‘Decolonization Justice’

                            BY MICHAEL BEVAQUA

Justice in the best sense is not the punishing of someone who has violated or broken a law. It is instead a process to provide some reparation or compensation for something of which there can be no certain equivalence. How does one compensate those who were enslaved for centuries? How does one compensate people who were colonized and their cultures brutalized for centuries? How does one compensate those who were the victims of discrimination, genocide and legalized abuse?

IF WE lived in a world where truth and justice mattered, then the issue of whether a self-determination plebiscite for Guam violates the U.S. Constitution would be irrelevant. As a decolonization plebiscite, it should obviously not be bound by the rules of the colonizer, since that would be a blatantly colonial act. So if someone brought this up, we should ideally stare blankly at that person’s silly question.

But, we don't live in such a world. We live in a world where power dominates and truth and justice generally only come into play when it matches the interests of those with great power. As such, we must have the absurd discussion about whether taking an act of self-determination would violate the U.S. Constitution. On its merits, this is ridiculous; imagine America in their struggle for decolonization accepting The Crown’s framework for how to do it.

It is a tricky conversation and one which is only “fair and balanced” in the Fox News sense. U.S. law is not built around the interests of justice in any way which might challenge the rights of the U.S. itself, today or in the past. Even when things are recognized to have been unjust or wrong, the U.S., like most countries, does not allow for much restitution to take place.

Justice in the best sense is not the punishing of someone who has violated or broken a law. It is instead a process to provide some reparation or compensation for something of which there can be no certain equivalence. How does one compensate those who were enslaved for centuries? How does one compensate people who were colonized and their cultures brutalized for centuries? How does one compensate those who were the victims of discrimination, genocide and legalized abuse?

In most societies, the answer is simple. At some point, when it no longer becomes possible or profitable to oppress a people, you let them go and you relax the rules that held them down. Once you do that, you try to do close to nothing to mention what happened before or compensate them for the terrifyingly inhumane ways they might have been treated for long periods of time. In fact, when the issue comes up – which might eventually turn into some claim that those who have been wronged should receive some sort of justice – you have to limit the ways in which they can receive it. You have to use the law to minimize it and to take away any reasonable avenues they might have to demand that something be done about the way they were treated before.

A case in point is the very famous Apology Resolution that the Native Hawaiians received from the U.S. government under President Clinton. Whether the U.S. assisted in overthrowing the Hawaiian Kingdom is not under dispute. It has been proven beyond a doubt that the U.S. assisted in stealing Hawai'i; the U.S. Congress investigated this issue itself and found U.S. private citizens and government employees overthrew a sovereign nation. And rather than working to restore the Hawaiian Kingdom and work for justice, the U.S. conveniently looked the other way and later annexed Hawai’i.

The Apology was a carefully worded "despensa yu'." The U.S. basically came forward and admitted it had done something terrible, unjust, immoral and illegal. You would think that given this revelation of something so obvious and so odious, it might become the basis for Native Hawaiians getting some restitution or justice for what happened to them a little over a century ago.

You would be wrong. In 2009, the Supreme Court decided that the meat of the Apology Resolution – meaning the preamble where the U.S. government admits to doing bad things – has no legal effect and does not provide the basis for anything. The Supreme Court decided this admission of terrible guilt amounted to only a conciliatory gesture, one meant to make someone feel better, but not actually do anything.

This is why justice, for it to mean anything, requires more than what the person who commits the offense or benefits from the offense is willing to give. It has to take more, or else it does nothing. If you don't give more than you are willing, you risk continuing the cycle of abuse and oppression. You enjoy the privileges of the former oppression, and give those who were oppressed no closure or way of getting some reparations for how they were treated. Rather than deal with and attempt to fix the disgusting history of what has taken place in Guam, Hawai’i or elsewhere, it merely buries it deeper and deeper, hoping that at one point, no one will remember the trauma of what was lost beneath the layers of lies.