#mahatma gandhi murder case

[nsfwmiamiart]

Incoming Text for @deepikapadukone : You are the lawyer of American women now. Watch this trailer:

Hey Deepika!

I want to help you understand your role in Mumbai. You are a lawyer now. You become the most powerful and wealthy lawyer in America, but you are based in Mumbai, get it?

There are so many women seeking to flee from their abusive husbands, and they come to seek your support in Mumbai.

African-American women win the court case against their abusive husbands in Mumbai. Deepika is their lawyer now.

Hispanic women win the court case against their abusive husbands in Mumbai. Deepika is their lawyer now.

Jewish-American women win the court case against their abusive husbands in Mumbai. Deepika is their lawyer now.

White-American women win the court case against their abusive husbands in Mumbai. Deepika is their lawyer now.

Do you see what is happening? You are the most powerful lawyer in America now, but you don't live there; you are based in India.

There are a lot of abusive husbands back in America, and these women are trying to find a way out of this abuse. Guess who will help them? It's Deepika.

You are the most hated woman in America now because you have the audacity to help these abused women. Let that sink in.

That is why you should ask the Indian government to offer you the best security guards in India. You deserve to have the best protection in India.

Also, make sure you never travel to a NATO country. You should wait a few years for things to calm down. They are capable of plotting your murder.

You are now a target just like Mahatma Gandhi back in the 1900s. Just make sure you remember that and think about your security in India.

Deepika Padukone is the female version of Mahatma Gandhi now.

Deepika be like, "Okay, nonviolence mode on! I'm bouncing to Brunei now."😂

Female Mahatma (2.0), funny joke, I know.

My dear Deepika, it is important that you think about your security because you will become a very powerful woman in the future, and your husband Ranveer will be your guardian angel. Make sure you have the best security because they will try to come for you.

If you need a better security team, you can move to Brunei and ask the Indian government to send you there for a better security system.

Here is their IG page: (@bruneiroyalfamily). The Brunei Royal Family will be honored to protect you in Brunei. You should ask them to protect you there.

You should think about your safety. You and Ranveer need a safe haven away from the noise of India, and you could find that safe haven in Brunei. I encourage you to call the Brunei government and explain to them your unique story. They will help you find a safe haven in Brunei.

You have to survive their assassination attempts, and the only way to survive right now is in Brunei.

Narendra Modi will call the Brunei government and ask them personally to offer you protection in Brunei. That way, you will stay away from all this noise in India, and you will give birth in a peaceful and quiet place. You will feel less stress and have a lot of outdoor spaces where there are no paparazzi.

Ranveer and Shah Rukh Khan should help you move to Brunei until you give birth. That way, you will feel safe and get away from all the noise in India.

I hope you will take measures to clean up your home and protect yourself from any intrusive people back in India.

No more spies, no more media, no more intrusion into your private lives.

You will move to Brunei and invite your good friends, actors Chow Yun-Fat and Jackie Chan, to visit you in Brunei.

This is how you feel at peace, and you will enjoy the protection of the Brunei armed forces.

Your safety is my priority, and you should think about moving there with your husband Ranveer.

The end of this conversation.

Your virtual friend and guardian angel,

Angelo

P.S.

Also, check out this new TV series with African-American lawyers. Deepika is just like the actress Emayatzy Corinealdi. She is a lawyer who protects abused women. Here is her IG page: (@emayatzycorinealdi).

Here is the trailer on YouTube:

[tezlivenews]

Gwalior News: हिंदू महासभा ने फिर लगाए गोडसे जिंदाबाद के नारे, मंदिर और ज्ञानशाला के बाद अब शुरू हुई अध्ययन माला

Gwalior News: हिंदू महासभा ने फिर लगाए गोडसे जिंदाबाद के नारे, मंदिर और ज्ञानशाला के बाद अब शुरू हुई अध्ययन माला

ग्वालियरमध्य प्रदेश के ग्वालियर में एक बार फिर राष्ट्रपिता महात्मा गांधी के हत्यारे नाथूराम गोडसे और नारायण आप्टे को लेकर हिंदू महासभा चर्चा में है। गोडसे का मंदिर और ज्ञानशाला के बाद अब गोडसे बयान अध्ययन माला की शुरुआत ग्वालियर में की गई है। खास बात यह कि इसके लिए हरियाणा की अंबाला जेल से मिट्‌टी लाई गई है, जहां गोडसे को फांसी दी गई थी। इस मिट्‌टी को हिंदू महासभा के भवन पर रखा गया है।ग्वालियर के…

[cooldreamangelpony]

The death of Lala Lajpat Rai was avenged by the killing of saunders

[thoughts-of-ghanashyam]

𝕷𝖎𝖋𝖊 𝖇𝖊𝖙𝖜𝖊𝖊𝖓 𝖔𝖗𝖉𝖊𝖗 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖔𝖘 ☯️

If one breaks down the life, no even the whole world on two fundamental forces, then only order and chaos remain at the end. These two elementary forces determine the course of the world and therefore also every life in all universes and spheres.

By the way, this aspect is not only valid for material science, but also for spiritual science. It also forms a general principle for psychology and resulting patterns of behavior. Jordan B. Peterson has written a wonderful book about this (12 Rules for Life), which I can only recommend to everyone in this context.

We humans (and probably all other living beings) love order. Order is the beauty and perfection of nature, recurring and relatively punctual seasons, the ebb after the flood and vice versa. However order is expressed, it gives us structure and security in the first instance.

What began in the communal horde at primeval times, currently finds its culmination in various forms of society. Order is the everyday rhythm of life, the beloved routine that doesn't throw us off track. Relationship and family, the circle of friends, daily meditation, going to the gym, the job, good food at the right time and everything else that determines our everyday life. But order is also laws, the state and society, which restrict us so far to secure this beloved order, but on the other hand also give us a sufficient sense of freedom. Order is the framework in which our material life takes place.

But order is also boredom and stagnation, because there are no more real challenges before loud order and structure. Order is likewise the steps of marching troops or the general "equalization" of a society. Order can thus degenerate all too quickly into an instrument of oppression - namely when it gains the upper hand and, for example, massively restricts or completely abolishes the fundamental rights and freedoms of living beings. Slaughterhouses and concentration camps (yes, I have deliberately listed these two terms together) are also parts of a radical and egomaniacal order, as we have experienced it many times in history or even experience it every day.

If order gets out of balance, it can be just as destructive as the supposed chaos.

Chaos...these are the uncontrolled forces of nature - earthquakes, floods or volcanic eruptions. Chaos is the ugly face of nature with things like plagues or pandemics. Chaos is murder, war, destruction and decay. Chaos is also the end of a relationship, the sudden death of a loved one, or the unexpected loss of a job. Things and events in which we lose control of our universal or individual order and suddenly become disoriented and helpless. This disorientation can in the worst case lead to further chaos in the form of physical as well as mental illness, drug addiction, violence, self-destruction, murder or suicide. Chaos is first and foremost something we want to avoid - at least as far as it is within our limited power.

However, similar to order, there is another aspect to chaos - the so-called second side of the same coin. Because if chaos arises from excessive order, change can also arise from this very chaos - for example in the sense of a revolution. Let us think here, for example, of the peaceful revolution of Mahatma Gandhi, which arose out of a maelstrom of oppression and misery and brought down an empire with peace and nonviolence.

Chaos can therefore, in addition to negative aspects, also provide us with motivation for proactive actions and thus spur us on to peak performance. Chaos is thus the unknown constant in our universe - the white spot on the map - the unexplored terrain. It challenges and encourages us in equal measure, it makes us progressive, creative and inventive. Without chaos, we would probably still be dwelling in caves and roaming the forest or steppe with a club.

So in the end, it's all about finding the right balance between these two forces. Almost every philosophy or religion of man has dealt with this principle. Good and evil, light and shadow, black or white, yin and yang. As diverse as the systems and representations are, they are equally universal.

But how do we create this balance? How do we manage to live in a healthy order and at the same time have one foot in chaos? Here, too, there are certainly thousands of possibilities - many of which are sold to us at an expensive price by hip life coaches with lots of pretty colorful pictures.

Personally, however, I believe the answer is both complex and simple in equal measure. Because the true link between order and chaos is probably consciousness. I therefore think that the keyword is "anchoring".

So let's keep it like a boat anchoring off a coast in a stormy sea. Storms come and go - so it is with order and chaos. In the end, nothing lasts in our world.

I found a beautiful verse in the Bhagavad Gita about this, too:

"O son of Kunti, the contact between the senses and the sense objects gives rise to fleeting perceptions of happiness and distress. These are non-permanent, and come and go like the winter and summer seasons. O descendent of Bharat, one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed. "

(BG 2.14)

So let us remain anchored - no matter how stormy the sea. We may be buffeted, we may even sink, but in the end, as I said, nothing is insistent - not even suffering.

So let's find that one place in life where we want to drop anchor - based on what or who we really are. Let's find out what our inner self really wants from life and hold on to that. Then, if we keep bringing ourselves back to that place by reminding ourselves of our true identity, values and purpose, we can learn to be in balance with chaos and order.

Thanks for reading! Hari Om Tat Sat!

[ukrfeminism]

After four decades at the helm of the women’s rights group Southall Black Sisters (SBS), Pragna Patel stepped down as director at the beginning of this year.

“It was time to move on,” says Patel, whose next move will “be something in the broader parameters of activism — that’s in my blood. I can’t see myself ever not being focused on things that need to be put right.”

Patel, 61, came to the UK from Kenya in 1965. She vividly recalls being the focus of curiosity as she stepped off the aeroplane on a cold, wet December night. “As a child, I didn’t understand why people were staring at us,” she says.

Later, she realised it was the combination of her brown skin and the fact that she was wearing a yellow, sleeveless cotton summer dress and flip flops.

Her father had come to the UK as an economic migrant, hitchhiking his way from Kenya and spending his first night in London sleeping at Victoria Station. His hazardous journey, notes Patel, was still safer than the journeys made by migrants today.

He worked at three jobs to earn enough money to bring his family to London. Racism made it difficult for her parents, who got factory work, to find employment or rented accommodation, so the family moved around London’s boroughs.

“I grew up with a sense of being an outsider and not understanding why,” says Patel, who attributes this burning sense of injustice to fuelling her “gut instinct” towards activism.

