This paper explores the relationship between truth commissions and larger questions of truth and justice and of memory and forgetting.
Written in 2004; 2,870 words; 7 sources; MLA; $ 85.95
Paper Summary:
This paper explains that "truth commissions" are official governmental bodies designed to determine what occurred under previous governmental regimes, and by exposing the truth, often about violence used by the government against its people, to bring about a sense of closure and healing to those who were harmed. The author points out that, sometimes, truth commissions have been effective in bringing about criminal prosecution to those who are found guilty of crimes, but more often, they have existed simply to air the truth, on the principle that acknowledging the truth is, in and of itself, a powerful tool for a society attempting to establish or re-establish the rule of law and an insistence on justice that is available to each person. The paper relates that the promise of the truth commission is the promise of distributive justice, a philosophy based on the idea of a strict or radical equality, which is simply the idea that every person in a society should have the same level of treatment.
From the Paper:
"The answer to this depends almost entirely upon one's own beliefs about the nature of governance and of human rights. If one were fortunate to believe in the divine right of monarchs, then one argues that it is the monarch alone or the modern equivalent, the military dictator ? guided by God ? who has both the wisdom and the power to institute laws. Those on the progressive left end of the political spectrum argue that only the most democratic institutions possess the wisdom and the right to make decisions for the group as a whole. But as good as this sounds, Maier (2002) reminds us that is is not this simple when trying to bridge the differences between "hot" and "cold" memories and to bring together a population in which most are innocent and a few are horribly guilty but many are not quite guilty but certainly not entirely innocent."
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