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The 1969 Easter Mass Incident

Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention. Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.

As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities. This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.

When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.

Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace. Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on. In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.

For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you. It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass. All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.

“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”

“We’re getting to that.” He waved.

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#funny

standwithdaanes

having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left. having a clear and accessible pathway for people to be socially (if not interpersonally) forgiven is how you get people radicalized against capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy. its how you turn "these people think i am a bad person" into "these people think something and someone coerced or forced me into doing bad things, and these people want to help me do something about that."

if you want more revolutionaries, you must have a system to turn guilty, traumatized, angry bystanders and collaborators into revolutionaries. and I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.

standwithdaanes

#'coerced or forced' is a little too unnuanced for me you are accountable for your actions#but yes everyone needs to have an opportunity to get better#even if that person wasn't coerced or forced in any way actually. yes even then.

to explain what i mean by "coerced":

i think doing things that are morally bad is also bad for the individual. people shouldn't be forced to do things in general, but its especially bad to force someone to do something morally bad. its also bad to coerce them into doing that. and its quite horrific for a system to embed within someone a worldview which habitually leads them to do bad things, and a social system which incentivizes people to do bad things.

this post is in part inspired by reading the book Dirty Work which talks about moral injury & people (largely marginalized people) who do work that is seen as morally "dirty" in society. and specifically the chapter on people who work with drones for the US military (in a variety of ways). one of the major figures was a woman who grew up in poverty and was terrified of dying that way, went to join the military to get to see the world, and ended up working a job requiring her to watch hours and hours of drone footage, including hours of people living their lives, their gruesome deaths, and their families trying to collect their body parts in the aftermath. she recounts how much this weighed on her psychologically and morally, but not only her fear of poverty but also being court-martialed or otherwise subject to punishment if she spoke out or did anything, and her anger at protestors who seemed to be largely middle-class women who directed their protests at individual workers like her. she eventually did become a whistle-blower and says she experienced backlash from the left as well as the right because of her job.

now, this was a difficult read for me. it can be frustrating to read a whole chapter on the suffering of drone operators when so many people in the US don't give the beginning of a fuck about the people who have been getting bombed for years. the trauma of entire countries doesn't outweigh the trauma of a single US soldier. how can we talk about her anger at women protesting drone warfare because it hurts her feelings when we are still having to protest drone warfare that destroys entire families?

and yet. i think that reaction is partially an attempt to avoid the discomfort of how fucked the situation is holistically. the woman clearly had internalized plenty of dehumanizing, imperialistic, racist, and likely Orientalist beliefs and values. but this was hardly something she consciously chose. its easy to say "never join the US military" when you are someone who 1. already had the time and chance to develop a sense of how evil the US military is (not everyone necessarily does) 2. was not and is not in the position of being 17 and worried you'll die of a fentanyl overdose in the next five years like multiple of your classmates and desperate for any opportunity out.

does it make her decision better morally? i don't think so. but why was it a decision she had to make? why did she have so few options? why did things feel so desperate? why did a certain decision seem better and more accessible than others? if we are going up the line of responsibility here, the reason this harmful, morally bad action took place at all is because of the system of US imperialism and capitalism.

the problem is, that answer does not give us A Person To Punish. which we, as people socialized into a worldview of punitive justice, have been taught to want. transformative justice isn't just switching to A Person To Fix, its directing our energy towards social change and collective thinking and acting. that doesn't ignore the individual, but it always sees the individual through a social lens. the ultimate goal is a system which incentivizes the morals we want to see just as much as the current one incentives individualism and authoritarianism and puritanism and imperialism.

i think the perspective that we are coerced, by social systems like imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, etc. into acting immorally and harming others and ourselves, more naturally invites people to see their own racism, sexism, orientalism, classism, etc. as both morally bad and yet not a sign they are bad. it directly counters the idea that saying "the thing you did is racist" means "YOU are racist and EVIL and CONSCIOUSLY DESPISE PEOPLE OF COLOR"*; the point is that the thing you did is racist, and if you don't want to do racist things, then you have to unlearn the shit you were socialized into believing. "coerced" keeps in mind that there are people who benefit from keeping this status quo. if racism is evil, and white supremacist culture means everyone has internalized racist beliefs, that doesn't mean everyone is evil. it means we have all been coerced into participating in evil, and we are demanding an end to that coercion; that is (one form of) accountability.