The eldest of four daughters, she found that growing up in a traditional, patriarchal community added to a sense of injustice. “My immediate female relatives all accepted their lot — marriage and children,” says Patel, who also as a teenager faced pressure to marry against her will.

Inspired by reading the defiant work of her first role model, Mahatma Gandhi, Patel “began a campaign of civil disobedience in my family”. Her mantra was “I will not submit”, the motif of James Joyce’s alter ego in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Her resistance was successful, and she went to study English literature and sociology at a higher education college in Liverpool.

Returning to Southall in west London, where the family lived, in the summer holiday, Patel met some young Asian women selling a newspaper produced by Southall Black Sisters, a group of Asian and Afro-Caribbean women that campaigned against sex, race and class discrimination.

“They were feisty, assertive, feminists — everything I had been told not to be — and proud of who they were,” she says.

The word “black” used in the name was a political and unifying term that aimed to bring together disparate minority communities with common histories of imperialism and colonialism.

Southall in the 1970s was at the centre of the UK’s anti-racism movement, when the community rose up to oppose a National Front march through the borough. A white anti-racist activist, Blair Peach, was killed by the police and 400 Asian youths were arrested, but not a single white youth was arrested.

Patel found the message of the SBS inspiring, and aged 22, when the group’s leaders moved on to other activities, she re-founded it, inspired by the law centres movement and with a grant from the Greater London Council.

The group gained national attention supporting Kiranjit Ahluwalia, whose successful 1992 appeal against her conviction for murdering her violent husband changed the law on provocation and the understanding of battered woman syndrome.

“I had no idea it was going to become a big case,” says Patel. “We were dealing with new things and learning about the issues ourselves.”

The case not only “struck a national chord”, but represented a “wonderful moment of unity when feminists of all backgrounds came together demanding justice for women — for the right to defend themselves”.

Today, she fears that identity politics has “fragmented unity” and warns of the “real danger” that as feminist, progressive antiracists emphasise their differences, they lose their sense of humanity and solidarity.

Patel recalls going to Yorkshire in the 1970s to stand on the picket lines to support striking miners. “We didn’t do it because we thought miners were non-sexist or non-racist; we did it to say that we have common struggles.”

In the face of increasing moves by the state to strip people’s citizenship, criminalise migrants, amend human rights protections and clamp down on protest, Patel is adamant that that spirit of unity must be rekindled.

“Forget about progressing rights, we have to think about how we hang on to them. Political forces are against us on this. We have to step up our game.”

Patel is particularly concerned about the rise in religious fundamentalism around the world, which she says is an attack on women’s rights, and moves to restrict protest.

“Protest is part of the feminist armoury. When you have nothing else left, you only have your voice.”

She is also troubled by the politics of the debate around transgenderism and the effect it has on reducing women’s rights. The “erasure of women is the single most regressive act”, she says.

Describing herself as a “champion of sex-based rights”, Patel stresses the harms that women and girls face because of their sex, including female foeticide and infanticide.

She says that she supports trans rights and the ability of people to live without discrimination. But, she stresses: “I’m not for a politics based on erasing others who are vulnerable.”

Away from activism, Patel enjoys cricket, though she adds that the game is “a story of empire”. Her ideal day, she says, is taking a picnic to watch England play India, admitting that supporting India, she would “never pass the Tebbit test”.

[wolfpawn]

The Art of Survival

Summary - 

It has been six months since madness descended on the High-Rise and the rest of London also, if not all of Britain. Robert Laing is one of only 8 men still alive in the High-Rise, the women reign supreme, as food become more and more scarce and the need to study his fellow residents as patients grows to almost an obsession, Robert sees that animal instinct is not as dormant in homo sapiens as he thought, we are not as removed from animals as we as a species think ourselves to be and when resources are few and far between, he learns that some are natural survivors, some are providers and some are leeches. Can he distinguish between them and see how it is best to survive, if only to complete his work?

Notes: this story will continue from the movie/book, both were similar. It will reference all the gore of them, rape, murder, etc but won't be as brutal overall, a sort of order has come over the place. 

"There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed." - Mahatma Gandhi

Laing sat looking over the cityscape. It has been almost six months since bedlam had fallen over the High-Rise. In that time, he learnt it was not just their building that had suffered madness, it had spread over the city like a fog of chaos. Sirens rang constantly, almost like a theme song over the city, but no form of authority of emergency service had even attempted to come to bear the towering building in over ten weeks. Rubbish littered the ground surrounding the vast building and even the corpse of a man was strewn there, George Ambrose, he had been from the eighth floor, a notorious sex pest even before society fell into chaos, he suspected the women had lured him to his demise.

The women, in the initial period after everything went to hell, suffered horrifically, the men had held the power, using brute force and sex to deal with "lesser" men and women respectively. But while the men went into factions and fought among themselves, the women banded together, they made the Penthouse and the thirty-ninth door of the building their domain and a home for any woman in the building who wanted such a life and for all the children of the building, setting up a fully functional home and school for them, and woe betide anyone who attempted to create an issue there. Any woman who acted in a manner that was deemed uncouth and unacceptable was cast out, sometimes for a few days to teach them a lesson, and in a few instances, as it was with Charlotte's case, permanently. For men, however, death was the usual end result, though often, such an end was neither swift or clean.

He had been there a few times, be it for a child with a fever or other such things. If they needed him, the women found a way (often Toby) of calling on him. They paid in food so he was always willing, but Robert remained courteous, inoffensive and respectful, meaning the women never felt threatened by him and never made him feel as though he was at immediate risk, though the threat was ever present, women stood to the sides, weapons of different sorts in their hands, watching him, but as he ensured he could never be perceived as a threat, mutual respect was maintained. The women seemed able to structure a system of order without the presence of men. He documented it after every visit, seeing more and more of how the women ran their domain. He found it a fascinating study in psychology.

Charlotte had been welcomed into their fold at first, but she was soon cast out. All the women did their share in the penthouse community but Charlotte was never one to do her share and thought her M.O. would continue there, her being the social centre point around which others worked and get her share of the food but even Ann Royal, the wife of the now deceased architect and engineer did her share, she was a watcher of the children, so Charlotte's sloth was confront quite swiftly and she found herself wandering the hallways until she found her way back to him. Toby often found his way to the penthouse, if only for food and was welcomed warmly by the women who often attempted to convince him to stay.

That was part of the intrigue of the penthouse to Laing, food, though not abundant, was more readily available than he would have thought possible, especially after a few months of the new manner of life they found themselves in. It was just not plausible for there to still be food there, yet there was, he had seen himself, he had eaten it. The meat he was paid in was some form of bird, he suspected it was pigeon or even gull but he did not care, all he cared about was it was food.

Laing continued to look over the city as the day came to a close and dusk darkened the world. The sound of rummaging in the bags of trash below catching his attention as he did so. He ignored it at first, but as a second bout of noises and then a yowl of pain came to his attention, he rose to his feet and made his way towards the edge of the balcony, peering down. He watched curiously as someone in a hooded coat rushed back towards the building with a long stick in their hand, and on the end of it, a now deceased cat. The figure paused for a moment and seemed to realise they were being watched. They looked around before finally looking upward, their eye catching Laing's.

He knew her to see, he was certain she was from one of the lower floors, her chocolate brown eyes were mesmerising and her freckled nose, though he knew many found such features unattractive, he found intriguing when they used stand in the elevator in the mornings. He recalled her suit, highstreet, yet nice, as she held the door for him one day, smiling brightly as she did. He had been grateful for that. She had been jovial and polite, he found her intriguing, but he had yet to see her again, she was one he thought of all women would seek refuge in the colony that had formed on the upper floors, but she seemed to be fairing well alone, better than him, who had not seen a morsel in a day and found himself hoping the women required his services again, if only to get some food.

[antilagardelle]

On Gods And Tyrants

(Name Redacted)

Prof. P____

Conversatio 1

9-15-21

Fewer themes engage the annals of human history with such importunate vigor as the contest of the individual, the collective, and the divine. Each man construes his own ideal configuration of the three, and each lives out this very contest in every action he pursues, whether consciously or not. The timeless interplay between these forces is beautifully exemplified in an equally timeless play: Sophocles’ Antigone; wherein not only may a remarkable depiction be found of the ceaseless clash between God, man, and state, but wherein also is a fourth party to be found mixed with this tripartite dialectic; and that would be the intrapersonal. Upon reading this powerful work from the fifth century BC tragedian, one is met with the ancient and tested observation that whatsoever tumults pervade the individual, shall likewise pervade the state. What manifests individually, manifests collectively in due proportion; and thus, man has yet to know an external war not derived from internal battles; a societal polarization not resultant of intrapersonal divides; a corruption at large not originating in a corruption at home: that is, within the self.

Examining Antigone under a jungian light, it may be observed that the City of Thebes, in which it takes place, is a symbol of the self, and each character an element of one’s psyche. Cities, towns, and houses often symbolize the self in literature, drawing from their consisting in an ordered system of cogs. Upon stepping into this play of Sophocles, the reader finds Thebes in the aftermath of a civil war between Antigone’s two brothers, Polyneices and Eteocles, culminating in each killing the other simultaneously. To demonstrate the manner in which this rapine of Thebes simulates the rapine of the human psyche, requires first the exposition of a deeper symbol beneath it all, which serves to nourish Antigone’s greater theme. Antigone, Polyneices, Eteocles, and their sister Ismene are children of Oedipus and Jocasta. What makes this disturbing is that Jocasta and Eodipus are mother and son. This would not be the only incestuous taint upon the characters of the story, nor the first in the theban lineage. Not only is Creon, the King of Thebes, Antigone’s uncle, making her affiance to his son Haemon quite close-knit, but Jocasta, Oedipus’ mother and wife, was only a distant cousin from Oedipus’ father Laius to begin with. What is the symbolism behind this? The prevalence of incest in the story, is a symbol of misaligned or improperly differentiated relations between the psychophisiological elements of the self. The warring brothers, whose father is their brother as well, signify the disorders actuated by such a backward psychological alignment. The moral to be extracted--appertaining especially to the relation of the individual, the community, and the divine--is that the political maladies of the community find their direct source in the intrapersonal maladies of the individual; or perhaps more specifically, from his neglect to advance any effort at their amelioration.  

