{"id":8270,"date":"2019-10-14T12:39:05","date_gmt":"2019-10-14T12:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/?p=8270"},"modified":"2023-05-18T11:57:02","modified_gmt":"2023-05-18T11:57:02","slug":"odgovornost-za-proslost-individualna-i-kolektivna-odgovornost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/en\/odgovornost-za-proslost-individualna-i-kolektivna-odgovornost\/","title":{"rendered":"Responsibility for the past, individual and collective responsibility"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Within the framework of the RECOM project in Slovenia \u201cI Respond to the Forgotten Voices\u201d<\/em>, Prof Dr Svetlana Slap\u0161ak gave several lectures on collective and individual responsibility for the past in June, September and October. We would like to present to you a part of the lecture aired on Flight Control<\/em>, radio show in the Serbian language on Radio \u0160tudent.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collective responsibility<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The basic change happened after the 18th<\/sup> century when ethical questions related to groups and not only\nindividuals were posed. The best example of how the French Encyclopedists\n(Encyclop\u00e9distes) contemplated on that is Voltaire<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s <\/em>\u201c<\/em>Treatise on Tolerance<\/em>\u201d<\/em>.\nIt is about a court hearing from a trial which ended in pronouncing a death\nsentence and happened about a century before the Treatise. A protestant in a\nsmall French town was accused and tried of many crimes he hadn\u2019t\ncommitted. Both his and his family\u2019s testimony were rejected and he was\nexecuted. Voltaire proves that he was killed only because of the intolerance\ntowards the group of protestants and not himself as an individual. It is an\nexcellent treatise, which puts the responsibility of a group into the\nforeground for the first time – one group towards the other group: the group of\ncriminals towards the group of the innocent. Voltaire debunks\nthis binary position and shows these\nstereotypes about the others, about someone who is different, someone all crimes can\nbe attributed to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is a part of his criticism of the Church and Christianity and\nit ends with an interesting thesis: he feels responsible because he lives in\nthe same country and in the same tradition… He speaks about his responsibility for this event that occurred\na century and a half ago. This standpoint is very important and his thesis on\ntolerance is still the basis of contemplation on collective responsibility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The legal term of collective responsibility<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The legal term of collective responsibility in philosophy and\nsociology developed in the 20th<\/sup> century, although some theoreticians had already discussed in the second half of the\n19th<\/sup> century, e.g. Durkheim and Max Weber. Even though they were not\nMarxists and they didn\u2019t agree\nwith Marx, they started contemplating the\nresponsibility of certain classes, the working class- the exploited, the\nexploiting class, the colonizing class, the bureaucratic class and the like,\nwhich was largely based on Marx\u2019s studies on classes. Each of these\ngroups has its own symbolic collective responsibility which can relate to\nfunctioning within the state, outside the state in the event of war or simply\nto functioning among different groups, some of which have the power and some\ndon\u2019t. These deliberations were better defined in Marx\u2019s\nstudies, where the responsibility of the capital and its holders on one hand and the responsibility of the proletariat both\nfor their own destiny and for the attitude towards the capitalists on the\nother, are clearly placed. In fact, the responsibility of the proletariat towards themselves is one of the key ideas which should\nlead to revolution. Marx specifically\nproves that the proletariat should reach the point\nof collective consciousness which leads to revolution. He estimated that such a\nrevolution would happen in some of the industrially developed countries but\nsomething else happened instead. The\ncollective consciousness of the proletariat awoke in a different place and\nunder different circumstances.\nNo matter how we interpret this, all of those concepts are concepts\nof collective responsibility related to the position of a class and in\nsocieties which acknowledge the concept of partial equality. Therefore, not\nfull equality, but partial equality in parliamentary systems or in the\nconstitutional monarchies in Europe. In such a mixed system, collective\nresponsibility especially clearly appears in the parliamentary life, life of\nthe society, the dissolution of government, the ideas of equality, the\nbureaucracy, the laws, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the First and Second World Wars, the issue of collective\nresponsibility took on a completely different interpretation, shapes and\ncontext. Collective responsibility in the contemporary sense appears only with\nthe defining of human rights in the first half of the 20th century and\nespecially in the Resolutions, Decisions and Charters of the United Nations after the\nSecond World War. Thus nowadays we can talk\nabout different levels and connotations of collective responsibility\nwhich apply more or less to all the\nexisting great contemplations in the society on one hand, and in feminism,\ntheories of the Other, in\nmultiple identities and especially in the cases of war crimes. This is the field where collective responsibility is especially clearly\nshown. It is actually shown not as a valid criterion but, on the contrary, as\nan area of criticism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regarding the rights, collective responsibility is related to the\nlegal status of a subject: multiple subject, group subject and collective\nsubject. These connotations are interrelated but they can by no means be\nreduced to one another. The result of legal contemplations on collective\nresponsibility is in fact quite insufficient.