Word: minow
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...extremes of response in their legal manifestations: vengeance in the form of justice in trials and forgiveness in the form of amnesty and reconciliation offered by "truth commissions." The Nuremberg Trials of World War II and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa serve as Professor Minow's main examples, and she examines each of their approaches in two rather lengthy chapters. She critiques them on the level of their effects on victims and survivors as well a on a national and societal level. How does each of these approaches help the victims? Does it offer some kind...
Professor Minow asks all the right questions, but it is not always easy to unravel her answers. Navigating through her short examples and the sea of names of victims and officials is sometimes difficult, and the first few chapters seem not to lead very clearly from one point to another. There is little sense of progression but rather a sense of increasing complication. There is also a distinct lack of narrative cohesion. We are never really brought close to the trials and the truth commissions--personal reflections or individual experiences are limited especially in the first few chapters, kept very...
...these problems in the book are really a reflection of the problems involved in tackling such a topic as mass violence. There are no real answers, and the deeper you dig, the more complex the issues become. As Professor Minow herself puts it, "There are no tidy endings following mass atrocity." If we are to tell someone's story, whose story shall we tell? Whose perspective should we use when trying to judge the effects of the trials? Which group will be represented--victims, bystanders or perpetrators? The boundaries between these classifications are often blurred. Which individuals should we select...
...later chapters of Between Vengeance and Forgiveness make up for any confusion or difficulties in the earlier ones. The discussion of the Japanese-Americans' search for recognition after the injustice of their internment during World War II is fascinating and a pleasure to read. Professor Minow's chapter on reparations and the final chapter, "Facing History," are well-written and even engaging. They shake out some of the uncertainties in her argument and show us that if we cannot do away with the effects of torture and violence or replace what has been lost after genocide, then at least...
Throughout the book, it is apparent that the ultimate goal of its writing is healing. In what I take to be the most moving passage, Professor Minow quotes Cynthia Ngewu, the mother of a murdered victim of the apartheid regime: "This thing called reconciliation...if I am understanding it correctly...if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed [my son], if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back...then I agree, then I support it all." It is this searching for forgiveness, this fumbling...