this perspective can't exist alone, either. it must be paired with a devotion to the victims of these systems. this is why it is a process. the back-and-forth has to be put into action to get a balanced solution. what is best is what practically creates system change, and having process for (again, social) forgiveness is a practical necessity.

*to be clear, this is what people often feel when they are told they did smth racist; that is itself a racist reaction, but one that people do have & i try to think about how practically to get people to get over that reaction & focus on the actual issue at hand

crypticpatterns

i 100% agree with all of this. to be clear, my tags weren't meant to deny anything about how society is coercive and systematically pushes people into doing bad things. only that i still think the choice to get better needs to be accessible even to people who could have chosen better, for one reason or another. (whether someone is allowed to be accepted should not be predicated on whether they were 'enough of a victim,' whatever that means.) and we shouldn't conclude that no one is responsible for their actions--they are. but society as a whole is responsible for the coercion and violence done against them, and the solution to that responsibility is not punishment, but restoration.

standwithdaanes

#prison abolition#the problem is that over and over we are saying we need rehabilitation we need transformative alternatives to prison#but I have yet to see any thorough ideas on what that looks like!#part of the point of Angela y davis's book “are prisons obsolete” is that we cannot imagine a system without punitive justice#she spends 9 chapters explaining why prison is bad#and I'm on board!#and then one paragraph on what we could do instead???#girl YOURE the expert you gotta have some ideas about this because I'm coming up blank!!#yeah we need transformative justice. how do we change what we have into that. or even just What does that look like when we get there???#seriously if anyone has a genuine proposal on this I want to read it

(gonna add what i wrote in another reblog here):

i want to highlight something important: societies where sexual violence was essentially unthinkable and extremely rare have existed (one example here). societies where restorative justice was the status quo have existed. these are not just new speculative theories on how we could live, it is based on how human beings have lived already. we are not starting from scratch here. we have lived like this before and we can live like this again.

from Histories of Kanatha: Seen and Told by Georges Sioui, a historian from the Wendat Nation of what is currently Canada:

Two of Achiganaga’s sons readily admitted that they, along with the Menominee, had killed the Frenchmen and barely covered the bodies with branches, then left the broken canoe at a distance to create the appearance of an accident. Although Dulhut tried to implicate Achiganaga, all others agreed that the father himself had no part in the incident. When Dulhut announced at the end of the council that the three guilty men should be executed, the assembled Indians refused to approve the verdict. For the next three days, the Indians took counsel among themselves. To the Indian people gathered at Sault Ste. Marie, the punitive methods of European law seemed wrong: two murders are not settled by committing three more. In their view, the initial injury to society—to all the people—should be healed and not compounded; the rip in the social fabric should be mended and not enlarged. To restore balance to society, Indian people in northeastern North America have two basic strategies: first, to provide gifts and services to compensate for the loss, and, second, to turn over actual human beings to the person who has suffered the loss: that is, to give lives to take the place of the lives lost. In Indian figures of speech, action is taken, either to ‘cover the dead’ with gifts as a form of restitution, or ‘raise up the dead’ by replacing a life lost with another human life. Everyone has a stake in restoring harmony, in making the social order whole again.

