Yes.
Not if the part of the mob that actually did and assisted the burning can be clearly identified.
Alice, problem is that there is only so much that can be done to perfect the design of the alarm. Or would you rather convict 1 innocent so as not to miss 100 guilty? Aren’t there societal consequences to that approach as well?
Kenobi:
There were no sactions on food or meds to Iraq (and I never said a word about Iraq anyway).
The “hundreds of thousands of dead”.
The “Independent” newspaper (and the rest of the usual suspects – individuals and organizations) claimed that 600,000 had died – but they also claim that 600, 000 civilians have died since the war of 2003 to present.
At least they could have invented a new number.
As for Al Qaeda being a separate force from the Taliban – not in Afghanistan they are not. Fight one you have to fight the other (no other way). “But we can not make Afghanistan a Western style society” – so what, I never said it could be one. I am not a neo-con, I do not think in terms of wars leading people to “deal with their gender issues” or whatever.
Contrary to ex General Mike Jackson “nation building” is not what military force is about.
“I do not care about the facts, I was just attacking your Death Cult logic”.
I am not a member of a death cult Kenobi.
If your son is murdered and all the police can offer you is a deal with the defence which will have the murderer in prison for a year or so – what do you DO?
Do you go back to the office and work on the actuary tables. Or do you kill the man who killed your son?
Remember Mr Hume did NOT want the death sentence for the murderer of his son – he wanted life in prison (but that was not on offer, the prosecution had good reasons not to go for Murder One, but it was still not on offer).
As for “innocent civilians”.
Errrr how were ANY of the gang members innocent Kenobi?
To join the gang you had to murder a random person – no other way in. And the gang existed to commit crimes (I could make an argument that Mr Hume did the community a service by dealing with the gang – but that would be dishonest of me, as the community is not on his mind).
And remember Mr Hume did not go after the other members of the gang till they had murdered his wife and did their best to murder his other son.
So we are not talking about Hatfields and McCoys here.
Mr Hume never at any point goes after an innocent person.
Guy Herbert asks me some questions.
I find Guy’s language difficult, as I often do, (which is a defect of mine, not of his), but I will try and offer a reply.
“Do I regard vendetta as legitimate?”
No, if you mean going after a member of someone’s family because they have murdered a member of yours (Hatfield and McCoy feud).
Yes, if you mean going after the individual who killed your son IF no one else is going to punish him (and remember Mr Hume did NOT want the death sentence, he wanted life in prison). You try the system first – only if it fails do you do the job yourself.
As the whole gang particpated in the later attack they all become legitimate targets.
As for the stuff about urges.
I am not a determinist. Mr Hume could have acted other than he did.
“And, as the consequences of his actions were bad, he should have acted differently” (sorry if I have misinterpreted your thoughts here).
Well here we differ, I do not tend to measure a choice by its consequences (partly, perhaps, because I tend to think the consequences of any action or inaction will be bad – the world being what it is).
A person tries to do the honourable thing – and the chips fall where they may.
Of course none of the above excuses the botched way Mr Hume does the first killing (driving his own car, dressed in a suit….. – he might as well have gone around with a megaphone shouting “it was me, I did it”).
I TEND to think that the consequences of actions or inactions will be bad (the world being as it is), but that is no reason not to even try to avoid a botch.
The murderer of Mr Hume’s son lived in a violent area and his gang had rivals. If Mr Hume had thought carefully about the killing he just might have avoided it being traced back to him.
I get it, Ken.
Other people’s violence doesn’t have consequences, only ours, right?
Remember kids:
If the justice system fails you, just kill ’em all. That’ll really help. Obviously no innocent bystanders will be hurt, just like in the movie.
A good film on revenge is the Clint Eastwood western ‘Hang ’em High’, which includes many interwoven plots all touching on the value and cost of revenge.
