Justice to the Victims of Fascism
KONVITZ, MILTON R.
Justice to the Victims of Fascism Two Opposing Views on the Lynching in Rome By Milton R. Konvitz THE tetter of Lcwii Mumford, in The New Yerk Timet of September 28, In defense of the Roman mob...
...The very application of the word lynching to the behavior of the people of Rune proves how little Dr...
...Because he wishes to make men respect reason and justice, he hat every incentive to exhibit these qualities himself In commenting upon my letter...
...To make an absolute of sny human institution, is to endow with divine attributes something that must remain, in the nature of things, limited, faulty, and inadequate...
...Or that there be no justice in destiny or time...
...Judges ssay be lea teat...
...Would he prefer the harsher type of "justice" such a mob administers...
...Herbert Matthews and Dr...
...It took mankind centuries to get away from taa blood-feud...
...Wky did not tkete tame libertyloving pertont form tkemtelvet into a mob and lynch Mmtolini or some of hit close associates ten years ago* or five yeart ago...
...and to we have capital punishment, though the moral arguments against it ate unanswerable...
...It is enough if the eyttem of criminal juttice at a whole reflects, to some extent, its existence...
...yet it must take it into account, to some extent, if it is to serve ss a substitute for the vendetta and blood-feud...
...If I mav judge by the number of approving letters I have received from widely different quarters becauM of my letter In the Timet, that conscience is still by W means dead...
...It should not be stifled completely...
...If Mumford were accused of the commission of • crime (ssy if he were a Negro suspected of the rape of a white woman in Birmingham), would he prefer the swifter "trial" by a lynching mob...
...They must act ss men in whom feeling and reflection are well-balanced...
...I would ssy that the individual mutt make every effort to stifle the feeling...
...for execution of the capital sentence expiated the crime or sin, and in hit death the criminal waa still a man in whom the dignity of mankind was to be respected...
...We recognize, this fact in times of natural disaster like a flood or an earthquake, when a thief, who would ordinsrily be tried by a court and a jury and sentenced perhaps to less than a year of imprisonment may, under martial law, be shot at sight by any soldier who catches him in the set of theft...
...sgainst the coldness with which we have read of the indescribable sufferings of countless innocent men, women and children...
...ThERE is an old maxim of Roman law: De minimie nun curat lex...
...v - ' consideration in hia mind, and ben umbo his very humanity...
...In discussing the subject of this article with friends, nenrly everyone hat tsid: "But revenge is s human amotion...
...that is, the law does not concern itself with trifles...
...Matthews, could only be compared, perhaps, *to the Harlem Negro riots a few years ago...
...There spoke a sensitive moral conscience, a Quaker conscience,in fact, quicker than most to be horrified by blood and slaughter and brutal violence: a conscienrt that represents the deeper and better heart of Amcrict...
...Justice to the Victims of Fascism Two Opposing Views on the Lynching in Rome By Milton R. Konvitz THE tetter of Lcwii Mumford, in The New Yerk Timet of September 28, In defense of the Roman mob which lynched Carratte, has shocked me, for Mumford is a parson to whom many Americans, including myself, hare learned to look for sensitive, critical, moral, and esthetic judgments...
...Yet under that simple test he hat failed...
...His protest against the reports of Herbert Matthews and his defense of the mob of lynchers cannot pass unanswered...
...It U not given to aaaa to wreak vengeance...
...They mutt act at men whose thoughts are felt passionately snd whose passions are disciplined by thought Time snd again Mumford hat said that men mutt not be indifferent to vice and ugliness snd cruelty: they must react deeply and intelligently to the evils surrounding them...
...I\i 1FORD belittles law snd order...
...Now, it seems, that he had been carried away by the title of that book—but with a wrong emphasis on the word "act...
...Does he know whether or not most of them had been anti-fascists before the arrest of Mussolini...
...Once we understand that fact only one conclusion is, I believe, possible: 1 expressed it in my letter to the Timet and I say it again: It it for the people who htvt suffered under the merciless and bestial tyranny of the Nazis to express both their own judgment upon the oppressors and such restraint upon unbridled vengeance as their own conscience may in the long run dictate: for them alone...
...Mumford, we had slwsyt thought, tried to combine light snd heat...
...I have not tortured him with diabolical ingenuity or mutilated the body of his son, his wife, or his brother...
...DoES Mumford know what types of persons participated in the Roman lynching...
...That was a terrible and threatening event...
...The faaltt af taa tow are many...
...What callousness, Mumford rightly points out, this declaration revealed—would that we had gone to war, not because of Pearl Harbor, but because the spirit of man was threatened with extinction in Europe...
...SuCH callous moralism, .such one-sided legalism, at Mr...
...But the law «s sn institution cannot be oblivious to the existence of the feeling...
...In hit most recent book, Condition of Man...
...Pale, silent, stern, what could I say to that long-accrued retribution...
...In all this Mumford is entirely right: we should be attacked for our smugness, our bloodless thinking, our indifference to moral values,"our calculating self-interest, our emphasis on creature comforts and material interests...
...Dr...
...and in so far as the lsw takes the existence of revenge into account, its philosophy of punishment is not altogether rational...
...Matthews, suddenly loses his memory...
...According to some ancient systems af law, even the man sentenced to die by strangling at beheading—a criminal of the worst type—was to as given a strong potion to make him insensitive or aaconscious...
...You need not approve, you mu»t not condemn...
...Vengeance is mint, aaith taa Lord...
