 "If You Want
Peace, Work for Justice"
So read the bumper sticker on the car on the highway ahead of me today.
It has a nice ring to it, and it does make sense on the surface: When
they are constantly treated unjustly, how can we expect the oppressed
to follow a peaceful path? The poor, the disenfranchised, the
powerless, and minorities are treated appallingly all over the world.
The only surprise is that there are not more
violent uprisings among the billions who have never experienced our
world as a just place.
Arundhati Roy, acclaimed author and advocate of both peace and justice,
has made this point on many occasions, most recently when she gave her speech
last month as spokesperson for the World
Tribunal on Iraq, a group
opposed to the political and economic oppression of the Iraqi people by
criminals of every stripe, from the religious fanatics and despots past
and present who brutalize, steal, terrorize and deprive citizens of
their rights, to the Halliburtons and other war profiteers who cheat
and steal from the country and its people out of bald greed, to the
warmongers and imperialists who have used and continue to use lies and
deception to justify atrocious actions, and to use that country as a
whipping boy to advance their cynical partisan political agenda. None
of these groups is interested in peace or justice for the people of
Iraq or anyone else -- injustice and war are far more profitable,
politically useful and expedient.
Here are some of the points she made in an earlier
speech, when she was awarded the
2004 Sydney Peace Prize:
The
Iraq war is a sign that the world has lost the will to fight for true
justice. Sometimes there's truth in old clichés. There can be no real
peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice.
Today, it is not merely justice itself, but the idea of justice that is
under attack. The assault on vulnerable, fragile sections of society is
so complete, so cruel and so clever that its sheer audacity has eroded
our definition of justice. It has forced us to lower our sights, and
curtail our expectations. Even among the well-intentioned, the
magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the
reduced, far more fragile discourse of "human rights".
War mongering is criminal. But talking of peace without talking of
justice could easily become advocacy for a kind of capitulation. And
talking of justice without unmasking the institutions and the systems
that perpetrate injustice is beyond hypocritical. It's easy to blame
the poor for being poor. It's easy to believe that the world is being
caught up in an escalating spiral of terrorism and war. That's what
allows George Bush to say, "You're either with us or with the
terrorists." But that's a spurious choice. Terrorism is only the
privatisation of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war. They
believe that the legitimate use of violence is not the sole prerogative
of the state.
The group No Peace Without Justice identifies
four elements of a just society: human rights, democracy, the rule of
law and international justice (recourse outside the country when the
first three elements cannot be found within). In his book The Future of Freedom,
Fareed Zakaria argues there can be no democracy, and hence no justice,
without first having constitutional and economic liberalism, which he
defines as including the rule of law, the separation of church and
state, earned and reasonably distributed wealth (as calculated by the Gini
index), defensible civil liberties and a balance of power (a system of
check and balances to ensure no group accumulates enough power to be
able to ignore the will of the majority). So all told justice has seven
elements:
- defensible human rights and civil liberties (freedoms)
- democracy
- the rule of law
- the separation of church and state
- earned and reasonably distributed wealth
- checks and balances to prevent concentration of power that could subvert the popular will
- international recourse when the other six elements cannot be found within
This is a tall order. History tells us that rights and freedoms
are hard-won, and must be won again and again when despots come to
power to curtail or eliminate them. Democracy and church/state
separation are both fragile, and few countries have achieved either
without a prolonged and violent period of popular unrest. The rule of
law is ephemeral -- not only do the laws need to exist and make sense
to the people, they have to be enforceable and enforced, a situation
that exists in few countries on the planet (many Latin American
countries, for example, have strong environmental laws, but no money to
enforce them and a high level of corruption and indifference among the
few who are employed to enforce these laws). As measured by the Gini
Index, only a handful of Northern European countries can reasonably
claim that their wealth is earned and reasonably distributed -- in many
countries it is acquired by force, inherited for centuries, or claimed
as a divine right, and in many others, including the US, its
distribution is grotesquely skewed. And in even more countries one
small group has an untrammeled monopoly on power.
The position of the US is particularly notable. Laws like the Patriot
Act have seriously undermined human rights and civil liberties.
Gerrymandering, unregulated campaign financing and a completely
unreliable electoral system make the country's claim to be a democracy
highly dubious. There is no rule of law when overzealous,
under-regulated and power-crazed enforcement agencies have the personal
discretion to imprison people they don't like without recourse to legal
counsel and without limit, and to deport people to barbaric countries
in order to outsource their torture and murder. There is no rule of law
when the president, who has no respect for the concept or its
importance, simply instructs federal employees not to enforce laws he
and his corporate cronies don't like. The separation of church and
state in the US is unappreciated and under siege. The distribution of
US wealth is among the most skewed on the planet, and a majority of the
country's rich elite inherited that wealth (and are working furiously
to repeal the estate tax so that will continue). The checks and
balances between the executive, legislative and judiciary (and the
'fourth estate', the media) are now extremely fragile and in danger of
unraveling, and unelected corporations wield staggering and
ever-growing power. And the US is one of the only first-world nations
to have not only not ratified, but openly repudiated the International
Criminal Court of Justice, and are now routinely using their veto power
to undermine the legitimacy and authority of the UN. The current
administration even believes it can ignore the Geneva Convention on
torture of prisoners of war.
So on all seven scores, the US fails to live up to the standards of a
'just' society. Yet while this gun-crazed nation has a huge rate of
violent crime*, it is politically a remarkably peaceful nation. If
there is 'no peace without justice' how can this be?
I would argue that justice is a political and economic construct, while
peace is essentially a social construct. Political and economic systems
and dynasties are self-perpetuating -- they are, after all, in control
of the law, and they use it to hold on to the wealth and power they
have become accustomed to. I have argued before that if we want to
change -- or save -- the world, we are unlikely to do so by political
and economic means -- there is just too much of a vested interest in
the status quo by those with all the political and economic clout.
By contrast, social change can occur quickly. Change to social systems
is powered by information and education, not by laws and economic
transactions. Information travels fast, and new technologies like the
Internet allow it to travel much faster and more effectively than ever
before. Information is, in its own way, power. Those with wealth and
political power can sustain that wealth and power for a long time, but
not indefinitely. Just as our remedy for an economic system that is
ruinous and unsustainable is to use our social power to walk away from
it, persuade others to join us, and starve that system to death as we
set up a new, responsible one, so our remedy for a political system
that is unjust is to use our social power to disassociate ourselves
from it, persuade others to join us, and starve that system of
legitimacy. Gandhi showed us how to do this, with non-violent
resistance and civil disobedience, organization, and the establishment
of a new responsible, responsive, community-based politic. It will take
much longer to undermine the unjust political systems of this world by
creating new political systems that work better -- and we can expect a
lot of angry backlash from those who find their power and authority and
legitimacy undermined by our actions. But ultimately, now that the
world is so crowded that there are no new frontiers, no refuges from
political repression and injustice and outrage, this is the only answer.
There is no justice.
With what we know about human nature and human history we should not be
foolish enough to expect it in large, conservative, unwieldy
governments, corporations and nation-states. And the road to peace, in
the absence of justice, is a social one, not a political one. It's a
hard road, but we can have it, now, if we want it.
* a number of
recent studies have indicated that it is the fifth of these elements of
justice -- earned and reasonably distributed wealth -- that correlates
most closely with the level of domestic peacefulness
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
