ec7fa8a17afb4ed09668ca3cba134dcd Victim crimes

VICTIM CRIMES What bothers me and I regret is that contemporary society tends to de-responsibility (to use a term I have never used because it is abstract), to the cancellation of personal responsibility, of guilt. Here, I notice that there is a tendency to empty many crimes, even the most serious, of the moral responsibility they imply, to worry only about prompt rehabilitation rather than just compensation for what they have suffered the victims. There is a profound imbalance: the rehabilitation of the guilty is very important, in fact I am against the penalty of death and the forms of punishment that offend the person, but so is the security of the punishment. If an individual has committed a serious fault it is also right that he pays and this must be considered both as an instrument of rehabilitation for the offender, both as compensation for the company; for this the penalty but must not be canceled. Instead there is a very serious tendency to forget this second aspect and this generates in citizens a sense of frustration and distress.   Please explain this concept better.   When one has the house devastated by thieves and knows that thieves will not be punished, when he has a relative who has been hit by a pirate car and knows the culprit will get away with little or nothing, then the victim feels a sense of abandonment and anguish. I think that this society, by weakening the certainty of the sentence, takes away the justice one of its most important functions, namely that of deterrent: many people sure of impunity commit crimes. Let's think about what happened recently at Malpensa, to talk about a crime not of the gods more atrocious but still serious: the crime was committed by people who had been exonerated or otherwise ...do not punish in a previous trial. Unfortunately, the absurd idea dominates that using indulgence makes it easier the exercise of justice, on the other hand, the victim is offended, depriving her of just compensation, the reply of crime, or rather its mathematical multiplication, and a state of anguish is generated in the citizens.  from "Alice.it", June 27, 2003   CULTURE At the conclusion of this itinerary in resentment, we encounter an element that reconnects what has been said about the Global situation with the more general meaning of "global populism". And that allows us to identify the signs tangible elements of a path that does not have a single chosen place: it has the whole world at its disposal. It's about the themes evoked by the German sociologist Hans Magnus Enzensberger in Il losente radicale (Einaudi, 2007). Enzensberger .... follows the traces of that trail of blood that crosses the contemporary horizon and that from our little ones domestic barbarism leads us to the point of meeting the figure of kamikaze terrorists. From the case of adolescents assassins in American colleges until 9/11 there is - suggests Enzensberger - a thread of despair and of anger, blind violence and studied exaltation of the rancor that ends up tying the murderers of the province to the killers of the Twin Towers. The former indicate a tendency, a possibility that is hidden in the manifest contradictions of a cultural model in crisis, the latter are part of the army of those who socialize this crisis and make it there flag of a planetary war. In common, these two examples apparently so far from each other make sense of defeat, the perception of an inadequacy that turns into murderous fury, in an endless desire to death and destruction. In both cases we are faced with what the German scholar presents as "the losers radicals ". Definition not so much referable to those who can be perceived as the losers of globalization or of the cultural transformations inherent in modernity, as for those that have not been or are unable to develop a vocabulary of change, an emotional lexicon with which to respond to short or short changes long course that cross their living space.  «At any moment - Enzensberger writes - the loser can to blow up. This is the only solution to the problem that he can imagine: the paroxysm of the discomfort that it does suffer".   The real problem arises, however, when one passes from individual madness to what the sociologist defines as the "socialization of rancor". “What happens when the radical loser overcomes his isolation, when you do socializes, when it finds a homeland of the losers, from which it promises not only understanding, but recognition, a collective of similar people who welcome him with open arms and need him? »asks Enzensberger.  Is this, add example, the horizon in which the kamikaze terrorist becomes a central figure, the symbol of a culture of death that "Plans the suicide of an entire society." Something, concludes the German scholar, that Europe has already known, precisely in Germany in the period between the two world wars: that vast movement marked by frustration patriotic and the resentment of young males returned from the front and no longer exalted as heroes, which was the scenario of the rise of Nazism.   CULTURE «The West has not conquered the world with the superiority of its ideas, its values ​​or its religion but through its superiority in the use of organized violence (military power). Westerners forget this often, non-Westerners never. (...) Some Westerners have argued that the West has no problem with Islam, but only with violent Islamic extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history, however, prove the opposite. THE relations between Islam and Christianity have often been stormy. For both, the opposite side always has represented "the Other" (...) The causes of this constant conflict are not to be sought in transitory phenomena such as the Christian fervor of the twelfth century or the Muslim fundamentalism of the twentieth, but in the very nature of these two religions and civilizations founded on them, in their differences and their similarities ». Therefore, «a planetary war  involving the leading states of the world's major civilizations is highly unlikely but not impossible. A similar conflict could arise from the escalation of a (local) war between Muslims and non-Muslims ».   It has been more than ten years since Samuel Phillips Huntington proposed this reading of the future relationship international in the light of a clear contrast between what he defined as "Islam" and what he defined as "West". There had not yet been 11 September, the US administration had not yet declared the "permanent war on terrorism", the international debate revolved to a large extent around the promises announced  from the full unfolding of the processes of globalization. Still, it was just starting from an analysis of the "new" world  globalized, that this Harvard lecturer - esteemed specialist in strategic studies and director of the John T. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies - had already published, in 1993, in the journal he founded, Foreign Affairs, a article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?" which would later be developed in the 1996 essay of the same name, published by the important publisher Simon and Schuster and translated all over the world (in Italy the first edition is from 1997, clash of civilizations and the new world order, Garzanti).   Since then, Huntington's theses announcing the "clash" as possible, near and to some extent inevitable of civilization "between Westerners and Muslims - the former represented as the custodians of the philosophy of human rights and second more or less like "barbarians" - have not only characterized the international political and cultural debate, but, as a sort of terrible prophecy, they appeared as the dramatic announcement of what would later be concretely verified. This at least in appearance. In reality, The Clash of Civilizations has become the banner behind which most of the right-wing cultures of the West have redefined their identity. From the doctrine neoconservative who landed in the White House since the first election of George W. Bush to lead the United States in 2000, to the many champions of Western identity who have appeared in recent years in Europe, from Orfana Fallaci to Pym Fortuyn, To cite two examples, everyone seems to have embraced Huntington's words. Thus, as Mondher points out Kilani, Professor of Cultural Atropology at the University of Lausanne, in Nothing will be the same again (Medusa, 2002): “There are many Western commentators who, after 9/11, have been keen to remember the Western origin rights, thus helping (...) to support the self-fulfilling prophecy of Huntington's thesis on "clash of civilizations". A thesis that, as is known, has the particularity of exchanging the consequence (conflicts and contradictions resulting from historical and conjunctural relations of power) with the cause (an irreducibility of values ​​between the "Christian West" and the "Arab-Muslim world") ». rights, thus helping (...) to support the self-fulfilling prophecy of Huntington's thesis on "clash of civilizations". A thesis that, as is known, has the particularity of exchanging the consequence (conflicts and contradictions resulting from historical and conjunctural relations of power) with the cause (an irreducibility of values ​​between the "Christian West" and the "Arab-Muslim world") ».   The theses of Huntington, a conservative close but not tout court comparable to the American neocon environment, have thus ended up taking on the meaning of a way out from the right in the face of the crisis of the nation-state and the advent of the global era.  «My hypothesis - explained the author of The Clash of Civilizations - is that the source of conflict fundamental in the world we live in will be substantially neither ideological nor economic. The great divisions of humanity will be linked to culture (...) The most important conflicts will take place between groups of different civilizations ». «This is because - added Huntington - in the post-Cold War world, culture is a force at the same time disintegrating and aggregating. Populations divided by ideology but culturally homogeneous come to unify, like the two Germanys have made (...) Societies united by ideology or historical circumstances but belonging to different ones On the other hand, civilizations end up crumbling, as happened to the Soviet Union ».   The rebirth of identity, the communitarian tendencies, "God's revenge" - as Huntington himself defined the overbearing return of religion to politics and the public sphere of many societies - rather than being presented as many possible drifts assumed by humanity in a condition of crisis, they became "the answer" to transformations introduced by globalization. To the point that the Harvard political scientist was already announcing at the time those that would have been the themes of his subsequent reflections, collected in 2004 in La nuova America.  The challenges of multicultural society (Garzanti, 2005), a violent manifesto against the US melting pot model in particular against the emergence of the presence of "Latin" immigrants in the US.  «Western culture - it could  read in The Clash of Civilizations - is threatened by groups operating within Western societies themselves. Of these threats consists of immigrants from other civilizations who refuse assimilation and continue to practice and propagate the values, customs and cultures of their own societies of origin. This phenomenon prevails above all among Muslims in Europe, who are, however, a small minority, but are also present, to a lesser extent, among the  Hispanics from the United States, who are a very large minority ».   The "civilizations" placed by Huntington at the center of his reflection therefore represent definite, stable and connoted according to almost "ethnic" criteria, to the point that the frontier that he himself runs between Westerners and Muslims then know his double within every society between "natives" and "foreigners".  «The political scientist of Harvard - explains Annamaria Rivera, ethnologist at the University of Bari and author of La guerra dei symbols (Dedalo, 2005) - proposes, through totalizing notions such as that of civilization, a configuration of international power relations based on rigid cultural-religious divisions. In the "bad anthropology" of Huntington, "civilizations" are seen as compact, autonomous, irreducible, potentially or actually hostile universes to one another; the relations of the so-called West with other areas, countries and cultures are represented in terms of the opposition between the West and the Rest ».  They are "closed worlds", impenetrable, those that, according to Huntington, are destined to cross only for the inevitable clash. In this context, one can read again in The Clash of Civilizations, “the real problem for the West is not the Islamic fundamentalism, but Islam as such, a different civilization whose populations are convinced of superiority of their own culture and obsessed with the little power they have. The problem of Islam is not there CIA or the US Department of Defense, but the West (...) These are the basic ingredients that feed  the conflict between Islam and the West ”. Therefore, as the Afro-British sociologist Paul Gilroy suggests in his After  the empire (Meltemi, 2006) "old colonial issues come back into play when geopolitical conflicts are declined like a battle between homogeneous civilizations ». Gilroy compares Huntington's book to the Essay on the inequality of races published in the mid-nineteenth century by the count de Gobineau and considered as the founding text of racism modern. «Despite the many differences - explains the sociologist -, both authors share the concern .... for the dynamics of mutual repulsion of civilizations and the disastrous consequences of the attempts at crossing. Gobineau ..... identified the mortal danger to civilizations in any deviation from the "homogeneity necessary for their life" (...) Huntington specifies the same type of problem, geopolitical and scientific-racial, in aphoristic form, in the idiom contemporary of multiculturalism and globality ".