Hollywood always makes revenge movies, Payback , Unforgiven, Man on Fire, because it resonates with the American social and political order. America is not England with an omnipotent Parliament, constrained formerly only by decency and respect for ancient tradition. The Constitution does not afford any rights to its constituent citizens, it recognizes them. So any substantive legal decision that violates natural law or the innate rights X feels he enjoys can be interpreted as breaking the social contract that binds us. At this point if conscience allows and necessities dictate, you may become a vigilante or Nachrichter.
My GGGrandfather lynched people. Not black sharecroppers or slaves as in mawkish BBC newsreels or docus, but men of property. At the start of Secession from the Union, a certain county in the South held a general meeting where it was decided that since half the county wanted to stay with teh Union the county would be declared a ‘free State’, i.e. the Confederacy and the Union’s writ would not be valid and men would be free to follow their conscience and fight in either army, but no partisan or military activity would be allowed in the county. My GGGrandfather went off to fight and upon returning on a furlough two years later discovered that a certain large landowner had murdered two of his second cousins (they were federal judges) and was holding the third in the local jail prior to his execution. My GGGrandfather busted him out and marched on the landowner’s plantation with his friends and kin and after forcing the landowner to reveal who killed his two cousins, hung him on his own porch. My cousin spent the next 20 years hunting down his borther’s murderers. He disappeared. His wife told him if he went to Texas again, he shouldnt come back; he went and didnt.
Many families have similar stories in the West of extra-judicial processes enacted by their ancestors. And the stories are kept alive by pulp fiction and movies which all contain a similar language: ‘this can not stand’, ‘that ain’t right’, ‘there are things we do and things we don’t do, and we don’t do that’…I suppose it is reminiscient of the Roman juridical notion of fas and nefas or Burke talking about the ancient rights of the British people. It is an inextricable amalgam of law, social mores and historical political concessions. To paraphrase Truman, that great Missourah President, on the Monroe doctrine–‘it’s not a law. It’s just something we do’.
It’s Hollywood. The moral is that everyone is right and nobody is right. Society is wrong and can never be made right. The Law fails because we are overwhelmed with cases, over legalized by lawyers “lawyering”, juries dumbed down, and the simple crush of economics doesn’t send the best and brightest to do public service.
Ultimately, Everyone sits for 120 minutes (or thereabouts) and comes out feeling frustrated. Theer were a lot of movies in the 1970’s and 1980’s with the same themes. Bronson, Eastwood, Segal, Van Damme, were the bigger names. There were many and the haunt late night TV in waves. They come for weeks like zombies and space aliens and natural disaster movies…
Given the Hollywood political propaganda machine gearing up for the 2008 elections, it is reasonable to expect -both- subtle and overt ani-Bush/anti-Iraq messages to flood forth now so that they can be acclaimed at the award shows in the Spring and relased into rental and DVD sales just in time for the November elections…. (3 bangs of the gong-!) Hollywood is giving a lot of money to politicians. They want a return on their investment. Look for increased fees for distribution channels. There will also be strengthened Intellectual Property and Copyright laws and Treaties. The DMCA is but an opening gambit for Hollywood to control everything and dampen innovation… YouTube and hulu.com may be the latest and last of the free ranging innovators… I know. Hulu.com is a leashed pet of FOX and NBC, but YouTube is a pet of the Google (all-your-data-are-mine) Do No Evil Empire.
The line between actors speaking lines for wages and politicians seeking money for re-election is very thin. The Producers haven’t made a pro-America movie in a very long time. It would be a surprise-nay- a shock to see one now…
OF COURSE IT’S ANTI-IRAQ-!
The character in the movie, as far as I can tell, suffers only from bad luck. Not condemning a man for murder on the basis of a single witness is hardly a failure of society of the justice system, it strikes me as perfectly reasonable. It is mere misfortune that no-one else saw the crime, and that (amazingly….) no other evidence existed. Imagine if our hero had not even managed to remove the mask – would that have also been a failure of society to have installed a satellite tracking chip in the criminals when they were born? After all, such a mechanism would have allowed them to be easily brought to justice…
Ah! Lady Luck enters the field. Lady Luck sentences over 40,000 largely innocent human beings to death each year in US traffic accidents. And we shrug our shoulders & move on. Just the price of having a transportation system.
