Retributive Justice and Avenues of Post-Nuclear Healing

One of the most compelling issues that I have been wrestling with during the course of this class is the idea that states and perpetrators of violence must pay for their actions. Bombings by the United States are often justified as appropriate retribution for acts of violence committed against America. This policy is not simply enacted on the international front either. The most common system of domestic justice within the United States involves jail time and (in certain states) capital punishment. Especially after reading Ceremony, I have been thinking about the extremely damaging cycle of violence that is embedded in even our calls for justice which frame crime, punishment and justice in ways that alienate the perpetrator and simply pass on harm to another subject. How then, do we go about handling atrocities and making reparations for them without continuing their cycles of violence and creating more and more injustice?

 The link which I have provided below contains an interview of Marshall Rosenberg, a psychologist who advocates a form of conflict resolution he calls Nonviolent Communication (NVC) as an alternative to a judicial and rehabilitation system focused solely on violent ideas of punishment and forced rehabilitation. Rosenberg outlines four steps to NVC: observing what is happening in a given

situation; identifying what one is feeling, identifying what one is needing; and then making a request for what one would like to see occur. These steps are used largely in individual treatment and so have their limitations and drawbacks, especially when considering reparations due for large scale atrocities such as wartime bombing and ethnic cleansing or genocide. However, the idea behind NVC of restorative rather than retributive justice ring very powerfully especially in novels such as Ceremony where Tayo's path to healing involves stepping away from the cycle violence and alienation present in white America and pursuing a new course which is meant to allow whiteness into the world narrative that it has been so alienated from.

http://people.ucsc.edu/~chlking/Transformative%20Action%20Winter%20%2711/COURSE%20READINGS/Class%208/Beyond%20Good%20and%20Evil.pdf