The Reek of Cruelty and the Quest for Healing - Where Retributive and Restorative Justice Meet

[T]his is the awful privilege of our generation and of my people, no one better than us has ever been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offence, that spreads like a contagion. It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it. It is an inexhaustible fount of evil; it breaks the body...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Villa-Vicencio, Charles 1942- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press 1999
In: Journal of law and religion
Year: 1999, Volume: 14, Issue: 1, Pages: 165-187
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Summary:[T]his is the awful privilege of our generation and of my people, no one better than us has ever been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offence, that spreads like a contagion. It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it. It is an inexhaustible fount of evil; it breaks the body and the spirit of the submerged, it perpetuates itself as hatred among survivors, and swarms around in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as thirst for revenge, as a moral capitulation, as denial, as weariness, as renunciation.Primo Levi.The Holocaust remains imprinted on western consciousness as the epitome of a crime "which no human justice can eradicate." Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, knew this well. The tragedy of the Holocaust is that the cry "never again," which came in its wake, has failed to control human evil. Stories of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa and elsewhere remind us of the capacity of humankind to commit the kind of heinous crimes that no amount of human justice nor reparation can assuage. This tragic reality motivates Carlos Nino in Radical Evil on Trial to pose the all-important question: "How shall we live with evil? How shall we respond to massive human rights violations committed either by State actors or by others with the consent and tolerance of their governments?"
ISSN:2163-3088
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of law and religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.2307/1051783