But if Lady Justice happens to find one innocent man guilty, then it is an unacceptable price to impose on the tender consciences of the Beautiful People. Can’t have a legal system that occasionally misfires, even if the consequence is the eventual breakdown of society.
The UK has some incredible examples of legal idiocy. That famous English farmer who shot & injured a criminal breaking into his home — farmer went to jail, criminal got tax-payer compensation. Or the Scottish juvenile delinquent who literally got off with murder — when he drove his knive into his innocent victim’s thigh severing a major artery, he had only intended to cause severe pain, not death, you see.
Liberals remind me of silly people up a tree sawing off the branch they are sitting on. Their success is their failure.
Pa Annoyed seems to think (I may be misinterpreting him) that the primary purpose of punishment is to deter crime – I do not. By they way, if the purpose of punishment is to deter crime why not punish innocent people (after all one could claim they were guilty).
Of course this is an old point. Ditto, if punishment is about deterrence why not hang someone for theft (not a silly point, there were over two hundred capital crimes before Sir Robert Peel got a grip on the system in the 1820’s – the pre Peel situation was just another reason to avoid the courts if possible, there were lots of other reasons).
I do not know whether punishment deters crime or not. However, in this case the argument hardly applies.
If a person is prepared to commit a random murder to join a gang (that exists to commit crimes and has violent rivals) the possibility that the threat of punishment is going to deter him is about zero.
As for being prepared to “pay a price” for taking the law into ones’ own hands.
Well Mr Hume is going to pay a price (and knows it), by the end of the film – assuming he does not bleed to death (bleeding to death might be for the best, all things considered).
However, he does not kill the first man with the intention of paying a price – and there is no moral reason why he should intend to pay a price.
As for “mob justice”.
All justice was “mob” justice up till quite recently. For example, most counties in England had no police force till the 1850’s – if the J.P. (an unpaid local magistrate) wanted to enforce the law he called upon the people (via hue and cry) to do it (assuming that they had not already acted – which they might well have done).
Possie is from the Latin after all. And a jury (assuming the criminal surrenders) has no legal training.
Of course this has its bad side. I am sitting in Northamptionshire and this county was a witch hunting one. Right into the 1700’s groups of people would hunt witches outside the legal system (although they did not tend to kill them), and as witchcraft (as these groups understood it) does not exist I fully approve of the efforts of the more enlightened part of the community to put an end to witch hunting (although, remember, the more enlightened part of the community were also acting outside the system).
Edwin Chadwick attacked the private associations (commercial and noncommercial) that tried to enforce justice in many British cities in his reports in the 1830’s.
However, Edwin Chadwick was a shameless liar. And I have no more reason to assume he was telling the truth about this subject than about any other.
Right up to the First World War the English (and Welsh and Scottish) police were almost always without fire arms – but many of the general public were armed to the teeth (millions and millions of people with firearms).
There were even cases when policemen chasing armed criminals called upon armed members of the public (who just happened to be walking down the street) to help them – again right up to the First World War (not another age). After all the policemen were less likely to be armed than members of the public were.
Still, as I have said, one must always give the system a chance first (otherwise that tax money is a pure waste).
There is also John Locke’s point about being a “judge in one’s own case”.
If one (or a friend or family member) has been the victim of a crime one may punish the criminal too harshly.
This is a strong point, as punishment should be in proportion to the crime. As the Bible puts it – it is a tooth for a tooth (not a head for an tooth).
By far the majority of crimes are committed repetitively by a very small fraction of the population. While this may not bode well for individual victims, a law enforcement system that has high sentences combined with a high standard of proof, will soon remove most criminals from the population.
As system with low standards of proof and low sentences is very far on the scale towards random punishments administered to gain the blessings of the gods of public safety.
Alice- the farmer had been serial burglarized by these people, and injured one of them.The other one was shot dead.
They sent him to prison for sure after the police had taken no steps to help him previously- his name was Tony Martin.