VICTIM CRIMES


What bothers me and I regret is that contemporary society tends to de-responsibility (to use a term I have never used because it is abstract), to the cancellation of personal responsibility, of guilt.

Here, I notice that there is a tendency to empty many crimes, even the most serious, of the moral responsibility they imply,

to worry only about prompt rehabilitation rather than just compensation for what they have suffered
the victims. There is a profound imbalance: the rehabilitation of the guilty is very important, in fact I am against the penalty of death and the forms of punishment that offend the person, but so is the security of the punishment. If an individual
has committed a serious fault it is also right that he pays and this must be considered both as an instrument of rehabilitation for the offender, both as compensation for the company; for this the penalty but must not be canceled. Instead there is a very serious tendency to forget this second aspect and this generates in citizens a sense of frustration and distress.

 

Please explain this concept better.



When one has the house devastated by thieves and knows that thieves will not be punished, when he has a relative who has been

hit by a pirate car and knows the culprit will get away with little or nothing, then the victim feels a sense of abandonment and anguish. I think that this society, by weakening the certainty of the sentence, takes away the justice one of its most important functions, namely that of deterrent: many people sure of impunity commit crimes. Let's think about what happened recently at Malpensa, to talk about a crime not of the gods more atrocious but still serious: the crime was committed by people who had been exonerated or otherwise

...do not punish in a previous trial. Unfortunately, the absurd idea dominates that using indulgence makes it easier the exercise of justice, on the other hand, the victim is offended, depriving her of just compensation, the reply of crime, or rather its mathematical multiplication, and a state of anguish is generated in the citizens.

 from "Alice.it", June 27, 2003



 

CULTURE


At the conclusion of this itinerary in resentment, we encounter an element that reconnects what has been said about the

Global situation with the more general meaning of "global populism". And that allows us to identify the signs

tangible elements of a path that does not have a single chosen place: it has the whole world at its disposal. It's about the themes evoked by the

German sociologist Hans Magnus Enzensberger in Il losente radicale (Einaudi, 2007). Enzensberger