& this comes from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, quoting a French Jesuit missionary's observation of the Wendat people & conceding that their non-punitive justice system worked better at creating social harmony than the French justice system:

"I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger …" Lallemant’s account gives a sense of just how politically challenging some of the material to be found in the Jesuit Relations must have been to European audiences of the time, and why so many found it fascinating. After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’. Wendat ‘captains’, as Lallemant then goes on to describe, ‘urge their subjects to provide what is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.’ More remarkable still, he concedes: ‘this form of justice restrains all these peoples, and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal punishment of criminals does in France,’ despite being ‘a very mild proceeding, which leaves individuals in such a spirit of liberty that they never submit to any Laws and obey no other impulse than that of their own will’.

i am not going to sit here and say that i can explain exactly how sex offenders would be treated in some hypothetical version of society, and i'm not sure of how this worked across the many societies throughout history that have practiced restorative justice. but society and culture truly shapes so much of what we think of as real, possible, how we interpret our experiences, how we relate to others. it's not that everyone will magically become pacifistic and docile and we'll never have any problems - but again, human beings have already lived like this!

in fact, many people are still actively trying to! in spite of its struggles under constant attack and de-legitimization, the restorative justice system of DAANES / Rojava has been afaik quite successful, given the circumstances they are forced to deal with. the system of community arbitration helps prevent a lot of issues from getting to the courts in the first place, it is explicitly designed to protect women's autonomy and the right of women to have a say in topics that impact them, and the focus is overall on doing what is necessary to keep people safe but also believing in the ability of people to change. before the influx of ISIS detainees which caused massive strain on their justice system, they had the second lowest rate of imprisonment for any self-governing region in the world (from here, which goes into detail on how they handled rehabilitation of ISIS affiliates before, well, the Syrian transitional government allowed the escape of many such ISIS affiliates and sympathizers during their violent attack on DAANES recently). If curious, check out this article as well:

Rojava’s restorative legal system offers a different model of community care, seeking to minimize police involvement. Original article publi

(also, from this reblog, which focuses more on how restorative justice frameworks can be weaponized & how Rojava & the Wendat framework try to counteract this):

Notably, both the Wendat and Rojava systems of justice take into account gender in a way that I think is very important for not just gender but how restorative justice needs to deal with marginalization as a whole. In Rojava, any issue regarding women (especially issues of marriage or sexual violence) must have women involved in the justice process from start to finish. On an institutional level, there must be gender parity across systems, including the justice system, and women can seek recourse on the most basic level by going to their local Mala Jin (women's house) to get support from their community. The Mala Jin are required to be consulted in any legal issue concerning women. Similarly, in the Wendat nation and many other nations, women had their own independent councils which had authority over their own issues.

Obviously, gender and race are different issues. But one can easily imagine how "restorative justice" could be used to excuse gendered violence by having a bunch of men demand a woman who was abused by her husband forgive him and prevent divorce. This is why Rojava is modeled the way it is, on every level; ethnic minorities are treated similarly, having their own democratic organizations and positions in councils to ensure they have a collective voice. The (Kurdish, Assyrian, Yazidi, Arab) women of Rojava have meaningful power over their lives and social organization, and they make sure that restorative justice is built to work for marginalized groups, rather than simply assuming the system itself is just so inherently good and moral in theory that everything will work out if its kept gender/race/class neutral.

It's not just a matter of implementing a system and then expecting everyone's mindset to change. Both the Wendat and Rojava systems involve a certain culture that facilitates people engaging in these systems, and the Rojava Revolution has involved dedicated work to spread the political and philosophical framework that underlies its justice system and allow it to function. In cases where restorative justice utterly fails, its a lot of times the result of either a poorly-made framework, people lacking the theoretical/cultural understanding to use that framework properly, or both.

The models of the Wendat and Rojava come from cultures that were/are both communalist and anti-authoritarian. For many Indigenous nations, the idea that someone could be forced to obey a political leader, or even that a child should be forced to obey a parent, was ridiculous and unjust. Leaders had to be constantly generous and persuasive to get people to follow them, and people had the inherent right to refuse orders. That is a very different way of relating to people than in more authoritarian cultures, like most European cultures. So trying to just cut + paste that kind of justice system without adopting any other part of the culture or political framework is obviously going to fail. It is a very European-Enlightenment way of thinking to imagine that if you just build a system that sounds really good and moral in theory, then in practice you can act and think however you want and the system will always spit out good results because it just looks so good on paper (this video from The Alt-Right Playbook isn't really relevant to restorative justice, but it is where I first heard this cultural idea of "the system will Just Work, no matter how many bad ideas are in it!" & I think it explains why a lot of white leftist attempts at various things are shitty. People don't want to put in the effort to do good, they just want a system that lets them act however they want and still feel good).