Today he lives at the farm with a permanent police presence because the criminals have taken a contract out on him.
This country is in the grip of vermin.
In the 1990s a girl I knew was raped.
I found out who and kicked him in the balls so hard his feet left the ground. Both feet.
After six months I was run out of town and hunted like it was a sport.
This was London.
The crim wasn’t a Londoner, but he was a druggy, so he gained respectabllity and sympathy from the population at large while organising the crims.
An armed and free population wouldn’t have stood for it.
pietr
My father was a London man (and from a rough area). But he would have been horrified to hear that most people would side with a rapist (at least not side against him). Back in the 1930’s the people of the East End, including Harry Marks, would not let the Blackshirts march – but nor would Harry Marks allow the Communists (of whom he had been a member) to terrorize a shopkeeper – he used their conference room table on them (and most people, regardless of their politics, praised him).
If what you say is true, I am glad my father is not alive to see it.
Perhaps the change started in the 1960’s when people like the Krays and the Richardsons started to be treated as somehow worthy.
My father took a couple of bullets (in “peaceful London”) but he would never pay protection money to anyone (he owed a nightclub in the 1960’s) and he would not allow drugs on his property either.
In the end it was not the gangsters who broke him – it was Slater-Walker (the biggest British fraud in modern times).
Mid,
You swine! I almost posted the exact same thing earlier…
Having said that, and with a nod to the Tony Martin case the fact that burglary is regarded as a “minor crime” means that you’ve got to get caught in the UK many times before they even consider putting you away.
Alice,
I think you details on Mr Martin are slightly off. This is my understanding (please anyone correct me if this isn’t the gist). Mr Martin (on his Norfolk Farm had been plundered several times by gypsies and received no substantive help from the cops (only burglary afterall, and his place was “remote”). He took to sleeping downstairs with a loaded (legal) shotgun.
He was awoken by two intruders and let rip. He wounded one but the other, a 16 year-old, was killed by a shot to the back whilst running away. That’s why he was sent down. To add further misery for him it was widely reported that the gypsies had a “contract” to do him harm in jail. The wounded on shot in the thigh and made a song and er, dance about being disabled and all the benefits and comp he should receive. He was later spotted by the tabloids riding a BMX with perfect ease.
There has to be legal safeguards for people who just got lost and wandered onto your property or who are seeking help because the car has broken down with their pregnant wife in it and they come to your door late at night. Similarly there shooting kids for scrumping apples or getting a ball back is obviously unacceptable but… But the second you break- in, you should lose those safeguards.
Paul,
As Holmes said to Watson, “Don’t go east of Whitechapel after dark without a pistol.” It was good advice in the 1890s and good advice in the 1990s (when I lived just east of Whitechapel).
Midwesterner you raise a hard point.
Do we “take people off the streets” so they do not commit more crimes.
I take this to mean – “three strikes and your out” (i.e. life in prison) and so on.
I would tend to say “no” – punishment should be in proportion the offence (although I would not like to look in the eye a victim of crime committed by a three time criminal I had let out of jail).
A person should not be sent to jail for life for stealing or for getting into a fight – even if has done this twice before.
There you go – I have gone from being a “Death Cult” swine, to a bleeding heart liberal in one thread. And yet I have not moved.
Paul,
Interesting one. I hadn’t really thought the primary purpose of punishment was to deter crime – I was speculating on the moral points and principles I thought the film was trying to bring up – but now that you mention it, I find I’m not very clear in my own mind what the purpose is. It is done because retribution is a human instinct that needs to be satisfied, and I’d be fairly sure the evolutionary reason for the instinct was probably something to do with deterrence, but if we avoid the naturalistic fallacy and consider the possibility that evolution might have got it wrong, is there a less ‘automatic’ reason of principle here to justify it? I’m not sure.
“If a person is prepared to commit a random murder to join a gang (that exists to commit crimes and has violent rivals) the possibility that the threat of punishment is going to deter him is about zero.”
