Country Of My Skull

Ryan Evans

5/12/2007

CHID 390

Ethics used to be what should be but that doesn’t work in society for a society can not complete agree on what the perfect solution or what the perfect form or ideal situation would be. Instead the shift of ethics is a state of what can be. The potentiality of the use of power in the structure of a society. Country of My Skull really develops this point when the commissions try to decide how to handle the terror in South Africa and the racial inequalities. Since there are different viewpoints and different standards of values of the ideal state the situation should not be based on an unrealistic unobtainable solution

“The Nuremburg and Tokyo trials could work the way they did only because the guilty lost their political power and their guns. Their defeat was complete and the conquerors need only to wrestle with their own sense of justice. But in Chile, as in South Africa, the overthrown regime is part of the new government and still has enough power to obstruct the inquests into any abuses or to start a new a civil war.”(31)

The position of power is in the hands of the government in order to try to control and restrain the violence of a revolution. When a single group holds a great amount of power but suddenly losses that power and becomes subjected by another group, the reversal causes a mixed definition of their status causing confusion. An example of this is the NAZI party between the late thirties to 1945 when the power was sucked from not only members of NAZI party who were actually responsible for the terror and violence of the holocaust but of all Germans. Sour resentment has come from the families of the key NAZI officials as they move from moving to a stance of heroics to being demonized. This brings up the question of what does it take to bring about justice. “It will sometimes be necessary to choose between truth and justice. We should choose truth, he says. Truth does not bring back the dead, but releases them from silence. A community should not wipe out a part of its past, because it leaves a vacuum that will fill by lies and contradictory, confusing accounts of what happened.” (32) In what way can death, murder, and terror be reconciled. The state can sometimes punish the people responsible; the state can give support to the families of the victims; the state can increase its police force to prevent from more incidents in the future. The state can do all this but the state can never change history or bring the victim back from the dead.

Inequalities in south Africa exist in such a way that it seems that whites are immune to attack for the structure of power in that society remains unbalanced

“No one can destroy whites-they have survival in their bones. But for us, if we don’t stand together no matter what, we’ll be wiped out.” (16)

Black Consciousness is addressed by Krog a lot in chapter 2. The idea that there is a true social inequalities between blacks and whites that exist in society and people are made aware of them.

“The torture of Yengeni continues, with some of us regarding him as a traitor to the case, a sell out, a cheat and, in some stupid twist of faith and fate, his torturer becomes the hero, the revealer, the brave man who informed us about it all.” (p.97)

The use of torture can seem to be an excessive use of power in correctional or investigative based part of society. It is used to disclose information that is useful to the society but sympathy usually is given to the victim. In the case that Krog presents, the sympathy is the opposite of what the mentality of siding with the victim. The torturer is seen as hero because he is upholding the system and withholding and inscribing power over the subjects within the society. By the means of using torture he is in way safeguarding the society by finding out information that can be used to in a sense save lives or to upkeep the system of control keeping the power safely in the hands of the police and society even if the methods may seem unjust or unclean. Torture is stigmatized as a non western method but this is far from the truth. The French practiced torture in Algeria and the United States practices unfair practices in Guantanamo. Even though it is kept quiet and secret it still remains a process that is used to uphold the power by physically forcing people to betray their country men in order to serve the agenda of the state which wishes to keep over the power.

“In all the stories, a landscape is created where the powerful are struggling with the powerless, the armed with the defenseless, and the landscape is filled with misunderstanding” (111). It is interesting here that the opposites are matched up. Who is to decide what makes a person powerful and to what extent does that power compare. Truth holds different weight to different people. How can one measure the level of terror when it all results in death. For some it depends on who is committing the acts and the way they are carried out. Dealing with death and atrocities can be tough and hard to compensate for because there is no way someone can bring a victim back from the dead. Terror also disrupts a societies basic needs of feeling safe. Health and safety are psychological needs on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

“The truth is validated by the majority, they say. Or you bring your own version of the truth to the merciless arena of the past-only in this way does the past become thinkable, the world become habitable” (112). The past is remembered and accepted true only through what is agreed upon by the majority but yet the horrors that happen known by the few are glazed over and not recognized. These events still exist they still truly happened but the power and the emphasis of them happening has been distorted in a way which needed to be illuminated and made known once again by society.