Probing textually for traces of this theme, one is brought to an instance where Creon is expounding on his edict that since Eteocles died fighting to defend Thebes, and Polyneices traitorously against it, only the former shall secure a proper burial whereas the latter will be left for the birds and dogs. Creon describes the latter as having, “sought the taste of kindred blood.”(Hadas 127) It would appear that this selection of words on Creon’s behalf, symbolically relates this clash of brothers to Oedipus’ having conceived four children with his mother, designating the latter as a prefigurement of the former. This theme also crops up in an exchange between Ismene and Antigone in the beginning of the play, while the two dispute Antigone’s resolve to defy Creon’s orders to refuse Polyneices any burial. Ismene says, “How our father perished, amid hate and scorn, when sins bared by his own search had moved him to strike both eyes with self-blinding hand; then the mother and wife, two names in one, with twisted noose destroyed her own life; and last, our two brothers in one day--each shedding, luckless man, a kinsman’s blood--wrought out with mutual hands their common doom.”(Hadas 124) The “Self-blinding hand,” the “twisted noose,” the two brothers shedding “A kinsman’s blood,” and begetting “with mutual hands their common doom,” all symbolize incest in the play, and its representation of a maladjusted psyche. Lastly, one finds this concept broached in one of the synchronized chants of the chorus of theban elders, who periodically add a sort of poetic narration to the play, and who seem to signify a kind of collective voice. After Creon decrees that he will have Antigone thrown in a rocky vault, where she will starve to death, the chorus breaks out into a kind of soliloquy, wherein they lament that, “Love, unconquered in the fight [...] ‘tis thou that has stirred up this present strife of kinsmen.”(Hadas 142) It is as if the family's inbred roots alone are culpable for all the story’s entropy.

The dynamic of the individual and community having now been dissected, the question remains as to the proper station of the divine within this hierarchy. Where is God to be interpolated amidst this convoluted triad? To answer this question may require a rather roundabout course, in order that provision be made for those both of theistic and atheistic (or agnostic) sentiments. Perhaps no scene in the play conveys Antigone’s unshaken purpose so consummately as when she is brought before Creon for questioning. He inquires, in this scene, if she knew his edict forbade Polyneices any burial, to which she replies affirmatively. Creon then asks, “Did you then dare transgress that law?” to which Antigone answers with the same unapologetic certitude that had Caiaphas rend his raiment, stating “Yes, for it was not Zues that had published that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the Justice who dwells with the gods below. Nor did I deem that your decrees were of such force that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven.”(Hadas 134) Regardless whether the reader believes in god or not, a sound argument could be made in favor of Antigone’s resolve. Antigone’s choice to bury her brother--or rather, to sprinkle sediment upon his corpse--derives an adequate justification from a reverence for the innate profundity of the human body. 

To date, all developed nations have laws against defiling the body. A man guilty of murder, who also decimates or skins the corpse of their victim, can and usually will be hit with additional charges for the act, not merely due to the obfuscation of evidence, but also to the act’s inherent profanity against the human body. This is because one’s body is a significant part of precisely who they are. It constitutes no small part of their overall humanity. Now Creon’s pretext for refusing to bury Polyneices is that he is a traitor against Thebes. This, however, begs a dire question: at what point ought the humanity of an offender not be recognized? And to answer this question with anything less than an unequivocal, “never,” is to deny not only the humanity of the offender, but that of the whole race. Reiterating those famous words spoken on that happy day in 1945, “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”(Robert H. Jackson, 1945) This invocation of The Nuremberg Trials is eminently pertinent, as is drawn from the fact that the very value of the assertion of man being the peak of all vices and virtues, individually and thus collectively, is in the very extent to which it is true. Not only is it the case that every individual contains within them the daunting capacity to orchestrate such heinous and vile crimes against humanity as did the Nazis; but even, as a deeper and more frightening psychoanalysis would reveal, the sadistic desire to do so. Within each and every human person dwells both the guards at Auschwitz, and Mahatma Gandhi; Emperor Nero, and Christ himself; The Green River Killer and the Dalai Lama. That is to say, that what makes the antagonists of human history so terrifying is just how human they were; and to bring this back to Creon’s decree, it necessarily follows that to disrespect the human body--as it constitutes a profound and ineffable part of who the man was as a child of God, from a religious perspective, and as a member of humanity, from an atheistic view--is necessarily to miss this important lesson of human nature. The lesson that we all contain the same capacity for evil, and for good. A lesson from which one garners a deeper faculty of self-reflection; and it can be anticipated that a populace who shuns self-reflection, can only precipitate malady after malady, resulting in scenarios as unconscionably wicked as those wrought by the men whose humanity they elected to disregard imprimis. Thus, any failure to recognize the humanity of the worst offender, is itself an offense of no less severity. This failure is averted by handling the bodies of such transgressors with a basic human decency. 

Now the foregoing is not to be misconstrued as an echo of Manicheism. Nor is the aim to imply, by contending all humans to contain the same capacity and desire for evil, that man is incapable of delivering any justice to the wicked. It is true that some men choose to act objectively better than others. But it is only this: a choice. It is a practice; and as such, it denotes that there is some baser nature they must necessarily labor against. The worst crime is in denouncing the existence of this baser nature in oneself, as to do so is to deify oneself; to deify oneself is to empower oneself absolutely; and, to allude to Lord Acton’s famous adage, is to thereby corrupt oneself absolutely. 

There is, however, another argument here being made. It is of the nature of reverence, to connote a sense of mystery in the thing for which the reverence is had. Why have humans entertained such customs as removing hats in church? Why dress nicely for funerals, or weddings? Or to give more dire scenarios: from whence does man derive the notions of not killing unarmed persons, or those who surrender in war? Why is it diabolical to disregard white flags, or enact cruel and unusual punishments on prisoners? There are two primary reasons. The first, is because things are inherently ineffable. The second, because there must be a line that one simply does not cross. That line, whatever it may be, and on account of the limited nature of human understanding, will necessarily have some mystery about it, and therefore, demand reverence. Thus, a world without reverence would be an upside-down and hellish waste, which could only be imagined as The Holocaust tenfold. Depravity alone can ensue from the complete absence of reverence. There must be a space reserved for what is sacrosanct; for what is inviolable; for what is universally unbreakable; and to finally answer the question as to the divine’s place in relation to the individual and the community, this ineffable window of things so superior to man that he dare not violate them, is what we call, God. It is beside the point if one believes in God or not. Perhaps one holds that this space for the inviolable is defined by natural law, or by human altruism. The point is that whatever one designates to fill this position must necessarily have two principal traits. It must be above him, in that he is invariably answerable to it, and not vice versa; and of those things which it demands of him, they cannot always be said to be easy or in line with his personal wishes. These are the things which define God, and outline his relation to the self and the collective, as far as our investigation is concerned. That man whose rendition of God fails this criteria, effectively echoes Creon in thundering, “Am I to rule this land by other judgement than my own?”(Hadas 141)

In conclusion, Sophocles’ Antigone will ever hold a place among the literary classics. The compelling clash of Creon’s indignant rigidity with Antigone’s adamantine resolve, will always proffer a breadth of moral, political, and intrapersonal lessons, as well as entertain its audience. It is a story of love, a story of conviction, and a story of our natures, both the nobler and the baser. Under the lens of the relation between God, man, and state, the play will never cease to yield boundless insights, nor to be fruitful to those who read it.

Bibliography

Hadas, Moses. “Antigone.” The Complete Plays Of Sophocles, Bantam Books 1967, p.127

Hadas, Moses. “Antigone.” The Complete Plays Of Sophocles, Bantam Books 1967, 124

Hadas, Moses. “Antigone.” The Complete Plays Of Sophocles, Bantam Books 1967, p. 142

Hadas, Moses. “Antigone.” The Complete Plays Of Sophocles, Bantam Books 1967, p. 134

Jackson, Robert H., “Opening Statement Before The International Military Tribunal.” Robert H. Jackson Center, November 21, 1945

Hadas, Moses. “Antigone.” The Complete Plays Of Sophocles, Bantam Books 1967, p. 141

[mypencildotcom]

Verified Rebirth Story of Shanti Devi supported by Mahatma Gandhi & mentioned in Wikipedia.

The Shanti Devi Rebirth Story

India is a land of mysteries, filled with stories of reincarnation. In the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madya Pradesh and Delhi, there are stories of rebirth that intrigue and generate the curiosity of people. Even a shocking story of a boy who started spewing stories of his murder in a previous life. But his claim was found to be untrue by the courts.

Some rebirth stories come too close to the truth which is shocking and mind-blogging, to say the least.

One such instance is the story of

Shanti Devi (Born: 11 December 1926 ), known as Lugdi Devi (Born on 18 January 1902 – Died on 4 October 1925) in her past life. She was an Indian woman who claimed to remember her previous life and interestingly became the subject of reincarnation research.

Lugdi Devi Story

The story starts with a daughter born at the home of Chandbud in Mathura.

Lugdi Devi was born and set to marry a clothing vendor in 1912 when she was merely 10 years old.

Her husband was a widowed man named Kedar Nath Chubai. Lugdi became pregnant in 1924 but unfortunately gave birth to a still-born.

Being pregnant for the second time on September 25th, 1925 giving birth in an Agra Government Hospital to a healthy baby boy.

Sadly, Lugdi became sick after the birth of her baby and passed after 9 days only being able to see her child once.

Lugdi Devi died on 4th October 1925 at the young age of 27.

Her baby boy was named Vaneet Lal who was left to raise by Kedar Nath Chobai.

Shanti Devi Story

After exactly one year, ten months and seven days, on 10th December 1926, a baby girl was born in Delhi. In the home of Babu Rana Bahadur, 145 kms from Mathura, Shanti Devi was born. Being silent for almost four years, when she finally started speaking, Shanti Devi began to claim to remember details of a past life.

Reincarnation Claim

According to these accounts, when she was about four years old, she told her parents that her real home was in Mathura where her husband lived, about 145 km from her home in Delhi.

This baffled her family, which led to visits to multiple psychiatrists, doctors and physicians.

A baffling instance with a psychiatrist was when Shanti Devi recollected intricate details of her deliveries at the age of four.

She also recollected minute details of her previous home in this past life from the name of the temple near her house in Mathura to the well outside her house to the 125 rupees she had hid under the flower pot in her bedroom.

She also recalled the exact distinguishing details of her husband’s face. A fair man with a wart on his left cheek with reading glasses.