If they have violent rivals, who are similarly uninhibited about violence and similarly armed, and that hasn’t deterred them, what makes you think the threat of armed citizens would deter them either?
I’m not sure it follows, anyway. A criminal may be concerned about punishment, but confident of not being convicted, as they are concerned about others with guns, but confident that even in gang culture it is still fairly rare to get shot. But the main point of course is that while there are always a few people who are not deterred by anything, the purpose of the law (or the mob) may be to deter all the rest who are not so bold. After all, it works here for the outlawing of guns: if people were not deterred by the thought of punishment, why wouldn’t they go out and arm themselves anyway, despite our laws against it?
I may be misinterpreting you, in thinking that you were suggesting the main purpose of guns is as a deterrent. But I think we’ve had this discussion before, and you’ve heard most of my arguments, so I’ll pause here.
Pa Annoyed.
I do not think that having firearms would deter the members of some gangs – although there are a lot of people it would deter (if any “liberal” doubts this he should put a sign saying “gun free house” on his windows and doors).
However, I do believe that shooting dead someone who is trying to kill you is likely to prevent him killing you – and will prevent him killing anyone else. The gang in the film are not going to murder anyone again.
Just as executing someone prevents them from killing anyone else – including other prisoners in jail (by the way when the “Economist” magazine says it favours life imprisonment for murder I do not believe them – as soon as they got rid of the death penality media people and other such would start work making sure that “life” did NOT mean “life”).
I watched the movie last night. My take on its message is if you are going to take the law into your own hands don’t do it half-assed.
If its a hollyweird parable on Iraq then the same applies, don’t go in to nation build, you go in to annihilate your enemy and get out.
“punishment should be in proportion the offence ”
Not only. Other circumstances should be considered also, like the record of the convicted. One who commits a third crime should be punished harshly, and put away for a long time. The nature of the crime, and of the former crimes also matter.
Commonsense needs to be applied, rigid laws don’t always offer good solutions.
For example: in the case of the three suspects of which two only were guilty – the judge should have found them all guilty of some lesser crime and sent them to jail. They should have stayed in jail at least for the time it takes to go through the appeals process. Maybe police could have planted informers in jail, or got some other evidence over time, or hoped that one of them would confess. If an innocent man sat two years in jail , then got out and got recompensed, the results is less horrible than having two murderers go free, free to commit more crimes. It is even better to have all three sit two years in jail, than all three go free. Injustice is done in all cases – you have to seek some trade offs.
Maybe the moral is that judges must consider not only the law in it’s most strict sense, but also the sense of justice of the people, or the mob, or commonsense.
Let’s think about the implications of taking people off the streets — financial as well as moral. Another tale — recognizing that my information on this may be as incomplete as on England’s Martin case — this time from a rural county in New Mexico.
The county was mainly a low-population, low-crime rural area, but had the misfortune to have a freeway (motorway) crossing those empty country miles. As part of an anti-crime drive, State Police stepped up enforcement on the freeway, arresting transiting bad guys, drug dealers, etc. The accused were sent to the County jail and held there at tax-payer expense while the wheels of justice turned ever so slowly. The costs of incarceration almost broke the County.
Keeping someone in jail for the rest of his life may cost around $1 Million — with that cost paid by the offender’s fellow citizens. That is $1 Million not available to be spent on roads, schools, hospitals — or even left with the unfortunate law-abiding taxpayer.
Why would we set up a system where someone can at his discretion claim $1 Million in benefits from his fellow citizens? Just who is getting punished anyway? Do we really need to rethink the whole notion of crime & punishment?
Paul, I did not see your comment right before mine when I hit post.
I agree with you 100% unequivocally that the purpose of laws must not be to seek societal outcomes. (Social engineering.) That whole idea is a dark lane with a deadly ending. Laws must be to enforce the laws of a society on all members equally. The hoped for outcome must never be a reason for a law. But when I see flawed societal outcome predictions being used in support of something, I do challenge them with a dose of reality. But repeating, this does not mean that laws in search of outcomes are legitimate. Those matters belong in a constitution and should be contained in the principles so enshrined. Any laws in violation of that constitution that are enacted and enforced are a sign that the government is breaking down.