.... follows the traces of that trail of blood that crosses the contemporary horizon and that from our little ones

domestic barbarism leads us to the point of meeting the figure of kamikaze terrorists. From the case of adolescents assassins in American colleges until 9/11 there is - suggests Enzensberger - a thread of despair and of anger, blind violence and studied exaltation of the rancor that ends up tying the murderers of the province to the killers of the Twin Towers. The former indicate a tendency, a possibility that is hidden in the manifest contradictions of a
cultural model in crisis, the latter are part of the army of those who socialize this crisis and make it there

flag of a planetary war. In common, these two examples apparently so far from each other make sense of defeat, the perception of an inadequacy that turns into murderous fury, in an endless desire to

death and destruction. In both cases we are faced with what the German scholar presents as "the losers

radicals ". Definition not so much referable to those who can be perceived as the losers of globalization or of the cultural transformations inherent in modernity, as for those that have not been or are unable to develop a vocabulary of change, an emotional lexicon with which to respond to short or short changes long course that cross their living space. 

«At any moment - Enzensberger writes - the loser can
to blow up. This is the only solution to the problem that he can imagine: the paroxysm of the discomfort that it does suffer".

 

The real problem arises, however, when one passes from individual madness to what the sociologist defines as the "socialization of rancor". “What happens when the radical loser overcomes his isolation, when you do socializes, when it finds a homeland of the losers, from which it promises not only understanding, but recognition, a collective of similar people who welcome him with open arms and need him? »asks Enzensberger. 

Is this, add example, the horizon in which the kamikaze terrorist becomes a central figure, the symbol of a culture of death that

"Plans the suicide of an entire society." Something, concludes the German scholar, that Europe has already known,

precisely in Germany in the period between the two world wars: that vast movement marked by frustration

patriotic and the resentment of young males returned from the front and no longer exalted as heroes, which was the scenario of the rise of Nazism.


 

CULTURE


«The West has not conquered the world with the superiority of its ideas, its values ​​or its religion but

through its superiority in the use of organized violence (military power). Westerners forget this

often, non-Westerners never. (...) Some Westerners have argued that the West has no problem with

Islam, but only with violent Islamic extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history, however, prove the opposite. THE relations between Islam and Christianity have often been stormy. For both, the opposite side always has represented "the Other" (...) The causes of this constant conflict are not to be sought in transitory phenomena such as

the Christian fervor of the twelfth century or the Muslim fundamentalism of the twentieth, but in the very nature of these two religions and civilizations founded on them, in their differences and their similarities ». Therefore, «a planetary war
 involving the leading states of the world's major civilizations is highly unlikely but not impossible. A similar conflict could arise from the escalation of a (local) war between Muslims and non-Muslims ».

 

It has been more than ten years since Samuel Phillips Huntington proposed this reading of the future relationship international in the light of a clear contrast between what he defined as "Islam" and what he defined as "West". There had not yet been 11 September, the US administration had not yet declared the "permanent war on terrorism", the international debate revolved to a large extent around the promises announced

 from the full unfolding of the processes of globalization. Still, it was just starting from an analysis of the "new" world  globalized, that this Harvard lecturer - esteemed specialist in strategic studies and director of the John T. Olin

Institute for Strategic Studies - had already published, in 1993, in the journal he founded, Foreign Affairs, a

article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?" which would later be developed in the 1996 essay of the same name, published
by the important publisher Simon and Schuster and translated all over the world (in Italy the first edition is from 1997, clash of civilizations and the new world order, Garzanti).

 

Since then, Huntington's theses announcing the "clash" as possible, near and to some extent inevitable of civilization "between Westerners and Muslims - the former represented as the custodians of the philosophy of human rights and second more or less like "barbarians" - have not only characterized the international political and cultural debate,

but, as a sort of terrible prophecy, they appeared as the dramatic announcement of what would later be

concretely verified. This at least in appearance. In reality, The Clash of Civilizations has become the banner

behind which most of the right-wing cultures of the West have redefined their identity. From the doctrine

neoconservative who landed in the White House since the first election of George W. Bush to lead the United States in 2000, to the many champions of Western identity who have appeared in recent years in Europe, from Orfana Fallaci to Pym Fortuyn,

To cite two examples, everyone seems to have embraced Huntington's words. Thus, as Mondher points out Kilani, Professor of Cultural Atropology at the University of Lausanne, in Nothing will be the same again (Medusa, 2002):

“There are many Western commentators who, after 9/11, have been keen to remember the Western origin

rights, thus helping (...) to support the self-fulfilling prophecy of Huntington's thesis on

"clash of civilizations". A thesis that, as is known, has the particularity of exchanging the consequence (conflicts and

contradictions resulting from historical and conjunctural relations of power) with the cause (an irreducibility of values ​​between

the "Christian West" and the "Arab-Muslim world") ».

rights, thus helping (...) to support the self-fulfilling prophecy of Huntington's thesis on

"clash of civilizations". A thesis that, as is known, has the particularity of exchanging the consequence (conflicts and contradictions resulting from historical and conjunctural relations of power) with the cause (an irreducibility of values ​​between the "Christian West" and the "Arab-Muslim world") ».

