It is not at all surprising that the nation has not immersed itself in oceans of shock and awe following last week’s two reported vigilante killings. Our minds have long been conditioned to cope with those kinds of depraved acts. After all, the reported beating to death of Nigel Lowe on Wednesday morning and Alfred Munroe the following day mimic a now familiar pattern of men playing God, delivering ‘cowboy justice,’ whether they be officially sanctioned death squads, powerful individuals with scores to settle or ‘average citizens’ like the killers of Lowe and Munroe who are either unable to distinguish between public spiritedness and mob rule, or else are not inclined to make that distinction.
These forms of behaviour have now become sufficiently familiar to us to render what passes for revulsion as acts of theatre, contrived, perhaps, to mask our refusal to concede what we have become ‒ a nation that cannot confront some deeply shameful truths about ourselves.
What we fear are the even more disturbing contradictions that these truths might bear, like the paradox of a Guyana Police Force that now finds itself compelled to issue a public refrain against acts of vigilantism in circumstances where the Force itself stands accused of circumventing due process and opting for resort to summary justice.
The same summary justice is applied with monotonous regularity in some of the more remote parts of the Republic in the goldfields, where men accused of stealing must face the terminal justice of ‘the bush’ which, so often lies beyond the jurisdiction of legitimate law enforcement. Sometimes, perhaps more often than we think, lives go unaccounted for.
It begs the question as to whether many more of us than we care to admit have not, in fact, come to believe that there is really nothing wrong with resort to the practice of placing our own arbitrary value on human life as happened when Lowe and Munroe were slaughtered in cold blood and as has happened in various other places at different times.
Time was when such acts truly shocked us. That is no longer the case. What is probably closer to the truth is that worryingly large numbers of us may now have come to embrace these acts of rough justice; so that rather than recoil in horror we are far more inclined to apply a kind of ‘just deserts’ line of reasoning that inclines us towards justifying, even ‘celebrating’ acts like the killings of Lowe and Munroe as if they were the perfectly correct thing for the perpetrators to have done. That line of argument is as abhorrent as the killings themselves.
It seems, too often, that we are prepared to embrace due process only insofar as we find it satisfying to do so; and when we don’t, when we become sufficiently seized of our own anger, our own irrationality and our own sense of arbitrariness, we clinically set due process aside, supplanting it with our own misguided sense of right and wrong, even when those conclusions are arrived at in circumstances of frenzy and irrationality. At that point we cross a line into the realm of mob rule.
Perhaps the real truth is that too many of us are morally incapable of persuading ourselves that there is no moral or legal currency in summary justice. Once our feet are set firmly on that path we – our society as a whole – find it relatively easy to take the law into our own hands and to apply it as we see fit, not recognizing, it seems that in doing so we, in effect, push our community inexorably in the direction of mob rule.
This applies as much in the instance of the mauling of a daytime ‘trunker’ by incensed and usually law-abiding citizens as it does in the savage beating to death of thieves, would-be thieves or suspected thieves (men like Lowe and Munroe) in some quiet community under the cover of early morning darkness by mobs of frenzied residents who, afterwards, wash away the evidence of their shameful exertions and return to their lives in the mainstream, perhaps persuaded that those exertions were in the cause of pursuing some civic duty.
The just deserts rationalization that accounted for two lives on two consecutive days last week will not be rolled back that easily. It is already deeply embedded in the hearts and minds of people some of whom are – apart from being ‘believers’ ‒ equipped with both the power and the means to arrogate to themselves the authority to set aside the laws of the land and impose their own rough justice. Then there are others who exist in far greater numbers and who, perhaps following on what they consider to be a worthwhile example, have come to believe that justice can be taking the law into their own hands.
If changing hearts and minds might be a more onerous pursuit, the least we can do is to be unceasing in our reminders that instances like the killings of Lowe and Munroe are nothing more or less than calculated acts of lawlessness for which the perpetrators must be made to account. That is what the law dictates.