\nIt comes down to a merely symbolic value of collective\nresponsibility which has no legal merit, no sanctions apply to it and which must have an extremely cautious\nattitude towards the collective and take special notice of completely\nseparating each legal subject from the collective. This results in a\npsychological situation we all know: we are all dissatisfied when war criminals\nare on trial. And it cannot be any different! Unfortunately, the symbolic\nstatus of collective responsibility always appeals to something modern law cannot take into consideration, and that is retaliation. When we watch the trial\nof a war criminal who had given the order to kill eight thousand Muslims in\nSrebrenica, when we listen to their excuses, the tolerance of the Court to\ntheir motives and when we get the final verdict that Karad\u017ei\u0107 is not guilty for what\nhappened in the Eastern Bosnia and Vi\u0161egrad and\nit is widely known that he had given the orders to kill people in most\nhorrendous ways, we have a feeling of, not only uneasiness, but injustice. The\nrationale behind the War Tribunal is to completely separate collective\nresponsibility which is symbolic and always leans towards vengefulness and to\nonly try the legal subject. And that is sometimes impossible to prove. So many\nwell-known war criminals have been released in the final stage of the Hague Tribunal\nand it is widely known what they had done. Some of the explanations of the\nHague Tribunal are unbearable for the ones who have any knowledge of the\nsituation, and even more so for the\nvictims. But they show that the Tribunal and its actions aim to be clearly\nseparated from any contemplation on collective responsibility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Responsibility for the written\/spoken\nword<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collective responsibility is only\nnarratively present in the court of law, but it has no value. There is no way\nof pronouncing a collective verdict. And that was the first valuable lesson\nlearnt from the trials in Germany after the Second World War. The standard set\nonly at the Nuremberg trials with a very important element which puts\ncollective responsibility into a specific, more or less closed corner was the\nresponsibility for the written\/spoken word. The key question is if the word\nproduces action. When I dealt with the issue of free speech, there was no doubt\nfor me that words didn\u2019t cause actions. This was the basis of all our defences of\nvarious artists who were persecuted by the government for something they wrote,\nperformed or painted\u2026 And we very often used the new theory of authorship,\nintroduced by Umberto Eco in the end of the 1960s. That is the basis of modern\nliterary poetics. The author doesn\u2019t have complete control over his\nliterary work, that is, he\/she is not the owner of its interpretation, but the\ninterpretation is determined by the reading. In the reception theory introduced\nby the Germans, literary work is studied based on the reading and the reader.\nThat is the third component of a literary work: text- author- reader. The\nreaders become important and they determine the reception of a literary work.\nIt made sense in terms of totalitarian socialism, so that even certain judges\nstarted repeating that the author wasn\u2019t accountable for his\/her text. That\nstandpoint came from the Russian formalism, French structuralism and generally\nfrom all the theories that started to question authorship. Umberto Eco<\/em>\nwrote a book called Opera aperta (The Open Work)<\/em>, where the reader can write in, input his\/her things. It shifted\nthe interpretation of a literary work and posed a new question about what the\ntext actually meant and who wrote it. The link between word and action is\nespecially denied. That phase was successful in a specific legal system. The\nsystem of trials for verbal offense disintegrated by itself in Yugoslavia,\nsometime in the third year after Tito’s death. That kind of defence in a\ntotalitarian regime was a completely unexpected result and the West couldn\u2019t understand what we were doing with their theories. But the\noppressed Soviet authors understood it quite well. The understanding based on\nthe interpretation of text and literature was very important for legal concepts\nand the concepts of human rights. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Marrakesh Declaration on Human\nRights<\/em> <\/em>(<\/em>Global Compact\nfor Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration)<\/em> clearly repeats what\nis written in the UN Charter: the\ninherent dignity, equal and inalienable rights of all human beings, one of which is the right to migration and there\nis no difference between economic and other migrants. Every person has a right\nto go\nanywhere he\/she wants and to live where he\/she\nwants. It is absolutely irrelevant whether migration was caused by war or economic\nreasons. The paradox is that the capitalistic system which is based on\nself-interest, on an unrestricted desire for the acquisition of wealth,\ndisapproves of the most indigent people for coming there for economic reasons. When one is able to see that,\nit is perfectly clear that the\nbasic reason is racism and not economic scare. And\nthen\na newly shaped question of collective and\ncollective responsibility is posed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Nuremberg trials and\nearlier, it was argued that a registered and\nconfirmed hate word was a crime and it was punishable by law because it\nindirectly caused crime. There was no doubt that hate words produced physical effects of hate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The <\/strong>purpose<\/strong> of reconciliation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\npurpose of reconciliation is to use the symbolic value of collective\nresponsibility for a good cause, mutual\nreconciliation. RECOM has collected nearly a million signatures for mutual\nreconciliation of people in the region of Yugoslavia and those people made a\ncommitment and are legally responsible if they break that commitment. Former soldiers reconcile easiest\nand fastest, they don’t have problems like the others. The media don’t talk\nabout an entire series of local soldiers\u2019 associations of Albanians and Serbs\nwho have individually and collectively made peace and who call one another \u201cbrother\u201d. They know full well\nwhat they went through and there is a possibility that some of them are\ncalculating on shorter sentences should it come to trial. But they\u2019ve made a commitment. Reconciliation is\nbased on texts which are partly symbolic and partly must be based on concrete\nevidence, on truth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\nshould certainly contemplate the methods for the prevention of crimes based on\nfostering collective responsibility. Collective responsibility doesn\u2019t have to be a\nconsequence of something, but a basis for something that will be applied so\nthat certain positive results would be produced in the society. And this\nproduction of positive results, reconciliation and the like is where collective\nresponsibility is imaginary, narratively skilfully executed without relying on\nthis or that case, not even on truth. It is only necessary for the text to be\ngood and to persuade people that there is no reason to accuse or attack one another\nand the like. Paradoxically, the very fluidity and impreciseness of collective\nresponsibility in the law, has a clear and useful application in social\nbehaviour. When we know about the stereotypes and facts, we have two basic\ntools for the application of collective responsibility as a powerful instrument. Thus, collective responsibility is\npractically reduced to political correctness, keeping to the facts, adherence to (at\nleast) recent history and socially useful usage of stereotypes. Political correctness\nis a product of a policy called positive segregation or affirmative action,\nwhich started in the USA and England in the end of the 1970s and was based on\nthe principle that those groups who had suffered more injustice by the majority\nin the recent past, had more rights than the others. We have once again come to\nthe point where freedom of speech is to a great extent connected to social\naction in relation to collective responsibility. Freedom of speech in a society\nwhich is based on freedom of speech must be strictly controlled. Thus we come\nto the essence of the propaganda study in America after\nthe Second World War when they published Goebbels\u2019 private letters. The\npropaganda, that is hate speech, causes material consequences, psychological disorders, the effect of brutalization of\nsociety, physical assaults on individuals or on an entire group- the entire\nseries of phenomena which directly lead to war. Before that, they cause serious\npsychological disorders in citizens, aberrations in social behaviour, they\nproduce injustice, destroy the ability to think and, worst of all, destroy\ncritical thought. The propaganda only serves to blind the citizens, to take\ntheir time, to scare them so they couldn\u2019t think critically. Collective\nresponsibility is vitally\nconnected to NGO action in Anglo-American countries which had amazing social\nresults (e.g. Angela Davis was reinstated to her position at the University).\nPolitical correctness and consent to non-fulfilment of justice is crucial to\nunderstanding collective responsibility as a constant source of good stories\nwhich can be used to make the citizens resilient to hate speech. It is, of\ncourse, a utopian assumption unless the state takes administrative, legal and\nbureaucratic actions which must signify closure of the source of hate speech.    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Within the framework of the RECOM project in Slovenia \u201cI Respond to the Forgotten Voices\u201d, Prof Dr Svetlana Slap\u0161ak gave several lectures on collective and \u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[223,221],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lectures","category-rekom-in-slovenia"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["sl","sr","en"],"languages":{"sl":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"sr":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10305,"href":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8270\/revisions\/10305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dkis.si\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}