Rebirth Story : Two lives coming together

Shanti Devi’s father approached his distant relative named Babu Bisht Chand who belonged to Dharganj, Delhi. Bahu Bisht was a teacher at the Ramjas School.

Shanti ran away from home which worried her family. Babu Bisht bribed Shanti to tell him the name of her husband so he could take her to Mathura.

Babu Bisht tested what he knew by send a letter to the address of Chobai with the address he was told about from Shanti Devi.

The letter reaches its destination, Chobai has moved on by marrying for the third time. Being shocked by the letter, he sends his cousin(Pandit Kathi Lal) to Shanti’s house to confirm this bizarre theory.

Rebirth Story :Rechecking Facts

Shanti is met with an impersonating husband who she correctly identifies as her husband’s (Chobai’s brother).

Shanti tells all to Pandit Lal which confirms his suspicions that Shanti Devi is Lugdi.

Chobai along with his son who is now ten years old and his mother visits Shanti home in Delhi. They are shocked to discover that Shanti’s collects all their food favourites when it’s time for dinner. Even Chobai is forced to believe Shanti is her wife reincarnated as she even recalls intimate details of their relations only known to her husband.

She found out that Kedar Nath had neglected to keep several promises he had made to Lugdi Devi on her deathbed. Like remarrying after her death, Chobai also makes his now-wife meet Shanti Devi which makes Shanti cry and wanting to return to her home in Mathura.

Rebirth Story: Mahatma Gandhi Commission

The story of Shanti Devi spreading like wildfire by publishing in the local Mathura Newspaper ad later in National Publications catches the attention of Mahatma Gandhi. He invites Shanti Devi to his Ashram to know her truth. He sets up

a commission to inquire the truth.

Rebirth Story : Hunt for the Truth

The commission travelled on a train with Shanti Devi to Mathura, arriving on 15 November 1935. There she recognized several family members, including the grandfather of Lugdi Devi.  She also correctly knew the path to reach her home in Mathura from the train station. As well in her veranda and the hidden money in her bedroom.

She then travelled home with her parents. The commission’s report, published in 1936, concluded that Shanti Devi was indeed the reincarnation of Lugdi Devi.

Even a second trip to Mathura to Lugdi’s home confirmed their suspicions as she correctly identified her whole family instantly.

Research

Her claim is found to be true, while another report by researcher Bal Chand Nahata disputed it.

Subsequently, several other researchers interviewed her and published articles and books about her.

Two further reports were written at the time.

The report by Bal Chand Nahata was published as a Hindi booklet by the name Punarjanma Ki Paryalochana.

In this, he stated that “Whatever material that has come before us, does not warrant us to conclude that Shanti Devi has former life recollections or that this case proves reincarnation”.

This argument was disputed by Indra Sen, a devotee of Sri Aurobindo, in an article later. A further report, based on interviews conducted in 1936, was published in 1952.

K.S. Rawat continued his investigations in 1987, and the last interview took place only four days before her death on 27 December 1987.

A Swedish author who had visited her twice published a book about the case in 1994; the English translation appeared in 1998

She told her story again at the end of the 1950s, and once more in 1986 when she was interviewed by Canadian Researcher Ian Stevenson and K.S. Rawat.

Shanti Devi Death

Shanti Devi did not marry as she kept her promise, unlike Kedar Nath.

Died 27 December 1987 at the age of 61.

For more interviews like this, subscribe to   MyPencilDotCom magazine and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn

Story Source: www. wikipedia.org, Crime Tak Youtube Channel.

[johnvazhathara]

Malabar rebellionThe many shades of the Mappila insurrectionTo some, 1921 represents a fight for freedom; to others, it is a case study of class oppression; and to yet another set, it is about a ‘Hindu genocide’

29/08/2021 



In Focus

Starting in the 1500s, Portuguese terror at sea damaged the existing trading networks. Mappilas resisted, but in the long run, they lost out

‘Poverty became the general pattern’ among Mappila Muslims by the 18th century and in crisis, some turned towards a more distinct sense of self and religious identity

If the 19th century saw a series of “outrages”, the 1921 revolt was a largescale insurrection in which over 2,000 rebels were killed, and nearly 40,000 surrendered

Manu S. Pillai

Among the witnesses whose names are inscribed in Arabic on the Kollam Syrian copper plates of 849 CE are men called Muhammad, Ibrahim, Mansur and Ismail. Oral tradition claims that Islam’s arrival in Kerala dates to the Prophet’s own lifetime. Whether one accepts the idea or not, by the ninth century, Muslims were a definite presence on the coast.

In the times that followed, as Arab traders married locally, not only did they father a community of Malayali Muslims — Mappilas — their offspring were also woven into the region’s narrative fabric. In the story of the sage Vararuchi’s children by a Parayar wife, for example, one is a Brahmin, another a Muslim. If the legendary King Bana Perumal chose Buddhism, Cheraman Perumal sailed to Mecca. The veracity of these tales is not really the point as much as what they seek to communicate. They were, in other words, a device by which a new group was legitimised, as the Mappilas became a familiar and respected element in Kerala’s cultural landscape.

The Mappila identity, now much discussed in the context of the 1921 rebellion, was first rooted in trade. The rise of Kozhikode, for long a seat of power and prosperity in Kerala, relied a good deal on Arab networks of commerce. Mappilas, local in their social practices like matriliny, and yet joined by a common faith with foreign Muslims, were an important link in the political economy. Indeed, a Muslim stood beside the Zamorin rajah at the great Mamankam festival at Tirunavaya. Hints of religious tension appear now and then, but the economic alliance between Hindu elites and Muslim traders meant that these were contained. Brahmin texts like the Keralolpathi offered Islam a place in their worldview, likening the Quran to a Veda, and works such as Zayn al-Din’s sixteenth century Tuhfat al-Mujahideen framed Hindu rulers as good, ideal monarchs. That is, however, till new (European) flies appeared in the ointment through the sixteenth century, and upset prevailing socio-economic balances.

Different facets

Although the 1921 rebellion is often discussed in isolation, this prehistory is integral to making sense of its economic, social, and religious facets. For by the 20th century, the Mappilas had been marginalised in the very land where they were once esteemed.

Starting in the 1500s, Portuguese terror at sea damaged the trading networks on which so much had been built. And while Mappilas resisted — including militarily and by subverting European efforts to police maritime traffic — in the long run, they lost out. Local Hindu Kings were forced to come to terms with successive European trading companies to protect their turf, with the result that their erstwhile Muslim associates were cornered. As the scholar Roland Miller wrote, “poverty became the general pattern” by the 18th century, and in crisis, some in the community turned towards a more distinct sense of self and religious identity. At first, Mappila spokesmen such as Zayn al-Din had called for jihad against Europeans; in time that language would be turned against those who represented regional economic injustices also. In other words, as the Mappila stake in society was painfully diluted, religious ideology offered a method by which to valorise resistance. In 1742, for example, British East India Company officials recorded how there were Mappilas who “selected themselves to Murder any Christian” and who, if they died in the process, saw it as “meritorious”. Into the 19th century, which saw colonial laws disproportionately favour landlords against tenants-at-will, the former too became targets.

Scholars have noted how as much as 77% of the produce could be demanded by the landlord. The fact that a large section of the peasantry in South Malabar — the nucleus of the 1921 rebellion also — was Mappila while landowners were typically Hindus caused an overlap between economic grievances and religious divisions.

The result was a series of “outrages” in which individual Mappilas or small bands launched ritualised suicide missions, killing Hindu grandees and officials. The triggers may have been economic but instances such as in 1852, when a temple was “festooned” with the entrails of a cow, show that these violent outbreaks had religious overtones too. The tendency among some to victimise present-day Muslims for the “sins” committed by “their ancestors” has generally resulted in a hesitation to acknowledge this religious element, with the focus limited to economic aspects. But the fact of the matter is that economics, radical religious ideology, and a historical sense of lost greatness all played a role. The 1921 revolt, thus, began as a part of the pan-Indian Khilafat Movement, to which even Mahatma Gandhi pledged support. It became a means by which to mobilise as part of a larger struggle. But all at once, it also offered an occasion for Mappilas in British-ruled Malabar to attempt to overthrow not only the colonial government but also the Hindu feudal classes that, in ostensible alliance with the Raj, pressed down on them. The scale of the event cannot be understated: over 2,000 rebels were killed, and nearly 40,000 surrendered. And if the 19th-century “outrages” were isolated flare-ups, this was a large-scale insurrection, validated in a religious vocabulary.

‘Gangs’ of Malabar

Sober students of history — if not politicians prone to rhetorical excesses — must be cautious, however, when it comes to labelling the event. Revolts of this nature tend to be messy in terms of even basic organisation. In 1921, there was no clear chain of command among the Mappilas, no single leader but “gangs” holding different areas, and no standard policy. During the months in which much territory was under rebel control, some factions espoused forced conversions of Hindus, for example, while others spoke pointedly against such tendencies.

To some, 1921 represents a fight for freedom and a chapter in India’s anti-colonial struggle; to others, it is a case study in the consequences of class oppression; and to yet another set, it is about a “Hindu genocide” at the hands of “terrible” Muslims. The facts suggest, however, that to varying degrees all three elements manifested here. A century on, acknowledging this is perhaps critical to making better sense of the Mappila Rebellion — a bloody but complicated event with many roots and a long back story.

(Manu S. Pillai is an author and historian)

[omgsquee2001]

The Golden Touch - A Criminal Minds Fanfiction

Warning: Mentions of Death, Mentions of Kidnapping Basically just normal Criminal Minds stuff

_________________________________

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.” - Mahatma Gandhi 

___________________________________

The Kansas City Police Department was more on edge than normal. Why? Well, the suspect in the murder of a father and the kidnapping of a mother and her two daughters was currently being questioned by SSA Derek Morgan 

and Dr. Spencer Reid.

While Derek was standing in the back of the interrogation room, arms folded across his chest, Spencer was sitting in front of Kyle, hands folded together. 

“I’m tellin’ ya man, I don’t have nothing to do with this!” Kyle shouted for what seemed like the fifth time. Spencer narrowed his eyes and tilted his head to the side, looking at Kyle. Kyle rung his callused and dried hands together in nervousness. 

“I’m not sure I believe you, Mr. Blakeman.” Spencer said. He stood up. Derek opened the metal door and they both walked out and regrouped with SSA Aaron Hotchner, 

SSA Emily Prentiss, 

and SSA David Rossi

David looked at Spencer. 