Outcomes should be sought with principles, laws should support principles. Cutting principles out of the equation is always a bad thing. (I disagree with a few of our commentariat over that point.)
My brother and I had a discussion just last night about ‘can judges show mercy’ to which my answer was ‘no, that’s called injustice. Only the person wronged can show mercy.’ It then progressed to a discussion of ‘should laws grant leeway to judges and can’t they show mercy then?’ To which my answer is that ‘it is not the judge showing mercy, it is the judge enforcing the law, and the law deciding what is appropriate. The judge must apply the sentencing guidelines leeway in the spirit of the law as it is written, otherwise it is a miscarriage of justice.’
On a different note, I had an acquaintance/casual friend who had an amazing criminal history of violent crime and had a conversion experience. He then dedicated the remainder of his life (he’s gone now) to teaching people how to protect themselves and avoid being attacked and to defending people he thought needed it. While he was extremely judgmental against criminals, he absolutely opposed removal of discretion from sentencing and probation. His view (from both sides of the prison walls) was that it was that discretion that was the strongest tool to keep things safer during crimes, arrests, sentences, and after release. I’m not sure how completely I agree with him, but I think that as many wrong judges as there are, there are even more wrong laws in some facet or other. Discretion w/ guidelines should not be removed from the legal process.
Alisa:
Not only is that an excellent point inside the discussion, but it’s distressingly true in the real world. There are HUGE social costs to the fear than an innocent may be jammed up.
Sometimes, I can’t get cooperation from a victim or witness, because the V or the W fears that they may end up taking the fall for whoever actually did whatever I want to find out about. Prosecutors like Michael Nifong, rare as they are, do wonders to destroy any credibility that the system has.
In my circumstance, that’s amounted to disturbances that I couldn’t resolve, and in a few of those cases, the fact that I couldn’t get cooperation in a misdemeanor assault (domestic violence) meant that the same offender steadily escalated to the point that now one of the children will never heal to the point of playing for a school sports team. And all because another member of the family thought I was more interested in a conviction than in getting to the truth of the matter.
Several major cities in the US have areas that are effectively completely lawless because of this: a perception that police are just itching to jam up the first minority they see, meaning that they can’t get cooperation from witnesses to crimes. (The “Stop Snitching” campaigns haven’t helped in these neighborhoods either.) The end result is, killers don’t get prosecuted effectively and so they continue their careers. And whole neigborhoods and even cities don’t have the rule of law, and the state of nature they do have is hardly an improvement.
And then, in the UK, from what I keep hearing it’s even worse. Fewer of the crimes involve firearms, but that’s no improvement and too many people won’t act themselves because they’re afraid of being prosecuted, and won’t even call 999 when a violent crime happens right in front of them because they’re afraid of whatever, which is just as well because the police are off chasing Home Office statistical horseshit in some Kafkaesque nightmare, and so you end up with suspected drug dealers being tied to lampposts, tarred, feathered, and no witnesses. And he should probably be grateful to be alive, as the Punisher is somewhat less careful with human rights than supposedly-trained-and-professional police.
In the case of the Irish drug dealer, I suppose I should be bothered by that. And I am. However, when people lose faith in the ability of the law and its enforcers to prevent violence and disorder in their neighborhoods, then they’re going to deal with it themselves.
I personally lay a great deal of the responsibility (in the UK’s case) at the feet of the Home Office for destroying the ability of the police to actually police, and for crapping all over Peel’s principle that “the police are the public and the public are the police.” The statement that people should fight crime by stamping their feet and waving their arms is sick and sad, but it was a few decades in the making.
On the US side, every civil rights violation by a rogue cop, combined with every press article and internet tough-guy claiming that we all do that all the time, is another brick in the same wall. The fact that 99% of us never did that and that most of the 99% actually actively work to get rid of the rogues counts for nothing with the people (usually US-based self-proclaimed libertarians on the internet) who can’t distinguish between a DUI arrest and being sent to Dachau. And so, in the words of one of my very favorite authors, “we just shovel shit against the tide.”
