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reflection

Does Justice Always Lead to Peace?

Part 1. Justice Alone Cannot Create Peace
by Dennis Sansom

ditors note: This article is the first in a two-part series.

Watch in the next issue of Baptist Peacemaker for the
conclusion, Does Justice Always Lead to Peace? Part 2. The
Laws of Violence and the Ethic of Forgiveness, featuring the
ideas of French philosopher Jacque Ellul and Jewish political
theorist Hannah Arendt.

The Received Wisdom: Justice Leads to Peace

e commonly hear that there can be no peace without

justice, implying that if we have justice, we will have
peace.

The thinking is that many sorrows and crimes of conflict
and violence require a rectification of losses and demand
a settling of political, economical and social debtsand a
satisfaction to the victims of oppression and exploitation.
The thinking continues that merely the cessation of
conflict and violence is not enough to establish authentic
peace. Justice must establish peace, so that the unjust
aggressors do not avoid their rightful punishment. The
victim needs to gain strength and respect. Thus, we must
first seek justice and then secure peace.

This view is so widely held that I call it the Received
Wisdom, and I think it is flawed. It relies too uncritically
on the belief that the concept of justice is self-evident.

A study of the history of philosophy, political theory
and law does not find a consensus on justice, and, frankly,
the real political issue is whose justice are we talking
about?

If it were possible to discern justices universal essence,
then the task of establishing peace based on it would be
much easier, and probably we would have done so by now.
Though we have not found a consensus, we keep
seeking a concept of justice, knowing that it represents a
political ideal to which we should seek.

But we must also acknowledge that in terms of actual
historical, social experience the notion of justice bends to
individual and group desires for political power, malleable
as a wax nose.
My argument is this: the Received Wisdom is not
sufficient to assure peace, because the actual use of justice
falls short in the real social, political realities of its intention
and pretension.

I intend to show that, to gain peace, we need more than
the concept of justice, that justice alone is not enough to
assure it. The pursuit of peace needs an additional ethical
commitment.

Baptist Peacemaker

July-September 2013

The Principle of Liberating Violence

uring the Algerian War for Independence in the 1950s,

a French Protestant Missionary, Eugene Casalis, sided
with the Algerians against the French and believed that the
violence they used against their colonial oppressor was
justified. He argued that there are two kinds of violence
that which liberates and that which enslaves. The French

My argument is this: the Received

Wisdom is not sufficient to assure
peace, because the actual use
of justice falls short in the real
social, political realities of its
intention and pretension.
had used violence to enslave the Algerians, and now the
Algerians would use violence to liberate themselves from
the unjust domination of the French.
For the oppressed victims to restore their homes,
native institutions and self-respect, they would need to
use liberating violence against the French. The logic of this
justification is that only violence can end violence, and that
the only way to end violence is with justified, liberating
violence.

It is understandable why people adopt this principle.
History is filled with horrible stories of oppression and
dominance, and the oppressed long to be free of the yokes
of bondage. We also know that violence is ubiquitous, and
that we are too often tragically left with the use of violence
as the only way to respond to the aggressor. Thus, we need
a way to justify our reactions against the unjust yokes of
dominance, and Casalis doctrine of liberating violence
seems to offer us a guiding principle.

However, as a justifying principle, it has a serious flaw.
It is too vague in its application. If the justification of the
use of violence is to liberate the oppressed, then any use
of violence would be just. There is no necessary reason to
restrain the violence. The oppressed do not need to appeal
to a higher ethical cause than their own liberation from the
oppressors. Their justification hence becomes absolutistic
and infallible.

continued on page 18

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reflection
Consequently, this view of justice is easily perverted
from its original intention to make a clear separation of the
unjust from the just. Though we can find many illustrations
of the misuse of liberating violence, there is none greater
than the French writer Jean-Paul Sartres justification of
the Stalinist purges and Gulag (forced-labor) camps in the
Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century.
Sartre was an avid communist and supporter of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) policies against

Sartre saw clearly what his justification of liberating
violence meansthe only way to heal the injustices of the
history of oppression is by killing the oppressors. Justice is
not merely the restoration of the land, homes and dignity
of the oppressed.

It is vengeance against the imperial forces and, until

vengeance has its sway, history is left unhealed. To bring
society closer to the just relationships of individuals to
individuals and classes to classes, Stalins purges and Gulag
campus were necessary, for they would heal the wound
caused by the capitalist oppressors.

The healing here is not just freedom from oppression,
for the Marxism of Stalin and Sartre maintained that, as
long as the dominant class exists, it would always oppress
the weaker class.

The healing is the satisfaction of vengeance keenly felt
and harbored by the victims, who come to know that they
do not need a transcendent solution to their plight, that they
do not need an amicable coexistence with the oppressive
class, that they do not need a private serenity of mind to
handle the tortures and death. They need blood, and only
then will healing come. Achilles lance both kills the enemy
and heals the killer.

It is estimated that Stalin was directly responsible for
the death of 20 million people within the USSR and its
satellites. Of course, many of Stalins decisions, which led to
the death of millions, were petty and irrationally paranoid,
butand this is the critical point to recognize. Sartres
principle does not recognize these distinctions, and there
is a good reason why it does not.

Once he accepts the justification of liberating violence,
the only distinction left is that between the oppressors and
oppressed. If killing members of the oppressed is deemed
necessary to kill eventually the oppressor, then it is justified.

This shows the inherent flaw of Casalis principle of
liberating violenceit cannot recognize when it becomes
unjust.

If Stalins purges can possibly be justified as healing
acts of freeing the oppressed, then the world and its
immense complexity have been reduced to a simple and allcomprehensive distinctionthe slaves and the masters
and with this supreme distinction, it is impossible for the
slave to become as unjust as the master.

However, when it is possible for the oppressed to justify
killing 20 million people who are not directly the oppressors
to eventually eliminate the oppressors, the notion of justice
has become so muddled and self-serving that it becomes
double-speak and full of sound and fury.

Though Stalin and Sartre are extreme examples of the
application of justice as liberating violence, they also show
the inherent logic of such a notion of justice. If justice is the
means of defeating the oppressor, then any form and any
amount of violence is justified.
Dennis Sansom teaches in the Department of Philosophy at
Samford University in Birmingham, AL. Over the past several
years, he has contributed to Baptist Peacemaker a number of
scholarly articles, some of which have received Associated Church
Press awards.

18

July-September 2013

Once [Sartre] accepts the

justification of liberating violence,
the only distinction left is that
between the oppressors and
oppressed. If killing members of
the oppressed is deemed necessary
to kill eventually the oppressor,
then it is justified.
the West, in particular against the United States. He argued
that the arrests, absconding of property and deaths due
to Joseph Stalins policies, as the leader of the USSR from
1922 to 1952, were necessary to continue the march of
justice, to eliminate the causes of economic exploitation by
the capitalist class and to liberate the workers from their
oppressors.

The following shows how thoroughly committed Sartre
was to the notion of liberating violence:
This irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor
the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect
of resentment; it is man recreating himself. The native
cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the
settler through force of arms. For in the first days of the
revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill
two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the
man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead
man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels
a national soil under his foot. We find our humanity on
this side of death and despair; he finds it beyond torture
and death. We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind.
The child of violence, at every moment he draws from it
his humanity. Will we recover? Yes. For violence, like
Achilles lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.

Baptist Peacemaker