Justice

 

Is there such a thing? One atheistic friend confided, “Since we do not have freewill, we couldn’t have acted otherwise, and this insight has helped me to deal with my guilt and shame.”

In essence, he was saying that he cannot be truly held responsible for rape or of breaking his wife’s arm.

Others who have adopted a cultural Marxist perspective deny justice in another way. The insist that what we call “justice” is no more than a tool that the white ruling class has invented to maintain control and to protect their own interests. Consequently, there is no moral truth, no right and wrong. Everything is just an exercise of power of the oppressing white elite.

It should be no surprise that since Marxism has reduced everything to the exercise of power, which Marxists have no reservations about using to secure their goals even as they justify it as the pursuit of “justice.” Just look at their placard, “No justice, no peace!” However, for them, “justice” is a matter of destroying the present system. Think “Cancel Culture.”

Our present administration seems to be relying on the Marxist playbook. From this POV, our prisoners are not the guilty but the oppressed. Consequently:

•    President Biden on Monday will commute the sentences of nearly all of the 40 murderers on the federal government’s death row, in another move to thwart President-elect Donald Trump’s stated goals. Under Mr. Biden’s order 37 of the 40 men on federal death row — all of whom had been convicted of murder — would have their sentences reduced to life imprisonment without parole.

•    On Dec. 12, the outgoing president commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people, including a woman who killed two of her ex-husbands and another lover; a woman who stole $54 million from a small town in Illinois; and a Pennsylvania judge who sentenced minors to harsh prison sentences for petty crimes in exchange for kickbacks from the prison operators. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/dec/23/joe-biden-commutes-sentences-37-murderers-death-ro/?fbclid=IwY2xjawHff0tleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHT-7X5egS5mCBR8SmPoVHxER0255o52mTwxgucTLlZ_PxgfKYQc42j2w4A_aem_W1R6yMI0jl6DGCgRBZdPhw

A concern for justice and the welfare of the innocent victims and for the safety of those who had testified against their perpetrators should have required Biden to keep them interned. It should have also caused him to bar the entry of many criminals into this nation. Aren’t our elected officials bound to protect to innocent against the guilty! Not if he believes that the guilty are the white oppressors who are allegedly trying to keep down the oppressed colored minorities and sexual non-conformists!

Unfortunately, those with this POV had largely gained control of the centers of influence. Of course, Marxist Critical Race Theory (CRT) has long been in the making. Derrick Bell argued in his article about Brown v. Board of Education [1954, “Segregation Unanimously Rejected”] that critical race theory asserts that the majority will only secure civil rights for minorities when it serves the majority’s self-interest. When whites adopt black children, they are accused of doing so to prove that they aren’t racist—no consideration of virtue.

This is a good example of Marxist deconstruction of the Christian West. According to CRT, any good that comes out of the West “serves the majority’s self-interest.” No wonder many college students want to see the destruction of the West. However, black scholar, Voddie Baucham, has written, “According to CRT, everything is merely a struggle for power.”  He provides an accurate portrait of CRT’s strategy to vilify the “oppressors”:

•    “Systemic racism is the cause of disparities. If you doubt that, it is because you are a racist who wants to protect your power and keep those disparities in place. This has to be true because, if you were not racist, you would know that the cause of disparities is… racism.” (Fault Lines)

Under CRT, Justice is no longer about  individual guilt or innocence. A CRT founder, Derrick Bell, wrote, "The whole liberal worldview of private rights and public sovereignty mediated by the rule of law needed to be exploded." https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2021/06/23/the-movement-against-critical-race-theory-is-deeply-necessary-n2591397

Ibram X. Kendi, the author of the best-seller, How to Be an Anti-Racist, has ironically written that: “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Only power speaks. CRT will resort to violence and coercion. Even the cultural Marxist of the Frankfort School, Max Horkheimer, had written “It is not economics that creates oppression but rather the nuclear family, traditional institutions, and concepts of race, gender and sexual identity. These are the chains of tyranny which must be broken by revolution.”

Instead, the real oppressors are one’s own conscience, whose accusations of guilt are projected on those who disagree. Consequently, It is easy for them to conclude that their opponents are the oppressors.

What has happened to our concept of justice? Under CRT, justice is no longer a matter of the guilt and innocence of the individual but one’s group identity. The only ones who are safe are those who are deemed to have the right identity or affiliation. Any opponents are to be destroyed. After all, they are the oppressors who have kept the oppressed in bondage.

Indeed, our nation had been guilty of systemic oppression. However, there is little recognition and appreciation that the situation is now radically different. Shelby Steele is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. In White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, Steele argues that the black community now suffers more through paternalistic programs and the victimization narrative than from their Jim Crow legacy:

•    What I've encountered in my life, most often in the white world, is good will, is people have who have wanted to help me. When I was younger and starting a career, people who mentored me, who really felt it was important to give me the best opportunity to pursue my dreams. And my sense is that that's really been an experience for most blacks who have tried to venture out and develop themselves…

•    One of the most remarkable things in all of human history is the degree of moral evolution, that white Americans have made from the mid-60s to this day. No group of people in history have morally evolved away from a social evil that quickly and to that degree in this sort of short span of time. And very often, in our calculations in thinking about race, we don't give whites credit for that.