So, you’re absolutely 100% right, the possibility that an innocent man may be punished for someone else’s crime has a significant real-world cost to the rest of us.
It wasn’t the East End that was the problem.
It was the West End.
Anyway it is ancient history; I still have friends down there among the real crims.
Paul,
Yes, if you mean going after the individual who killed your son IF no one else is going to punish him…
Is the nub of the problem. You, and other people on the side of vengeance in this thread, suppose that the vigilante has perfect knowledge, and the careful procedures of “the system” are inadequate.
That’s a bad assumption. The common law system of proof beyond reasonable doubt has developed precisely because interested parties frequently have strong convictions that they ‘know the truth’ of what happened, weakly founded in evidence. This goes almost as much for prosecutors as it does for supposed victims and affiliates of victims. Not only can they lie, but they can lie to themseves.
The psychological fact is that people rehearse their own stories of any incident to the exclusion of contrary evidence, and the more emotional intensity there is in such recapitulation the more independent of fact will the conviction be. Dunning-Kruger again.
Sunfish,
The recent Northern Irish (note ‘northern’, particularly since it was a Loyalist area) case is slightly different from vigilantism. It isn’t the mob as in an arbitrary assemblage of people ‘dealing with it themselves’. More The Mob dealing with it themselves, and asserting their power is still on the street. Paramilitaries have excluded law enforcement from their territories. They are also themselves often credited with control of the drugs trade in those territories, so the ‘crime’ might have been being a dealer without a licence from the UDF.
Guy,
I hadn’t heard that the NI tarring-and-feathering was a turf war. Not saying it wasn’t, but was that published somewhere?
A lot of good comments here – from Jacob, Alice, Midwesterner, peitr, Sunfish and Guy Herbert.
A lot of what has been said is stuff to think about (not for me to say “well I think….”).
However, on Guy Herbert’s comment (although I agreed with a lot of it):
You seem to have in mind the legal system as it existed in the late Victorian period or in the early and mid decades of the 20th century.
The modern criminal justice system is not like this.
Perhaps it could be again (as someone like Peter Hitchins would argue), but it is not at present.
A man who trusts in the system, as it now is, builds his house on sand.
Guy:
Paul was discussing a movie, and in the movie a man actually saw another man kill his son. The fact that the jury did not believe him does not mean that he should not believe his own eyes. By that token, honest people should never believe their eyes, and so only the crooks will testify.
On Northern Ireland:
It used to be said “we have every crime here bar vice”.
Sadly however prostitution is now common – it comes with the drugs.
In libertarian theory both prostitution (on private property) and drugs (ditto) should be legal – but this does not include importing people for sexual slavery, violent pimps (and so on).
The paramilitary people (on both sides) have become gangsters – and they use their near monopoly of firearms (they do not have much respect for “gun control” – in spite of “decommissioning” stunts) to enforce their control of protection rackets, drugs and prostitution (whilst posing as moral guardians). Of course without a firearm it is impossible for a respectable man to defend himself against thugs anyway (even if the thugs are “only” armed with clubs).
This is an old story in Ireland.
Even in the 18th century both the Protestant “peep-of-day boys” and the “Catholic Defenders” included a lot of criminals (or people who became criminals).
Of course for most of the 18th century there was still “gun control” in Ireland (for Catholics and, at least to some extent, for Dissenters). There were also (for almost all the century) all sorts of economic regulations – and taxes (as measured as a fraction of the total economy, Edmund Burke was one of the first men to point out that this was the correct way to measure taxes) were much higher than in Britain.
Even in the 19th century Ireland was wildly different to Britain.
The Royal Irish Constabulary were an armed national police force (at a time when police, where they existed at all, in Britain were unarmed and local), and there were all sorts of restrictions (from time to time) on the local population.
