 |
|
|
|
|
Lex Talionis & Perpetual War
by Henry William Brownejohns
August 2004
When the history of this war is written, it is likely that the names of Nicholas Berg, Paul Johnson, and Kim Sun Il will be conveniently forgotten. Indeed, we are such a queasy and forgetful people that a good deal of us have already lost track of the faces that go with these names. This is a shame, for it is the fate of these men that most exquisitely illustrates just how debased this conflict is, that most perfectly tells us to what astounding nadirs the human race has been led.
There is, in a cool, reverberant chamber of the Louvre museum in Paris, a solitary column of black polished stone, over seven feet high and six feet around. This stone was shaped nearly 3,000 years ago in the court of Hammurabi, King of Babylon—the ruin of which, incidentally, is a few hundred kilometers north of Baghdad. This is the first law-book; up and down its substantial height are carved the rules by which Hammurabi's Sumeria was governed. No previous king had thought to write down, to literally set in stone, his rules of civil conduct. Prior to Hammurabi, a king would make his judgments by whim and memory. As of 1850 B.C.E., a citizen could know what to expect from his juror.
And what he could expect was the principle of lex talionis—the law of likeness. That is, the punishment would be like the crime. In latter days, we would come to know this principle by the idiom ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' It is a brutal judicial principle; the column upon which it is inscribed is in the Louvre for its historical relevance and its aesthetic appeal—we celebrate the novelty of its invention, not the merits of its content.
There are innumerable flaws in the Sumerian legal code. (Rule number two: “If any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house.” All so that “Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God,” may “bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers.” Are we proud of our president, who cribs from the doctrine of Babylon?) But the most obvious logical flaw of the principle of lex talionis is the open end of the retributive equation. The power and the resistance, under Hammurabi's logic, would exchange body parts until neither had any left, and would then be obliged to move on to the dismemberment of relatives and associates.
What the Iraq War has shown us is that we have not made an inch of progress since Sumeria. The next time a head is cut off and the militants deliver another videotape to the news bureau's door, the public will once again briefly struggle with its revulsion, while the officials try to channel our confusion into military rage, political sympathy, or plain cultural xenophobia. This is the same thing the mujahedeen do when our armies debase Muslim prisoners to settle the accounts of September 11. The mujahedeen who are executing foreigners so medievally are doing so in direct retaliation to the crimes they have perceived us committing, by military and economic occupation of their territory, and by the equally medieval abasement of those prisoners in our custody. The militants have passed down their judgments according to the code of Hammurabi, and our official response has been no less Babylonian. The extremists on both sides know that their power would vanish if the conflict were ever to end, so they use the other side's material to incite their troops to retribution, humiliate their prisoners, whip their civilians up into a racist frenzy, and so maintain a state of perpetual war.
We have watched with dumb impotence as Israel and the Palestinians have traded eyes, teeth, ears, and hearts, and continue to do so indefinitely—and somehow we have concluded that this is the best course of action in our own ill-advised crusade against Islam. The Western war-hawks have made no secret of their conviction that they are the superior moral power, that We are Good and They are Evil. But, contrary to the advice of real moral righteousness, they still lead us in a self-destructive exchange of limbs for limbs, a conflict of Babylonian shortsightedness. Anyone with access to 20th century logic should be able to see that the victor in such an exchange will be that party which first chooses not to extract the eye it is owed. Either one of the combatants will discover this simple solution to the open equation of this war, or we may look forward to our own neglected relics one day taking up space in the corner of someone else's museum.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
