Peace – Abrams Dicta

Does the United States need to consider appointing a truth and reconciliation commission? This week I caught a news story about the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which concluded its work on December 15, 2015 to uncover the truth about Canadian mistreatment of aboriginal children and to seek reconciliation between the aboriginal community and larger Canadian society. The occasion of the release of the report was recognized with a statement by Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, in which he praised the work of the Commission, its search for truth, and affirmed the need for continued reconciliation.

This got me thinking about how issues of race and inequality continue to be problems in American society. From the multitude of press stories about seemingly unjustified police shootings of Black men to the recent U.S. Supreme Court argument regarding affirmative action in college admissions we see issues of race, inequality, and social injustice continuing to be a part of the American social and legal landscape. It amazes me that even in the 2016 Presidential campaign we see issues of race, prejudice, and fear continuing to be successfully exploited by candidates.

Absent a national effort to seek out the truth of our history, it will be very difficult for our nation to move forward in healing the deep wounds created by a century of slavery (I’m counting from the nation’s founding; I recognize that the actual history of slavery in North America is much longer) followed by a century of Jim Crow and segregation, followed by decades of prejudicial policing and economic injustice. For most White Americans these issues are mentally relegated to the area of “Black History” with the implication that it’s of little relevance to them. I wonder if it is in the labels that truth gets lost. Maybe there is no such thing as “Black” history or “White” history, only a shared universal history found in whatever truth we can recover from the past. Slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow were not only Black experiences, they were an experience of all who lived during those times and are a legacy that all contemporary Americans have inherited.

Our search needs to be for something greater than a collection of facts that we call history, it should be for truth, no matter how messy or inconvenient it may be. Truth is not about vilifying or shaming, but about seeing ourselves as honestly and accurately as possible so that we can find reconciliation and freedom from the past. Denial is the product of a dysfunctional mind whereas truth is a pathway to healing from the dysfunction.

None of this is a novel idea. We’ve long known that one of the most important steps for a person struggling with an addiction seeking to become sober through a 12-Step program is a fearless and searching moral inventory followed by an effort to make amends except where it would be harmful. Religious traditions have long recognized that truth and repair are predicates to redemption. For example, this week I was attended the Friday evening service at Congregation Shomrei Torah and I read the following in the Jewish prayer book:

“You cannot find redemption until you see the flaws in your own soul and try to efface them. Nor can a people be redeemed until it sees the flaws in its soul and tries to efface them. But whether it be an individual or a people, whoever shuts out the realization of his flaws is shutting out redemption. We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.”

Our national failure to seek out the truth of our history tethers us to the past. Sure, we all know the factual history that slavery and segregation once existed in the United States. What is lacking is the visceral connection that comes through a “searching and fearless” inventory that reveals the truths behind the history. It’s more than just knowing the basic facts, it’s understanding the why, the how, and the impact. The stories of both the oppressed and the oppressor must be told and heard.

When used in this context, truth is not something that is defined by a particular group. It’s not the property of the oppressed or the oppressor, but is owned by both. Without truth reality becomes distorted and both the oppressor and oppressed suffer. Consider the bizarre reasoning of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who recently wrote that slavery didn’t strip the slave of his or her dignity. Such reasoning is the intellectual denial of the truth.

Having sought out the truth, we then seek reconciliation with each other. As a lawyer working in the American legal system, reconciliation is a somewhat foreign concept to me. The system I work in proudly declares itself as an adversarial system where we seek to determine guilt, innocence, or liability, and then impose some form of retribution either in the form of jail or money. Repairing the relationship between the parties is not the goal and is rarely achieved. Therefore, I find it tempting to reduce reconciliation to its most simplistic concept and regard it as nothing more than apology, but that’s incorrect. In researching reconciliation, I found an interesting paper on reconciliation in Rwanda by Eugenia Zorbas in the African Journal of Legal Studies in which she writes:

“Reconciliation is a vague concept. In the wake of mass violence there is no goal past which ‘reconciliation’ has been achieved. My premise is that legal (prosecutorial) instruments, striking political compromises, publicly acknowledging the wrongs inflicted on victims, and other measures, as ‘messy’ as they may be, are all more acceptable than doing nothing. I label ‘doing nothing’ unacceptable first because of its ‘shocking implication that the perpetrators did in fact succeed’. Indeed, silences makes us complicit bystanders to the perpetrators of yesterday. Secondly, inaction is unacceptable because it leaves grievances, fears of reprisals, and cultures of impunity to fester, encouraging cyclical outburst of violence by the perpetrators of tomorrow… ‘Reconciliation’ is the umbrella term I will use to refer to this series of messy compromises, though it may be inconceivable or offensive to some, is thus the only sustainable and genuine form of prevention in societies that have undergone mass violence.”