England was a violent society in the 1700’s – but 300 women and children were not forced into a barn and then burned alive (as was done to Protestants in county Wexford during the 1798 revolt – although the leader of the revolt, up in Ulster, was a Protestant).
No one (on any side) ever had respect for the courts – jury trials depended on who had the stacked the jury (or was issuing the most effective threats) and the idea of an unbiased judge was in the same catagory as a unicorn.
Judges at least improved a bit in the 19th century (in the 18th century they were a sick joke).
All this is a problem for the Unionist case (I am not saying it a fatal problem, but it is a problem). Ireland is foreign – although Britain these days is getting a bit like the way Ireland once was (although there is still a long way to fall).
By the way, to those who will say “it was all the fault of the British”:
Even before Strongbow came over in the 1160’s Brehon law made the ownership of property very uncertain (to say the least) and war was the normal state of affairs in Ireland.
There has NEVER been an “independent UNITED Ireland” you see.
Full disclosure:
My mother’s name was Power (I even look more like a Power than a Marks – even down to the dents in the tops of my ears).
My grandfather (James Power) was Roman Catholic Irish – and pro British (many Roman Catholic Irish were – which confuses Americans).
It was interesting to observe the difference between him and my father.
Harry Marks was a very violent man (raise a hand to him – and the best you could hope for was to be beaten to a pulp, even when he was in his 60’s and only had one lung). However, he did not enjoy violence – it always upset him. And he would never raise his hand to someone who was weak or helpless.
James Power was the only man I have met who enjoyed trench warfare in the First World War (I remember at Lancing British Legion where he would talk to other old soldiers – they had nightmares about things he missed).
Smile and joke – and then attack without warning (whilst continuing to smile and joke) was his way.
Do not get me wrong – James Power was a lovely man in many ways (I liked him a lot), but in some ways he was more dangerious than Harry Marks.
There would be no warning – nothing in body language and voice, and an opponent being weak was not a bar.
This is very Irish (at least Catholic Irish), as in the saying “kill you, and then buy you a drink afterwards”.
Whereas my father would make great efforts to avoid a fight (it is only if someone attacked him, or attacked someone else in his presence, that all bets were off) – and be upset for days if he had hurt someone.
Although this did not effect court appearances. Then Harry Marks would be a respectable old ex businessman (hence no criminal record). I remember one lorry driver who had made the mistake of spitting in my father’s face – by the time of the trial the lorry driver looked O.K. (and the prosecution had not taken photographs of what he had looked like after my father had finished with him) and the court watched an elderly man (with one lung and so on) say how he had only defended himself against a young man twice his size.
Still on one thing they were the same – if a man raised his hand to a women he should have that hand broken.
Sadly this has died in Ireland (or so I am told). There was a time when even the worst of men would never hit a women (even if the women had hit him – or smashed a chair over his head, or whatever).
What you say is true Alisa.
Of course, Guy is quite correct when he says that we should never act against people we just happen to think have violated someone.
The desire to find “someone” (anyone) to blame for a terrible thing is always there – but it must be resisted.
The risk of harming the innocent is not acceptable. So it must indeed be beyond all reasonable doubt.
Guy is quite correct on that.
Paul: of course.
Funny Paul.
My granddad was also Irish and Catholic.
He also fought in the Great War.He then came home, joined the IRA and fought the British Army.
By the time the Civil War broke out he’d had enough, and married an Englishwoman, and went to live in England.
Remarkable.
pietr
It puts me in mind of the character in “The Longest Day” (the Irishman played by a Scottish actor) who spends the entire film complaining about the evil British.
Near the end (as you many remember) an English soldier turns to him and says “as you hate us so much it must have gutted you to be conscripted”.
Only to get the (truthful) reply “there is no conscription in Ireland, I volunteered”.
In England’s wars (I say “England’s” because it was true even before 1707) the Irish have always rushed to volunteer – and no it is not normally a matter of earning bread or even getting training to fight the British later.
It is just is – well whatever it is.
As the lady said “it is a funny old world”.