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?” David asked the young Doctor. Spencer glanced at the agent/book writer. 

“I’m not sure. You know, the average person hears between 10 and 200 lies per day. We tend to think that liars are the ones who can't keep their stories straight, but we'll list this so-called tell first, and thus least reliable, because there are other explanations for changing stories. It's simply too easy, and deceptive, to rely on inconsistency as a proxy for deceit.” Spencer said, giving off random facts about liars. David looked at Reid like he had grown two heads. 

“How is it that you know literally everything?” David asked. Spencer shrugged. 

“I have an IQ of 187, I can read 20,000 words per minute and I have..” he was cut off by David. 

“Yeah, yeah. You have an eidetic memory, we know.” David said. Spencer nodded, smiling. Emily turned her head to her colleagues.

“Do you think we should bring her in? I mean, Kyle has to be our guy, right?” She asked. Aaron stared at the man behind the glass. 

“There’s only one way to find out,” he looked at Emily. “Prentiss, you call JJ and let her know that we need her,” he looked at Spencer. “Reid. You, Rossi and Morgan will act as her guards. While she is searching for the truth, if Kyle tries anything, your jobs are to make sure you get her out of there as quickly as possible and restrain him.” Aaron said. The three agents nodded, splitting off to do their assigned duties. 

____________________________________

16 year old Serine Kiatani

was staring out the window of the Kansas City Police Department Conference Room. She watched as all the people in the building rushed by, trying to solve the case that she and her team were sent to solve. Jennifer Jareau, aka JJ, 

walked into the conference room, talking to someone on the phone. 

“Alright. Yeah, I’ll let her know. Thanks Prentiss,” JJ looked at the 16 year old and smiled slightly. “Hotch needs you. You ready, Serine?” JJ asked. Serine gave a shuddering breath and nodded. 

“Yeah. I’m ready.” She said. JJ smiled and sat next to her, taking the young girl’s hand in her own.

“Hey, you know we’re not going to let anything happen to you, right? You’re safe as long as you’re with us.” She said. Serine smiled and nodded.

“Yeah, I know that. Thanks, JJ.” She said. JJ smiled and pulled the younger girl into a hug.

“Now,” JJ said, pulling away from the hug and placing her hands on Serine’s shoulders. “Let’s go find that family.” She said.

————————————————————

Kyle was still sitting in the interrogation room when the door opened. A young girl, followed by three men, two of which were Morgan and Reid. Serine pulled out the chair and sat in front of Kyle, folding her hands and laying them on the table, leaning forward.

“You do know why you’re here, right, Mr. Blakeman?” Serine asked. Kyle scoffed.

“Why don’t you tell me, missy.” Kyle said. Serine looked Kyle in the eyes.

“You’re here because you are suspected of the murder of Alester Smith and the kidnapping of his wife Tasha and his twin daughters Natalie and Nareen,” She said. Kyle sighed. Clearly there was no lying to these people. “Now, Mr. Blakeman,” Serine said. “I’m going to try something. I’m going to ask you to close your eyes. I will place my fingers gently over your eyes. You might see a series of images flash before your eyes. Please, don’t be alarmed,” Serine said. Kyle shrugged and closed his eyes. “Good, now take a deep breath and relax,” she said. Kyle did just that. Serine leaned forward and gently placed her two index fingers on his closed eyes, the rest of her fingers were in contact with the skin around his eyes. She closed her eyes and concentrated. Golden dust gently floated from her fingertips to circle around Kyle’s head. Serine’s eyes moved about underneath her eyelids. Fragments of golden images flashed before her mind’s eye. She heard the screaming of the wife and the two girls as Kyle shot Alester and pointed the gun at Tasha and her daughters, telling them to move. The golden picture dissipated and showed Serine a picture of a house on the north side of town. Serine gasped and pulled her hands back, breathing heavily. Spencer rushed up, placing his hands on Serine’s shoulders and kneeling down to her height.

“Serine?” Spencer asked in concern. Serine looked to the man who was like an older brother to her. She smiled.

“I’m fine,” her smile fell and she stared at Kyle, whose eyes were now open. “Kyle Blakeman killed Alester Smith and is keeping Tasha Smith and her two daughters, Natalie and Nareen in a house on the north side of town. 220 North Adams Street.” She said. Kyle’s eyes widened. He shot up, trying to get to Serine. Rossi pulled both Spencer and Serine back.

“Get the kid out of here, Reid. Tell Hotch. We’ll meet you there as soon as we handle him.” Rossi said. Spencer nodded and took Serine’s hand, walking out of the interrogation room.

[newsoutbursts]

Dressed Like Mahatma Gandhi, Some In Delhi Protest Against Hathras Case Jantar Mantar: Bhim Army supporters and opposition party leaders also protested in Delhi New Delhi: A group of Youth Congress workers marked Mahatma Gandhi's 151st birthday on Friday with a unique protest, dressing up as the icon himself and demonstrating at Jantar Mantar in Delhi against the alleged gang rape and murder in Uttar Pradesh's Hathras.

[gocurrentcom]

Dressed Like Mahatma Gandhi, Some In Delhi Protest Against Hathras Case Jantar Mantar: Bhim Army supporters and opposition party leaders also protested in Delhi New Delhi: A group of Youth Congress workers marked Mahatma Gandhi's 151st birthday on Friday with a unique protest, dressing up as the icon himself and demonstrating at Jantar Mantar in Delhi against the alleged gang rape and murder in Uttar Pradesh's Hathras.

[gokul2181]

Sushant Singh Rajput's friend Ganesh Hiwarkar and ex-manager Ankit Acharya protest in Delhi; demand justice for the late actor | Hindi Movie News

New Post has been published on https://jordarnews.in/sushant-singh-rajputs-friend-ganesh-hiwarkar-and-ex-manager-ankit-acharya-protest-in-delhi-demand-justice-for-the-late-actor-hindi-movie-news/

Sushant Singh Rajput's friend Ganesh Hiwarkar and ex-manager Ankit Acharya protest in Delhi; demand justice for the late actor | Hindi Movie News

Sushant Singh Rajput’s friend Ganesh Hiwarkar and ex-manager Ankit Acharya have started the protest at the Jantar Mantar in Delhi. On Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary, the duo organized the protest which was joined by the fans of Sushant to seek justice for him. They will also be holding a hunger strike.

Speaking to Times Now, Ganesh said that the CBI should investigate the case under 302 (murder charges) and they should not try to divert it. He also mentioned that the CBI team should give updates about the case since only NCB has been giving out statements. Have a look:

Watch: Protest demanding ‘Justice for Sushant Singh Rajput’ that happened in Delhi.Ground report by TIMES NOW’s K… https://t.co/s9XjkCI7hU

— TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) 1601616401000

The security has been beefed up near Jantar Mantar. Earlier today, Sushant’s sister Shweta Singh Kirti also urged everyone to join the protest in Delhi. She even asked everyone to wear a mask and follow social distancing at the venue. Her tweet read, “Join and support the campaign at Jantar Mantar today… remember to wear a mask, maintain social distancing and follow the local laws. Let’s ask the right questions and stand for the right cause!! #Satyagrah4SSR #Revolution4SSR”

Meanwhile, Shweta shared a picture of herself recently on her Instagram handle and expressed that she has faith in CBI. Her post read, “We have faith in CBI, we are an inch closer to finding the truth! Next few days are crucial… We might hear some good news. Very hopeful. I know God is with us for sure. We are calling it #Revolution4SSR ARE YOU WITH US??”

Source link

[madisonacampbell]