...To put normal civil law and order as thi first requirement for humanity in the countries once ruled by fascism is to betray every principle of natural justice: indeed, it is to show mercy to the criminal at the outrageous expense of his victim...
...In comparing the action of these people to those of an American lynching party, Dr...
...Konvitz's conception of justice has no place for the catastrophic: he forgets our own procedare under natural catastrophes, and he forgets the demands of justice in relation to the gignntie human catastrophe with which the oppressed peoples sll over Europe have been visited...
...In the name of law, ha even forgets that the liw it I elf prudently dittiuguitket between criiiiet committed in cold blood, likt the hideout acts af torture the fatcit't eouttantly retort to, mndcrinH toxmitied undtr proioceitiqu in the heat of pattion...
...No ordinary Iswi ' or courts are capable of dealing adequately with crimes of the nature that the Nazis have committed...
...Yes, men must act...
...Konvitz understands this occasion...
...but now, it set ms, he hss taken hit place with Unamuno...
...KONVITZ has written hft letter in an attempt to vindicate the spirit of justice, in what he takes, mistakenly, to be my attack upon it...
...Bat the tow to all that steads between as snd the jungle...
...Not light, but heat...
...Konvitz's wordt remind me by contrast of Wait Whitman's, which we Americans would do well in the present situation to remember...
...but they must act as men, not as beasts...
...It was against this perversion of the sentiment of justice that my letter to the New York Timet was directed...
...Konvitz have exhibited, show a shortness of memory and a deficiency of humzn feeling that are incapable of working effctively toward that justice and reason in which all decent men believe...
...It is a rattoanl institution, and none of its faults to af the kind that intelligence and good-will cannot rare, or at toast mitigate...
...KonviU commits these injustices in the quiet of his study, and without tny personal provocation from me: I have not broken up his life...
...Could I wish humanity different ? Could I wish the people made of wood and stone...
...fiat tats does not mean that in any tptcifit cuss the law must reflect the exiitence of thie feeling in the community...
...Konvitz, like Mr...
...By Lewis Mumford DR...
...Let him ponder that weakness in himself before he proceeds to condemn in the name of law and order those whom he castigates ss the "mob," a mob made up first of all, on the testimony of the witness he -follows all too uncritically, of the relatives of people who had been the victims of Fascist and Nazi horrors...
...Konvitz betrays that very lack of human insight against which I have tried to warn my countrymen: for this outbreak of passion, ' in a city noted for its orderliness, according to Mr...
...Even as far back at Old Testament times provision was made far cities af refuge, to which a man could flee from the wrath af hit victims and their families...
...They mutt set as members of a civilised community, not at members of a mob...
...In so far aa his conduct reflects revenge, it is not completely rstionsl...
...He ssys that a t. 1 by a court is slower thsn a lynching, and that com .s sre more lenient than are a mcb of lynchers...
...he strikes out against the shocking indifference of the American people to, the slaughter of millions of Jews by the Nazis...
...It is given ta man to administer justice...
...The law sofUns its judgment of the latter crimes: Dr...
...In so far, then, ss punishment is concerned, revenge may be a factor in the system of criminal law...
...Faced with the irremediable wrongs that have been committed by the degraded Nazis and Fascists, Dr...
...Por in dealing with the words of a man whose work he professedly admires, he misinterprets my plainly expressed intention, and even "quotes" words I have never used, such as "a trial by a court is slower than a lynching...
...and it 1 could not be condemned with unqualified self-righteousness by any white person who remembered the generations of opprtsion that underlay such a flareup of the more primitive instincts...
...or two years ugot Where were then three tummer toldiert and eunthine patriate...
...But in the trial of a case, the purpose of which is to determine guilt pr innocence, nothing is in order except rstionsl er scientific methods of snalysis and discovery...
...Some years ago Mumford wrote an able tract against Fascism and Nazism called if en Mutt Act...
...He reminds us that the President of the United States stated to the nation that America did not enter the war willingly but only because we had been attacked...
...Ha hat a well-deserved place of eminence ia contemporary critical thought...
...Indicia I trials may be stow...
...tsid Unamuno...
...I thould like to tnggett that the Roman mob was no different from any other mob: they acted juet at the moment when it took no courage to act: they went into action at a time when it wae eafe for any mob of bulliet and rewards to do what their passions dictated...
...And yet how difficult it is for justice to prevail in the hearts of men, he himself shows...
...But what is true at one extreme is equally true at the other: the law, which is framed to meet the ordinary forms of violence and injustice among people living in peaceable civil communities, has not been built ' to deal with violence on a catastrophic scale...
...Konvitz does not...
...Miguel de Unamuno said that Goethe cried out for the wrong thing...
...snd hi to doing he slso loses his sense of btlsnce, which is the essence of rearron: the idea of law and order for their own Fs'r, 'lie :''on of the iiidiri I rirrcc...
...I do not in my person symbolise the indignities am, the horrors under which he has lived for the last twenty years...
...But now Mumford would have us go to the other extreme: he would substitute blood for brain, hest for light, feeling for intelligence When Goethe was on his death-bed, he is said to have cried out: "More light...
...They occur in his poem on France, written in 1860, a poem that represents hi« sober reflections upon another event, equally dreadful in its blind violence, but equally a product of provocations that had reached''catastrophic dimensions: the Reign of Terror that climaxed the French Revolution of 1789...
...but it was juit the reverie of a white lynching party...
...i I...
Vol. 27 • October 1944 • No. 44