Any restorative justice system worth its salt should preempt situations like the above. No victim who is marginalized should be in a position where they, alone, have to defend themselves against a group of people who do not share their marginalization, even if those people (claim to) have good intentions. The system should be built specifically with that situation in mind, in order to ensure that no group is able to hoard the power and control what justice looks like. It should be a ground rule that if an incident involves people of a marginalized group, that the system has a way to ensure that group has authority over the proceedings. If the victim is a Black person, step one should be bringing in other Black people to support the victim and ensure that the victim as an individual, and the community as a whole, has not just a perfunctory voice but the power to dictate what restorative justice looks like in that situation.

If an attempt at restorative justice is not foundationally anti-racist and built to force white people to deal with discomfort and distress and social consequences for engaging in racism, it does not deserve respect. When cis/male/white/upper-class people are never made, in a justice system, to do any restorative acts that challenge the privileges they gain from those positions, the only clear end-goal of the process is the victim's forgiveness. And rather than that forgiveness being the natural result of a process that amends the harm done to them, the whole process collapses into "how fast can we get this person to shut up about what they went through?" because the process has been built for the comfort of the offenders, not for restoring harmony in the community to ensure the well-being of all its members. Good restorative justice sees the reform of offenders as a practical way of establishing that safety and harmony for everyone; if it didn't demand anything from the offenders, it would be completely inept. In one of those quotes in that post I linked, the restorative justice process is explicitly meant as an alternative for the victim('s family) demanding violent retribution, with the idea being "if they are not satisfied through restoration, they will demand blood and probably take matters into their own hands, so our restoration system needs to be genuinely effective to keep the peace." There was no assumption that the victim would just have to get whatever the community decides they get and have to deal with it (which ties back to the cultural anti-authoritarianism).

(I hope this helps a bit to give you a sense of what such a framework could look like when lived out!)

standwithdaanes

this post is already long as fuck BUT! I really want to add some stuff from The Politics of Restorative Justice: A Critical Introduction by Andrew Woolford and Amanda Nelund, on restorative justice and neoliberalism:

Restorative justice is suited for co-optation by neoliberal regimes because it can be used for these sorts of affirmative purposes. Restorative justice can siphon off criticisms of and anxieties toward the courts. It can provide a less costly venue for dealing with minor crimes so the retributive system can direct its energies and punitive resources toward what neoliberals consider more serious criminal violations. Thus, restorative justice does not replace the punitive violence of the state; instead, it serves to supplement and help focus this violence on those cases deemed most deserving. In this sense, restorative justice can be useful in helping neoliberal governments contend with a potential contradiction in their strategies of governance. Neoliberal governments need to maintain a sense of being tough on crime, but criminal justice systems are incredibly costly and cumbersome to administer. Restorative justice, therefore, allows these governments to divert less controversial crimes away from the system, while focusing their resources on those that represent, in their view, the greatest public dangers. In this sense, it allows the neoliberal state to rule some offenders with its “left hand,” using more cooperative restorative justice processes, while reserving the punitive might of its “right hand” for “dangerous” others (Wacquant 2001; Bourdieu 1998). An affirmative restorative justice also fails to disrupt dominant patterns for designating risk in our society. The punishing “right hand” of the state is directed predominantly toward working-class, racialized, and marginalized youth who are perceived to be “dangerous” because of their actual or potential involvement in street crimes. Meanwhile, the unacceptable loss of life and large public and personal expense caused by corporate crime is given less criminal justice attention. [...] For these reasons and others, restorativists must be critically aware of the neoliberal discourses that shape the logic of governance in their jurisdictions and must seek to devise strategies to avoid their restorative justice programs being swept away in the sea of neoliberalism and contributing to this growing imbalance. [...]