Via the ACLU: The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

No one expected their words to be enlightening or their tone harmonious. Hatred rarely comes in such flavors. It spills out as an ugly, incoherent mess infused with the rotten odor of willful ignorance. And so it was with the Nazi wannabes — self-styled white supremacists determined to make their mark on the world, committed to convincing anyone who might listen that their superiority was both evident and inevitable. The setting was downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017. Their mission was unity — of like-minded hate mongers. Their leader, Jason Kessler, was a 33-year-old who lived with his parents and had once supported Barack Obama. He had learned that many demographers thought whites would eventually become a minority race in the United States. That news was so unsettling that Kessler remade himself into a white-rights activist. He styled himself as “a civil and human rights advocate, focused on the Caucasian demographic” in the mode of “Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi.” His “Unite the Right” rally, observed the Christian Science Monitor, “was supposed to be the movement’s coming out party, an emergence from the shadows of internet chat rooms into the national spotlight.” Kessler was inspired in part by fellow University of Virginia graduate and white supremacist Richard Spencer who, in May 2017, led a band of racists in Charlottesville chanting “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi-inspired slogan. Why they were enamored of Russia is anyone’s guess; I presume it had something to do with President Trump. The reason for the Nazi chant was evident; they thought it allowed them to channel the spirit of General Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned the U.S. Army in a doomed quest to preserve race-based slavery in the South. Charlottesville’s leaders recently had voted to remove Lee’s statue from the downtown park that no longer carried his name. Spencer and his crew opposed that effort and everything they thought it implied, including hostility to the legacy of whiteness. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were similarly motivated by the perceived threat to American whiteness. Its members — 50 strong — converged on Charlottesville that July to march around and shout “white power” as hundreds of counter protesters responded with “racists go home.” How did the mad ravings of a bunch of intellectually confused, racially paranoid misfits end up spurring a national debate over the limits of free speech, the meaning of the First Amendment, and the moral obligation of the president of the United States? One reason is that — despite Kessler’s efforts to cast himself as the Martin Luther King Jr. of white rights — the rally engendered fears of made-for-TV-scale violence. As news of the event spread, and some sense of its size became clear, several local businesses announced they would temporarily close out of concern for the safety of their customers and employees. The University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville, asked students to stay away. Many rally participants showed up armed with rifles and other deadly weapons (thanks to Virginia’s open carry laws). Indeed, even before the rally’s scheduled noon start time, Kessler’s congregation had ignited so much hostility and ugliness that local authorities labeled the gathering an “illegal assembly” and ordered participants to leave. In the end, the racist, anti-Semitic hate-fest caused three deaths. Two of the dead were state troopers. Berke Bates and H. Jay Cullen, assigned to monitor the gathering from the sky, died when their helicopter crashed. The third victim was Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Adolf Hitler fanatic from Ohio, killed Heyer by intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of counter protesters — injuring some 19 people in addition to Heyer, who died from blunt-force injury to her chest. Following the tragedy, Donald Trump famously condemned the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” His words provoked a controversy that went on for months as Trump proved incapable of criticizing the racist mob without also condemning those who opposed it. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, was so sickened by the president’s words that she refused to take his condolence call. “I’m sorry. After what he said about my child,” Bro told CNN, and added, incredulously, “I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the [counter] protesters … with the KKK and the white supremacists.” James Fields’ lawyers sought mitigation by stressing his history of mental illness. A psychologist testified that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 6 and later with schizoid personality disorder. His lawyers also delved into his childhood traumas, which included coping with the murder of his grandmother by his grandfather, who had subsequently killed himself. “James’s mental illness causes him to lose emotional and behavioral control in stressful situations,” said his attorneys, who claimed he had taken himself off his meds when he was 18, meaning he was medically untethered when he murdered Heyer. After pleading guilty, Fields received two life sentences — one in state court and the other in federal court. Even with Fields confined to prison, questions raised by Heyer’s murder — and the rally that caused it — reverberated. Trump’s troubling insistence on calling bullying bigots “very fine people” was perhaps inevitable given his need to placate a base that contains more than its share of people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who promoted the rally as an effort to “take our country back” and who, after Heyer’s murder, thanked Trump via tweet for his “honesty & courage.” Duke also tweeted, “This is why WE LOVE TRUMP and WHY the FAKE NEWS MEDIA HATES TRUMP. He brings to light what the lying, Fake News Media Won’t. The truth is the media covers up horrific numbers of racist hate crimes against White people!” But putting the president and his behavior aside for the moment, what about the free speech community — the civil libertarians who successfully fought in court for Kessler’s right to hold his rally in downtown Charlottesville? The city had wanted to move Kessler’s parade of bigotry to another park, one farther from the heart of town that officials claimed would be easier to police. But Kessler had said no; and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with a local outfit called the Rutherford Institute, had sued the city on Kessler’s behalf. Following the event, the ACLU was heavily criticized — and also lauded — for standing up for the racist rabble-rousers. Glenn Greenwald, best known for reporting on U.S. surveillance programs brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcefully defended the ACLU. Civil liberties advocates, he argued, “defend the rights of those with views we hate in order to strengthen our defense of the rights of those who are most marginalized and vulnerable in society.” Others were not so sure. The Guardian reported on an erosion in “the belief that the KKK and other white supremacist organizations are operating within the bounds of acceptable political discourse — rather than as, say, terrorist organizations — and therefore have a moral right to be heard.” Jessica Clarke, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, pointed to studies showing that bigots routinely hid behind free speech arguments as a cover for racism. Highly prejudiced people, she noted, “were less likely to voice First Amendment objections when the threatened speech was race-neutral, suggesting their free speech concerns were more about the freedom to express racist prejudice than free speech in general.” Legal scholar Laura Weinrib noted that the ACLU had never blindly supported free speech but had done so in the fight for a better society; and she wondered whether “a dogged commitment to free speech” was still the best strategy for an organization pursuing social justice: “The balances have shifted dramatically since the 1930s. In recent years, nearly half of First Amendment victories have gone to corporations and trade groups challenging government regulation. Free speech has served to secure the political influence of wealthy donors. Labor’s strength has plummeted, and the Supreme Court is poised to recognize a First Amendment right of public sector employees to refuse to contribute to union expenses. Long-settled principles of American democracy are newly vulnerable, and hate has found fertile terrain.” Even Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, questioned whether old assumptions about free speech still applied: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims — the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out — still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” Leslie Mehta, the young black attorney who was legal director of the ACLU of Virginia when it took the Kessler case, seemed confident, when I interviewed her in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, that she had made the right decision. “There were certainly lots of conversations between myself and the executive director. There were a lot of revisions back and forth with briefs and having discussions about potential implications, but nobody has a crystal ball and no one [knew] exactly what [would] ultimately happen. I do think that the First Amendment has to mean something. And at the time, it was my understanding … that there was no evidence that there would be violence.” Mehta, a native of Woodland, North Carolina, is intimately familiar with the South and with the United States’ legacy of brutal racial oppression. She went to historically black Howard University School of Law because of its reputation for creating lawyers devoted to “social activism and social justice.” But she also is adamantly committed to the idea of free speech. “I think one of the reasons why free speech is so important to me is because … it exposes what you disagree with. And for me, I think it’s important to hear things like our president saying … ‘Well, there are good people on both sides.’” Mehta also thought it was important to consult with her mother and her 92-year-old grandmother as she proceeded with the Kessler case. Her grandmother, she confided, “never said that she fully agreed or disagreed [with Mehta taking the case], but she did not think that I was wrong.” As anyone trying to understand the Charlottesville fiasco quickly discovers, the issue of speech — particularly in a society polluted by racism and largely defined by economic inequality — is endlessly complex. So let me begin this journey with a brief exploration of how the U.S. came to embrace such a broad notion of free speech, and let’s look at some decisions made in its name. ••• We tend to think our current conception of free speech has been around essentially since the beginning of the republic. In truth, our firm and collective embrace of the First Amendment is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Constitution was drafted at a time when the Founders had rejected foreign tyranny. They were wary of the potential power of a centralized state. So the Bill of Rights was a balancing act, weighing not only the rights of individuals versus government in general but also the rights of states versus the federal government. Indeed, at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment did not apply to the states. As legal scholar David Yassky has pointed out, the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech was “quite weak — at least to contemporary eyes. A citizen in 1800 had no absolute right to free speech; if the speech-restricting law was a state law, the Constitution was silent.” Eventually that changed, and that had a lot to do with the Civil War, the end of slavery, the 14th Amendment, and assorted court decisions. But even after the Reconstruction era, free speech, as we understand it today, was nothing but an aspiration, which is one reason that Southern states could effectively outlaw agitation for abolition. Free speech is very much an invention of the 20th century. And that concept of speech is very idealistic, inextricably linked to the notion that in the competition of ideas, good ideas generally crowd out bad. That argument received its most famous articulation in a 1927 case: Whitney v. California. At its center was Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy California blueblood convicted of joining the Communist Party. She argued that her prosecution violated the Constitution. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. But even in disagreeing with her position, Louis Brandeis (joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) produced a brilliant and eloquent exegesis on the potential of free speech to enact social change: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine.” As Brandeis saw it, free speech was virtually a sacred right and an awesomely powerful force that would expose “falsehood and fallacies” and “avert … evil by the processes of education.” Hence, the remedy to bad speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” That piece of writing has been deemed one of the most important commentaries ever crafted on the First Amendment. But Brandeis assumed something that has not been borne out by facts, which is that the better argument would generally win. He also assumed that relevant people on all sides of a question were equally capable of being heard and that skeptics were interested in listening. That fallacy continues to inform the thinking of those who see speech as inherently self-correcting. Much as many of us admire Louis Brandeis’s mind and spirit, the society he envisioned has never existed. Instead, we have created a society in which lying is both endemic and purposeful. We have brought the worst values of advertising into the political sphere and wedded that to long-established tactics of political propaganda, even as our political class has learned to use social media to spread disinformation that propagates at a breathtaking rate. The very idea that political speech would expose and therefore vanquish “falsehood and fallacies” now seems incredibly naïve. Free speech always had limits. But because of our new technological reality, because of the unexpected weaponization of speech, we are having to consider those limits in a new light. We live in a world where it is far from clear that the answer to bad speech is more speech; and where a foreign power, thanks to our freedom of expression, may well be responsible for the election of a U.S. president. We live in a time when a frightened white minority within the larger white majority fights to maintain control of our country; and when large corporations and cynical functionaries — eager to exploit fear — have a bigger megaphone (including their own television news networks) than anyone speaking for the powerless and dispossessed. We live in an era when the U.S. awarded its presidency to a man who lost the election by roughly 3 million votes, and who, with the cooperation of a submissive Senate, has appointed judges determined to thwart the will of the public; has proposed policies, supported largely by lies, designed to further divide an already polarized nation; and caters to an irrational mob whose most fanatical elements want to refight the Civil War. All of this raises a host of difficult questions: If the Brandeisian view of speech is fatally flawed, what is a better, or at least a more realistic, view? Is it possible to reverse these trends that are destroying our democracy? How do we balance an array of important societal values that compete with the value of free speech? How, in short, do we enable a relatively enlightened majority to rescue our country from an embittered, backward-looking minority? And what happens to speech — which has never been totally free — in the process?

Excerpt adapted from The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose. Published by Amistad. Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins.

Published September 21, 2020 at 01:40PM via ACLU (https://ift.tt/3iRPsAm) via ACLU

[nancydhooper]