 

The theses of Huntington, a conservative close but not tout court comparable to the American neocon environment, have thus ended up taking on the meaning of a way out from the right in the face of the crisis of the nation-state and the advent of the global era.

 «My hypothesis - explained the author of The Clash of Civilizations - is that the source of conflict
fundamental in the world we live in will be substantially neither ideological nor economic. The great divisions of humanity will be linked to culture (...) The most important conflicts will take place between groups of different civilizations ».

«This is because - added Huntington - in the post-Cold War world, culture is a force at the same time
disintegrating and aggregating. Populations divided by ideology but culturally homogeneous come to unify, like the two Germanys have made (...) Societies united by ideology or historical circumstances but belonging to different ones

On the other hand, civilizations end up crumbling, as happened to the Soviet Union ».

 

The rebirth of identity, the communitarian tendencies, "God's revenge" - as Huntington himself defined the overbearing return of religion to politics and the public sphere of many societies - rather than being presented as many possible drifts assumed by humanity in a condition of crisis, they became "the answer" to transformations introduced by globalization. To the point that the Harvard political scientist was already announcing

at the time those that would have been the themes of his subsequent reflections, collected in 2004 in La nuova America. 

The challenges of multicultural society (Garzanti, 2005), a violent manifesto against the US melting pot model in particular against the emergence of the presence of "Latin" immigrants in the US.

 «Western culture - it could  read in The Clash of Civilizations - is threatened by groups operating within Western societies themselves. Of these threats consists of immigrants from other civilizations who refuse assimilation and continue to

practice and propagate the values, customs and cultures of their own societies of origin. This phenomenon prevails above all among Muslims in Europe, who are, however, a small minority, but are also present, to a lesser extent, among the
 Hispanics from the United States, who are a very large minority ».

 

The "civilizations" placed by Huntington at the center of his reflection therefore represent definite, stable and connoted according to almost "ethnic" criteria, to the point that the frontier that he himself runs between Westerners and Muslims then know his double within every society between "natives" and "foreigners".

 «The political scientist of Harvard - explains Annamaria Rivera, ethnologist at the University of Bari and author of La guerra dei symbols (Dedalo, 2005) - proposes, through totalizing notions such as that of civilization, a configuration of international power relations based on rigid cultural-religious divisions. In the "bad anthropology" of
Huntington, "civilizations" are seen as compact, autonomous, irreducible, potentially or actually hostile universes to one another; the relations of the so-called West with other areas, countries and cultures are represented in terms of the opposition between the West and the Rest ».


 They are "closed worlds", impenetrable, those that, according to Huntington, are destined to cross only for the inevitable clash. In this context, one can read again in The Clash of Civilizations, “the real problem for the West is not the Islamic fundamentalism, but Islam as such, a different civilization whose populations are convinced of superiority of their own culture and obsessed with the little power they have. The problem of Islam is not there CIA or the US Department of Defense, but the West (...) These are the basic ingredients that feed  the conflict between Islam and the West ”. Therefore, as the Afro-British sociologist Paul Gilroy suggests in his After
 the empire (Meltemi, 2006) "old colonial issues come back into play when geopolitical conflicts are declined like a battle between homogeneous civilizations ». Gilroy compares Huntington's book to the Essay on the inequality of races published in the mid-nineteenth century by the count de Gobineau and considered as the founding text of racism
modern. «Despite the many differences - explains the sociologist -, both authors share the concern

.... for the dynamics of mutual repulsion of civilizations and the disastrous consequences of the attempts at crossing. Gobineau

..... identified the mortal danger to civilizations in any deviation from the "homogeneity necessary for their life" (...)

Huntington specifies the same type of problem, geopolitical and scientific-racial, in aphoristic form, in the idiom contemporary of multiculturalism and globality ".



 

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