In other words, we can’t simply declare the injustice over and then move on with life as if nothing happened. Unfortunately, moving on without reconciliation has been the American approach to social injustice to date. Whether we’re discussing slavery and segregation, native American genocide, or political persecution of communists and socialists, our solution has always been to declare the injustice to be unlawful and move-on. We outlawed slavery, then 100 years later outlawed segregation. We’ve outlawed employment and housing discrimination. We’ve even outlawed laws that outlawed interracial marriages. Yet not once have we ever engaged in national soul searching for truth followed by overt action intended to heal the wounds. In the meantime, we see repeat performances of the old demon of racism in our society. Perhaps it’s not too late. Maybe if we seek truth and reconciliation we can end the denial and start healing some of the wounds that are festering in American society.

A friend recently asked me for my thoughts on the agreement President Obama recently negotiated with Iran to ease sanctions. What follows is my response to his inquiry:

I don’t know the details about the deal President Obama entered into with Iran, so I’m not able to say whether or not it’s a good deal. However, I do think there are many reasons why we need to end the sanctions and to begin moving towards a more normalized relationship with Iran.

First and foremost, the existing economic sanctions simply haven’t worked. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome. An economic embargo lasting 60 years didn’t work with Cuba. We have imposed sanctions on Iran for more than 35 years without any measurable success other than impeding the growth of the middle class in Iran, which is against our interests, as I will discuss later.

Furthermore, the United States faces the very real possibility that continuing the sanctions would create isolation for the United States. The Soviet Union, along with several other nations, recently indicated that they would no longer go along with sanctions. Thus, our ability to economically isolate Iran, in what is now a global economy, is weakening.

I recognize that my view on Iran is somewhat different than found in the United States mainstream and within the Jewish community. I do not see Iran as being the uncontrollable threat that it is often portrayed as. Granted, they have a fundamentalist religious government, but I feel that a lot of that is our own fault. We rarely speak about the very complex and questionable history the United States has with Iran. Historically, the United States put cheap oil before democracy in Iran by working to over-throw a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 for the purpose of ensuring American oil companies could access Iranian oil. The United States installed the Shah, a notoriously cruel puppet dictator who ruled until the Islamic Revolution in 1979, which was when the hostage crisis occurred that still resonates loudly in the minds of many Americans.

However, I think it’s important to point out that the Hostage Crisis, while humiliating for the United States, ended peacefully. The Iranians did not kill their hostages in the manner that we see groups such as the Islamic State doing today.

Despite the difficult history and the religiously based government, I think a relationship between Iran and the United States has the potential to be mutually beneficial. Iran is not a backwards nation. Despite having a religiously fundamentalist government, most Iranians are not fundamentalists. Iran is a nation with a high literacy rate. Iran has built several major universities that are producing scientists who are involved in cutting-edge research. There is an expanding middle class that is not religiously fundamentalist. I believe it’s this expanding middle class that is the future to a secure Iran. However, the existing sanctions have greatly impeded the growth of the Iranian middle class. I believe that it is the emerging Iranian middle class that provides the greatest hope for political reforms in Iran and for long-term peace and stability in the area. A nation with a growing middle class along with expanding education is unlikely to start an unnecessary war.

Much of the political discourse is focused upon atomic weapons. I think we have to keep in mind that the technology that gives rise to atomic weapons is now nearly 70 years old. The United States built atomic bombs in the 1940’s without the use of even the simplest computers. The genie is out of the bottle on this one and we need to give a lot of thought to how do we discourage the proliferation of such weapons and defend against the eventual, and I feel inevitable, situation where an atomic weapon falls into the hands of a terrorist organization. We need to consider how do regimes change, including our own government, without the loss or use of such weapons. Additionally, we need to consider what message do we send by having such overwhelming conventional firepower, yet we still maintain the world’s largest arsenal of atomic weapons and have built more atomic weapons that all other nations in the world combined. Additionally, we are the only nation to have ever used an atomic weapon against an enemy. I think this makes it challenging for the United States to speak with persuasive authority, where we ask another nation to abstain from a form of weaponry that forms the backbone of our own military strategy.

Lastly, Israel understandably feels very vulnerable by any prospect of atomic weapons in Iranian hands. Israel has faces a very real threat from Hezbollah, which obtains a great deal of its funding from Iran. However, I continue to believe that the solution to this problem is an expanding Iranian middle class and the changes I believe would occur in the Iranian political landscape with middle class expansion. In essence, my argument at its very core is “open Iran to the world and see what happens”. We know isolation doesn’t create good things, let’s see what engagement creates.