Affirmative restorative justice can also be used to extending intersecting modes of domination because it might be used to provide only lip service recognition to the injustice experiences of poor, gendered, racialized, and/or lgbtq individuals. In so doing, restorative justice might work to pacify or make less disruptive such individuals, offering them surface inclusion and considera-tion in terms of their specific justice needs without combating the underlying context of domination in which they exist. For example, a restorative justice that is not outwardly transphobic will not address the housing and employment challenges faced by trans people. And a restorative justice program that seeks to introduce “colourblind” practices will do nothing to challenge the system of white advantage within North America. These are important aspects of the context in which restorative justice operates, and a restorative justice that fails to unite with other groups seeking the elimination of intersecting forms of domination will always find itself in the position of serving as a minor salve for major injustices of our social world. A related concern is that restorative justice is, in its own right, a modality of governance. Restorative justice provides insights and tools that allow individuals to better govern themselves. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. What Foucault (1994) refers to as the “care of the self ” can be a reflexive sense of who we are that allows us to disrupt the ways in which power operates upon our minds and bodies. However, the internalized self-governance promoted by restorative justice can also be an imposition of onerous social control if it asks people to become passive and non-confrontational. The fact that conflict resolution techniques can be used to appease and pacify rather than to transform has been noted by several critical scholars (Dyck 2006; Pavlich 1996a, 1996b; Woolford 2005). For example, a university ombudsperson schooled in restorative justice techniques might function as a sort of mediator for student-professor conflicts. If a professor has been accused of sexual harassment of female students, the ombudsperson can convene a confidential mediation session that allows the parties to resolve the problem. The professor may come to understand his actions make the female students uncomfortable, and students may regain a modicum of trust that he will no longer act in this inappropriate manner. However, what has occurred here is remarkably convenient for preserving that status quo state of affairs on the university campus. The issues of professorial power, of chilly climates, and of sexual harassment have all been buried with the resolution of this case as simply an interpersonal conflict. Likewise, an Indigenous nation dealing with widespread sexual violence and addiction within their community may be well aware that the histories of Canadian settler colonialism and residential schooling have played a significant role in provoking these conditions. Nonetheless they may be required or encouraged by state gatekeepers to the circle sentencing process to concentrate their efforts on dealing with the immediate concerns of healing individuals and family from violence and substance abuse, and to leave aside their broader and more time-consuming critique of Canadian settler colonialism. It seems, therefore, that at every step, the transformative power of restorative justice is reduced and exchanged for the (albeit very understandable) pragmatics of resolving the immediate problem. Put in everyday terms, there is nothing inherently wrong with restorative justice promoting that people learn how to communicate effectively and resolve conflicts on their own, unless this is encouraged in a manner where the person does not reflect on the nature of the conflict and seeks instead to automatically resolve conflict, regardless of whether the conflict might serve a productive purpose.

For these reasons, restorative justice must acknowledge it does offer governance, and it must seek to govern well. Gil (2006: 509) discusses this issue: Expanding critical consciousness in everyday social encounters, as well as in professional service settings, involves political discourse. When people interact socially and professionally, their actions and communications can either conform to, or challenge, the social status quo and prevailing patterns of human relations. When people speak and act in accordance with “normal” expectations, they reinforce, by implica-tion, the existing social order and its “common sense” consciousness. According to Gil, restorative justice needs to create opportunities for the “emergence of critical consciousness.” Such a consciousness would not simply reproduce the normative relations of our social and political worlds; it would instead be inspired to question these worlds and to look toward alternative possibilities. If restorative justice is to govern well, it can only do so by encouraging its participants to be critical agents capable of challenging unfair norms and practices within their everyday lives. It can only do so by moving conflict resolution beyond the limits of affirmative repair. It can only do so by helping people become more than just automatic repressors of conflict — they must become agents capable of assessing their internalized habits and assumptions about the world, allowing them to disrupt patterns of domination that are embedded in their day-to-day worlds.

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