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

No one expected their words to be enlightening or their tone harmonious. Hatred rarely comes in such flavors. It spills out as an ugly, incoherent mess infused with the rotten odor of willful ignorance. And so it was with the Nazi wannabes — self-styled white supremacists determined to make their mark on the world, committed to convincing anyone who might listen that their superiority was both evident and inevitable. The setting was downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017. Their mission was unity — of like-minded hate mongers. Their leader, Jason Kessler, was a 33-year-old who lived with his parents and had once supported Barack Obama. He had learned that many demographers thought whites would eventually become a minority race in the United States. That news was so unsettling that Kessler remade himself into a white-rights activist. He styled himself as “a civil and human rights advocate, focused on the Caucasian demographic” in the mode of “Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi.” His “Unite the Right” rally, observed the Christian Science Monitor, “was supposed to be the movement’s coming out party, an emergence from the shadows of internet chat rooms into the national spotlight.” Kessler was inspired in part by fellow University of Virginia graduate and white supremacist Richard Spencer who, in May 2017, led a band of racists in Charlottesville chanting “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi-inspired slogan. Why they were enamored of Russia is anyone’s guess; I presume it had something to do with President Trump. The reason for the Nazi chant was evident; they thought it allowed them to channel the spirit of General Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned the U.S. Army in a doomed quest to preserve race-based slavery in the South. Charlottesville’s leaders recently had voted to remove Lee’s statue from the downtown park that no longer carried his name. Spencer and his crew opposed that effort and everything they thought it implied, including hostility to the legacy of whiteness. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were similarly motivated by the perceived threat to American whiteness. Its members — 50 strong — converged on Charlottesville that July to march around and shout “white power” as hundreds of counter protesters responded with “racists go home.” How did the mad ravings of a bunch of intellectually confused, racially paranoid misfits end up spurring a national debate over the limits of free speech, the meaning of the First Amendment, and the moral obligation of the president of the United States? One reason is that — despite Kessler’s efforts to cast himself as the Martin Luther King Jr. of white rights — the rally engendered fears of made-for-TV-scale violence. As news of the event spread, and some sense of its size became clear, several local businesses announced they would temporarily close out of concern for the safety of their customers and employees. The University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville, asked students to stay away. Many rally participants showed up armed with rifles and other deadly weapons (thanks to Virginia’s open carry laws). Indeed, even before the rally’s scheduled noon start time, Kessler’s congregation had ignited so much hostility and ugliness that local authorities labeled the gathering an “illegal assembly” and ordered participants to leave. In the end, the racist, anti-Semitic hate-fest caused three deaths. Two of the dead were state troopers. Berke Bates and H. Jay Cullen, assigned to monitor the gathering from the sky, died when their helicopter crashed. The third victim was Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Adolf Hitler fanatic from Ohio, killed Heyer by intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of counter protesters — injuring some 19 people in addition to Heyer, who died from blunt-force injury to her chest. Following the tragedy, Donald Trump famously condemned the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” His words provoked a controversy that went on for months as Trump proved incapable of criticizing the racist mob without also condemning those who opposed it. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, was so sickened by the president’s words that she refused to take his condolence call. “I’m sorry. After what he said about my child,” Bro told CNN, and added, incredulously, “I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the [counter] protesters … with the KKK and the white supremacists.” James Fields’ lawyers sought mitigation by stressing his history of mental illness. A psychologist testified that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 6 and later with schizoid personality disorder. His lawyers also delved into his childhood traumas, which included coping with the murder of his grandmother by his grandfather, who had subsequently killed himself. “James’s mental illness causes him to lose emotional and behavioral control in stressful situations,” said his attorneys, who claimed he had taken himself off his meds when he was 18, meaning he was medically untethered when he murdered Heyer. After pleading guilty, Fields received two life sentences — one in state court and the other in federal court. Even with Fields confined to prison, questions raised by Heyer’s murder — and the rally that caused it — reverberated. Trump’s troubling insistence on calling bullying bigots “very fine people” was perhaps inevitable given his need to placate a base that contains more than its share of people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who promoted the rally as an effort to “take our country back” and who, after Heyer’s murder, thanked Trump via tweet for his “honesty & courage.” Duke also tweeted, “This is why WE LOVE TRUMP and WHY the FAKE NEWS MEDIA HATES TRUMP. He brings to light what the lying, Fake News Media Won’t. The truth is the media covers up horrific numbers of racist hate crimes against White people!” But putting the president and his behavior aside for the moment, what about the free speech community — the civil libertarians who successfully fought in court for Kessler’s right to hold his rally in downtown Charlottesville? The city had wanted to move Kessler’s parade of bigotry to another park, one farther from the heart of town that officials claimed would be easier to police. But Kessler had said no; and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with a local outfit called the Rutherford Institute, had sued the city on Kessler’s behalf. Following the event, the ACLU was heavily criticized — and also lauded — for standing up for the racist rabble-rousers. Glenn Greenwald, best known for reporting on U.S. surveillance programs brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcefully defended the ACLU. Civil liberties advocates, he argued, “defend the rights of those with views we hate in order to strengthen our defense of the rights of those who are most marginalized and vulnerable in society.” Others were not so sure. The Guardian reported on an erosion in “the belief that the KKK and other white supremacist organizations are operating within the bounds of acceptable political discourse — rather than as, say, terrorist organizations — and therefore have a moral right to be heard.” Jessica Clarke, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, pointed to studies showing that bigots routinely hid behind free speech arguments as a cover for racism. Highly prejudiced people, she noted, “were less likely to voice First Amendment objections when the threatened speech was race-neutral, suggesting their free speech concerns were more about the freedom to express racist prejudice than free speech in general.” Legal scholar Laura Weinrib noted that the ACLU had never blindly supported free speech but had done so in the fight for a better society; and she wondered whether “a dogged commitment to free speech” was still the best strategy for an organization pursuing social justice: “The balances have shifted dramatically since the 1930s. In recent years, nearly half of First Amendment victories have gone to corporations and trade groups challenging government regulation. Free speech has served to secure the political influence of wealthy donors. Labor’s strength has plummeted, and the Supreme Court is poised to recognize a First Amendment right of public sector employees to refuse to contribute to union expenses. Long-settled principles of American democracy are newly vulnerable, and hate has found fertile terrain.” Even Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, questioned whether old assumptions about free speech still applied: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims — the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out — still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” Leslie Mehta, the young black attorney who was legal director of the ACLU of Virginia when it took the Kessler case, seemed confident, when I interviewed her in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, that she had made the right decision. “There were certainly lots of conversations between myself and the executive director. There were a lot of revisions back and forth with briefs and having discussions about potential implications, but nobody has a crystal ball and no one [knew] exactly what [would] ultimately happen. I do think that the First Amendment has to mean something. And at the time, it was my understanding … that there was no evidence that there would be violence.” Mehta, a native of Woodland, North Carolina, is intimately familiar with the South and with the United States’ legacy of brutal racial oppression. She went to historically black Howard University School of Law because of its reputation for creating lawyers devoted to “social activism and social justice.” But she also is adamantly committed to the idea of free speech. “I think one of the reasons why free speech is so important to me is because … it exposes what you disagree with. And for me, I think it’s important to hear things like our president saying … ‘Well, there are good people on both sides.’” Mehta also thought it was important to consult with her mother and her 92-year-old grandmother as she proceeded with the Kessler case. Her grandmother, she confided, “never said that she fully agreed or disagreed [with Mehta taking the case], but she did not think that I was wrong.” As anyone trying to understand the Charlottesville fiasco quickly discovers, the issue of speech — particularly in a society polluted by racism and largely defined by economic inequality — is endlessly complex. So let me begin this journey with a brief exploration of how the U.S. came to embrace such a broad notion of free speech, and let’s look at some decisions made in its name. ••• We tend to think our current conception of free speech has been around essentially since the beginning of the republic. In truth, our firm and collective embrace of the First Amendment is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Constitution was drafted at a time when the Founders had rejected foreign tyranny. They were wary of the potential power of a centralized state. So the Bill of Rights was a balancing act, weighing not only the rights of individuals versus government in general but also the rights of states versus the federal government. Indeed, at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment did not apply to the states. As legal scholar David Yassky has pointed out, the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech was “quite weak — at least to contemporary eyes. A citizen in 1800 had no absolute right to free speech; if the speech-restricting law was a state law, the Constitution was silent.” Eventually that changed, and that had a lot to do with the Civil War, the end of slavery, the 14th Amendment, and assorted court decisions. But even after the Reconstruction era, free speech, as we understand it today, was nothing but an aspiration, which is one reason that Southern states could effectively outlaw agitation for abolition. Free speech is very much an invention of the 20th century. And that concept of speech is very idealistic, inextricably linked to the notion that in the competition of ideas, good ideas generally crowd out bad. That argument received its most famous articulation in a 1927 case: Whitney v. California. At its center was Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy California blueblood convicted of joining the Communist Party. She argued that her prosecution violated the Constitution. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. But even in disagreeing with her position, Louis Brandeis (joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) produced a brilliant and eloquent exegesis on the potential of free speech to enact social change: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine.” As Brandeis saw it, free speech was virtually a sacred right and an awesomely powerful force that would expose “falsehood and fallacies” and “avert … evil by the processes of education.” Hence, the remedy to bad speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” That piece of writing has been deemed one of the most important commentaries ever crafted on the First Amendment. But Brandeis assumed something that has not been borne out by facts, which is that the better argument would generally win. He also assumed that relevant people on all sides of a question were equally capable of being heard and that skeptics were interested in listening. That fallacy continues to inform the thinking of those who see speech as inherently self-correcting. Much as many of us admire Louis Brandeis’s mind and spirit, the society he envisioned has never existed. Instead, we have created a society in which lying is both endemic and purposeful. We have brought the worst values of advertising into the political sphere and wedded that to long-established tactics of political propaganda, even as our political class has learned to use social media to spread disinformation that propagates at a breathtaking rate. The very idea that political speech would expose and therefore vanquish “falsehood and fallacies” now seems incredibly naïve. Free speech always had limits. But because of our new technological reality, because of the unexpected weaponization of speech, we are having to consider those limits in a new light. We live in a world where it is far from clear that the answer to bad speech is more speech; and where a foreign power, thanks to our freedom of expression, may well be responsible for the election of a U.S. president. We live in a time when a frightened white minority within the larger white majority fights to maintain control of our country; and when large corporations and cynical functionaries — eager to exploit fear — have a bigger megaphone (including their own television news networks) than anyone speaking for the powerless and dispossessed. We live in an era when the U.S. awarded its presidency to a man who lost the election by roughly 3 million votes, and who, with the cooperation of a submissive Senate, has appointed judges determined to thwart the will of the public; has proposed policies, supported largely by lies, designed to further divide an already polarized nation; and caters to an irrational mob whose most fanatical elements want to refight the Civil War. All of this raises a host of difficult questions: If the Brandeisian view of speech is fatally flawed, what is a better, or at least a more realistic, view? Is it possible to reverse these trends that are destroying our democracy? How do we balance an array of important societal values that compete with the value of free speech? How, in short, do we enable a relatively enlightened majority to rescue our country from an embittered, backward-looking minority? And what happens to speech — which has never been totally free — in the process?

Excerpt adapted from The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose. Published by Amistad. Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/the-short-life-and-curious-death-of-free-speech-in-america via http://www.rssmix.com/

[loyallogic]

Analysis of the ‘rarest of rare doctrine’ in awarding death penalty

 This article is written by Pubali Chatterjee and Sayani Das, from Amity University, Kolkata.

Introduction

There is no strait-jacket formula for the application of the ‘rarest of rare doctrine’. In a criminal case, the trial consists of two main essentials i.e., the nature and the gravity of the crime. Based on the two essentials the magnitude of the punishment can be carved out. The Judicature of India is under a commitment to find some kind of harmony among aggravating and mitigating conditions on one hand and cry of the general public on the other and also to add the grounds should be remarkably sound so that there is no option left other than death penalty. In recent times, the Apex Court has maintained capital punishment granted to the blamed for Nirbhaya rape-cum-murder case subsequent to calling it as “rarest of rare” case and outrageous discipline is conceded for guaranteeing equity. In India, “rarest of rare” regulation is the measuring stick for giving the death penalty. 

