Nick
Catalano is a TV writer/producer and Professor of Literature
and Music at Pace University. He reviews books and music for
several journals and is the author of Clifford
Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter,
New
York Nights: Performing, Producing and Writing in Gotham
, A
New Yorker at Sea,, Tales
of a Hamptons Sailor and his most recent book,
Scribble
from the Apple. For Nick's reviews, visit his
website: www.nickcatalano.net
This last phrase of the American pledge of allegiance aspires
to an ideal which the world is further from attaining than
ever before. Because of huge population increases, crowded
urban centers, increasing demi-wars and conflicts, complex
business and personal relationships, and corrupt governments,
any semblance of utopian justice seems more elusive than ever.
Instances of injustice
proceed from universally observable events to personal tragedies.
Examples of some that many have witnessed through the years
can help illustrate the scope of the issue.
On December 21,
1988 a U.S. jetliner exploded from a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie
Scotland killing 270 people including 189 Americans. Most
of the latter were college students studying abroad. Although
instances of terrorist bombings were common during that time,
I was particularly horrified because I was teaching my own
university students a travel course and we all traveled to
Europe together every spring for my seminar. As time went
on, investigations revealed that the bomb was planted by Libyan
terrorists.
It has been 32
years since this catastrophe and scores of international law
enforcement agencies have failed to bring the perpetrators
to justice. The case was recently reported by a PBS Frontline
journalist who lost a brother on the flight -- Pan Am 103.
Several of my students from that time emailed me to share
their despair at the injustice that has occurred for so many
years.
A few years ago
in these pages I wrote about the age old injustice associated
with the Nazis stealing art from all over Europe during their
reign of terror. I reviewed the George Clooney film The
Monuments Men which exposed some of the
more spectacular thefts: Michelangelo’s “Bruges
Madonna,” the Ghent altarpiece, Vermeer’s “The
Artist Studio”, and thousands of works by Renoir, Klimt,
Picasso and every important artist imaginable. The film noted
that much of the art would never be recovered.
At this writing,
a new book from Yale University Press, Goring’s
Man in Paris: The Story of a. Nazi Art Plunderer and His Word,
notes that the original thievery by Hitler’s henchmen
continues its legacy of injustice. Insidiously, during the
past 80 years scores of art dealers, gallery owners and even
famous museums have perpetuated this injustice enabling generations
of new thieves as they ignore factual reports of stolen art
in their possession.
Even when there
has existed advanced civilized mechanisms to counter the vast
array of social injustices history records colossal failures.
After the American civil war fought mainly to eliminate slavery,
the Congress enacted measures to enforce the liberation of
former slaves. These measures collectivized under the label
“Reconstruction” included the fourteenth amendment
(1868) providing former slaves with national citizenship and
the fifteenth amendment (1870) granting black men the right
to vote. These laws were included in the Reconstruction Act
of 1867 which needed the override of a veto by President Andrew
Johnson.
Northern military
units were dispatched to enforce the Reconstruction edicts
but after a few years the troops were withdrawn. Immediately,
southerners returned to their abuse of freed blacks; courts
and jurists seldom wavered from their urgent need to solidify
white supremacy. The judiciaries upheld a double standard
of justice for whites and blacks while police forces eagerly
enforced monstrous racial abuses. Enormous horrors occurred
from widespread lynchings to ordinary bus ride restrictions
of blacks.
These and vastly
more well-documented abuses continued unabatedly for over
30 years until Homer Plessy, a black train rider, refused
to sit in a train car for blacks. He brought charges challenging
the Louisiana Separate Car Act of 1890; this law was typical
of dozens of similar state and local segregation laws throughout
the south. Racial prejudice had been challenged in the network
of southern segregationist courts but no human rights changes
were ever made. However, Plessy’s case somehow made
it to the U.S. Supreme Court. At last, generations of racial
discrimination and hopeless injustice had a golden opportunity
to be changed. Despite a long history of essential human rights
violations, the American dream of “justice for all”
would be realized and blacks could finally receive the moral
compensation long denied them.
Incredibly, in
one of the blackest moments of U.S. Supreme Court history,
the Justices voted to support the network of southern state
segregation laws. In May 1896, in a 7-1 decision, the court
affirmed southern segregation practices maintaining that no
negro civil rights were violated in what they termed “separate
but equal” practices everywhere in the south. It wasn’t
until 1954 in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education that
the court, in a reversal, declared the “separate but
equal” doctrine unconstitutional. But to the present
day, systemic racism remains a practice in the darker corners
of American sociology.
The
shibboleth “Justice delayed is justice denied”
was iterated as far back as the Magna Carta in 1215. I chose
the above instances of injustice because, as in countless
other situations, the delays in righting wrongs continue daily
everywhere unabated.
Although, after
what we have just presented, universal injustice seems as
elusive as ever, some collective idealism does exist in the
international halls of power. 
As
far back as 1899 in the convention of the first Hague Peace
Conference the Hague Tribunal -- the popular name for the
Permanent Court of Arbitration -- was established. Through
the decades The Hague court structure has been updated to
address classic cases of war crimes and other easily identifiable
international injustices. In the recent past the cases of
Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone come to the fore with the Court’s
prosecution for the crimes of presidents Radovan Karadzic
and Charles Taylor. In another area under The Hague aegis
one of their organizations won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013
for their “extensive work to eliminate chemical weapons.”
But make no mistake.
Grossly insufficient support for work of The Hague structures
has been given by world leaders who have historically merely
paid lip service to its existence. Indeed, it remains the
only world organization and hope to remedy universal injustice.
As a new administration comes to Washington, hope exists that
President Biden will find time to initiate new support and
recognition of the work at The Hague.