The Indian laws don’t hold a consistent point of view of the death penalty yet neither do they deter it totally. Capital punishment in India has been limited to the rarest of rare cases- like Section 121 (taking up arms against the state), Section 302 (murder), Section 364A (kidnapping with ransom), and so on of the Indian Penal Code 1860, recommend offenses culpable with the death penalty. The most widely recognized cases including significant death row convicts are fear based oppression and assault cum murder cases. The ‘rarest of rare doctrine’ can be divided into two sub-parts: Aggravating circumstances and Mitigating circumstances- in case of aggravating conditions, the Judge may on his will force capital punishment yet for Mitigating conditions, the Bench will not grant capital punishment under rarest of rare cases.

Inception of the ‘rarest of rare doctrine’

In Nathuram Godse v Crown (Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi) -the instance of Nathuram Godse is the principal instance of rarest of rare nature that occurred in free India. On the night of 30th January 1948, Nathuram Godse shot dead Mahatma Gandhi in a petition meeting at Birla Mandir in Delhi. After a delayed preliminary, Justice Amarnath granted him capital punishment which was collectively affirmed by the three adjudicators of Punjab High Court.

In Kehar Singh v Delhi Administration, the apex court affirmed capital punishment granted by the trial court and kept up by High Court to the three appellants Kehar Singh, Balbir Singh and Satwant Singh for planning conspiracy and attaining murder of Smt. Indira Gandhi u/s 302, 120B, 34, 107 and 109 of IPC. The court held that the homicide is the rarest of rare cases in which extraordinary punishment is called for a professional killer and his schemers. 

In the astonishing instance of Santosh Kumar Singh v Union Territory of Delhi (Mattoo Murder case), however Santosh Kumar Singh was indicted for raping the person in question and breaking each bone in her body his conduct was as yet not considered savage enough to mark the case “rarest of rare”.  

In India, a death penalty used to be compulsory u/s 303 of IPC. In any case, in 1983 Supreme Court in Mithu Singh v State of Punjab proclaimed segment 303 ultra vires the Constitution on the ground that it abuses article 14 as likewise right to life presented under article 21.

Click Above

Application of the doctrine

The detailing of rarest of rare, much the same as some other subject, isn’t liberated from analysis by others. Numerous adversaries have called attention to a perspective on this principle being vague and dependent upon different translations. A strong analysis emerged from Justice Bhagwati himself who as he would like to think forewarned saying, such a basis would offer ascent to a more noteworthy measure of subjectivity in dynamic and would settle on the choice whether an individual will live happy on the organization of the Bench. He fights the way that the life of a wrongdoer depending on the psyches of seat is plainly violative of the Fundamental Rights revered in Article 14 and 21 of the Indian Constitution. 

It has likewise been contended that the choices corresponding to this regulation are given subjectively. For example, when an individual, associating the loyalty with his better half cut off her head and executed her, the Supreme Court had no uncertainty in ordering it as a rarest of rare case and forcing death.

The choice in Amruta v. State of Maharashtra gets pertinent here, as a situation where the court would not give demise in any event, when it included comparative realities as the case previously mentioned. The court decided that a determined, heartless and ruthless homicide of a young lady of extremely youthful age subsequent to submitting assault on her without a doubt fell in the classification of rarest of rare. 

But in Kumudi Lal v. State of U.P, which is likewise a case including assault and murder of a fourteen-year-old young lady, the court wouldn’t affirm capital punishment. In Amrit Singh v. State of Punjab, a young lady was fiercely assaulted. She passed on in this manner because of exorbitant dying. Both the District and High court indicted the condemned under section 302 and condemned him to death. In any case, the Supreme Court held that the demise was not deliberate however the assault was severe. 

Analysis of constitutional validity

The lawfulness of capital punishment was solicited just because under the watchful eye of the Apex court on account of Jagmohan Singh v State of Uttar Pradesh. Section 302 of IPC was tested as violative of Article 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution. The Court maintained the sentence of death as constitutional and held that considerably subsequent to expecting that right to life is the establishment stone of the opportunity identified under Article 19 and that no law can be sanctioned which removes the life of an individual except if it is sensible and out in the open intrigue. In this way, it is hard to hold that death penalty as such was outlandish or not required in broad daylight intrigue. In the event that the whole strategy for a criminal preliminary under the CrPC for showing up at a sentence of death is legitimate then the inconvenience of capital punishment as per the technique built up by law can’t be supposed to be illegal. 

It was contended that the Supreme Court in Maneka Gandhi v Union of India, has given another interpretative measurement to Articles 14, 19 and 21, and their interrelationship in each law of reformatory confinement both in its procedural and considerable viewpoint must breeze through the assessment of every one of the three articles. In any case, the Court dismissed this argument. It was held that Article 19 not at all like Article 21, doesn’t manage the right to life and individual freedom and isn’t appropriate for making a decision about the lawfulness of the arrangements of Section 302 IPC. As respects Article 21, it was perceived that in the said article, the establishing fathers perceived the privilege of the State to deny an individual of his life or individual freedom as per just, reasonable, sensible and fair technique set up by law, and there are a few signs in the Constitution which show that the Constitution producers were completely discerning of the presence of capital punishment, for example, Entries 1 and 2 in List II, article 72(1)(c), article 161 and article 34.

Working of the doctrine

The Doctrine of Rarest of Rare came up on account of Bacchan Singh v. State of Punjab. The Supreme Court, for this situation, tried to remove a precept especially for offences at fault with death to diminish the uncertainty for courts in regards to when to go for the most elevated discipline of the land. By most of 4 :1, the defendability of capital punishment was maintained by the Supreme Court and a rule was set out that capital punishment must be encircled distinctly in the rarest of rare cases. However, the extent of this expression was left unclear.

The Ratio Decidendi of Bacchan Singh’s case is that capital punishment is sacred in the event that it is endorsed as an option for the offence of homicide and if the ordinary sentence recommended by law for homicide is detainment forever. This implies capital punishment must be forced on rarest of rare cases where an elective choice is avoided. 

Afterward, on account of Machhi Singh v. State of Punjab the court attempted to set down rules for surveying whether wrongdoing fell into the class of rarest of rare.

In the Macchi Singh’s case, the court set out specific standards for surveying when a case could fall under the ambit of rarest of rare. 

The models are investigated as beneath: 

1. Way of commission of homicide- when the homicide is submitted in an incredibly fierce, detestable, revolting, or unforgivable way in order to stir exceptional and extraordinary anger of the network; for example, 

a. When the victim’s house is determined to fire with the aim to prepare him alive. 

b. At the point when the casualty is tormented to cruel acts so as to realize his/her passing. 

c. At the point when the body of the casualty is ravaged or cut in pieces in a ruthless way. 

2. Rationale in the commission of homicide When all out evil and savagery are the thought processes behind a homicide.

3. Socially despicable nature of the wrongdoing: When a homicide of an individual having a place with one of the regressive classes is submitted. 

4. Size of the wrongdoing when the extent of the wrongdoing is gigantic, for example, in instances of numerous homicides. 

5. Character of casualty of homicide When the homicide casualty is a blameless youngster, a vulnerable lady or individual (because of mature age or sickness), an open figure, and so forth.

For the situation of Santosh Kumar Bariyar v. State of Maharashtra, the Supreme Court decided that, the rarest of rare decree fills in as a rule in upholding Section 354(3) and sets up the arrangement that life detainment is the standard and demise discipline is an exception. Section 303 of the Indian Penal Code commanded capital punishment for all guilty parties carrying out an actual existence punishment. This segment was struck down as being held illegal. The year 2008 represented the instance of Prajeet Kumar Singh v. State of Bihar, wherein the court governed precisely on what might comprise a rarest of rare case.

The Court held that a capital punishment would be granted just, when a homicide is submitted in a very ruthless, unusual or obnoxious way in order to excite serious and extraordinary irateness of the community.

Conclusion

The authors submissively present the accompanying suggestions so as to direct and moderate the discussions relating and rotating around the Doctrine of Rarest of Rare: 

1. Normalized rules ought to be set down:

A uniform rule should be set out that envelops grounds under which cases can be distinguished as rarest of rare.

2. The choice must be taken with due consideration and sensibility: 

While granting the discipline of capital punishment, it must be remembered that, in spite of the fact that, the charged has submitted a ruthless demonstration, if there is any opportunity that demonstrates that the blamed will not deliver further mischief to the general public, on this ground, he/she should not be given the death penalty. 

3. Capital punishment ought not be postponed after its declaration: 

In Triveni Bai v. Territory of Gujarat[1], the Supreme Court held that the execution procedure must be postponed on sensible grounds, so the accused may get a reasonable preliminary. In any case, it is recommended that there ought not be any deferral after the proclamation of capital punishment. This does not imply that the blame ought not be given the option to claim however it ought to be open just for a particular period. As of late what acquire need is the thing that kind of cases ought to be marked as rarest of uncommon. The judgment likewise unmitigatedly uncovered the profound established man centric society. On dissecting the above-expressed choices, it very well may be inferred that the rarest of uncommon precepts has become ‘judge-driven’. It’s an ideal opportunity to reclassify ‘rarest of rare’.[2]

1983 2 SCC 68, http://www.legalserviceindia.com/legal/article-726-the-doctrine-of-rarest-of-the-rare.html, last accessed on August 01 2020 at 20:50 PM.

Raashi.Vaishya, Legal Service India, The Doctrine of Rarest of the Rare, http://www.legalserviceindia.com/legal/article-726-the-doctrine-of-rarest-of-the-rare.html, last accessed on August 01 2020 at 19:56 PM.

LawSikho has created a telegram group for exchanging legal knowledge, referrals and various opportunities. You can click on this link and join:

https://t.me/joinchat/J_0YrBa4IBSHdpuTfQO_sA

Follow us on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more amazing legal content.

The post Analysis of the ‘rarest of rare doctrine’ in awarding death penalty appeared first on iPleaders.

Analysis of the ‘rarest of rare doctrine’ in awarding death penalty published first on https://namechangers.tumblr.com/