Decisions of courts of law can both prevent and generate violence. The fathers of the Greek tragedy already knew it, as does—unfortunately—Tai Ji Men.
by Massimo Introvigne*
*Introduction to the webinar “After the August 2 Taichung Decision on the Tai Ji Men Case: Can the Law Become a Tool of Violence?” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on August 22, 2024, United Nations International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief.
An article already published in Bitter Winter on August 23rd, 2024.
Today’s webinar puts together two different but not unrelated themes: an unjust decision rendered against Tai Ji Men on August 2 and the United Nations International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief. It would seem that a court decision and violence can hardly be connected. After all, the law is considered the opposite of violence. Many introductory manuals of law tell university students that courts of law were born to replace the violence of those who, when laws and judges did not exist, could only seek justice through personal vendetta.
On the other hand, that relationships between law and violence are more complicated has been suggested in the 20th century by such different philosophers as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. With different purposes, they have noted that courts of law, whose aim is theoretically to prevent violence, do produce violence as well. By their decisions, people can be deprived of their freedom, their properties, and in some countries even of their lives.
This problem is not at all new. Greek philosophy and the Greek tragedy are often indicated as the two pillars of Western civilization. The nexus between law and violence was explored in a unique way by Aeschylus in the fifth century BCE in the three tragedies composing his “Oresteia.” Those who are uncomfortable with Greek tragedies because of the complicated family relations they depict would not be encouraged by the “Oresteia.” Aeschylus tells the story of how Orestes kills his mother because she has killed his father (her husband), King Agamemnon of Mycenae. And Orestes’ mother, in turn, had killed Orestes’ father because the latter had killed their daughter Iphigenia, one of Orestes’ two sisters. Actually, he had sacrificed her to the Goddess Artemis as this was needed to reach the city of Troy and eventually win the Trojan War.
Apart from the possible headaches coming from these family relations, the fact of the matter is that Orestes has committed a serious crime by killing his own mother and is pursued by the mythological avengers known as the Furies, who want to torture him and tear him into pieces.
Enter Goddess Athena, the goddess of justice, and tells everybody that this is not how justice is supposed to work. Orestes should not be summarily executed, she said, but taken to the Acropolis in Athens where twelve jurors will decide of his fate. If the jury will be tied six against six, Athena herself will cast the decisive vote. This in fact happens, and Athena votes in favor of Orestes, deciding he should not be executed as letting him live is the only way to put the family vendetta to an end.
What is crucially important for the history of law is that this mythological tale enacts the invention of the jury trial, which is presented as a more civilized way of administering justice than summarily killing those accused of serious crimes.
Aeschylus’ story has been analyzed by jurists for more than 2,000 years. They have noted that it is not obvious that twelve citizens of Athens would come to a more just decision than the Furies, who might have been a little bit rough but were, after all, goddesses. What was needed to achieve the result was that the jurors-judges, or at least half of them, would apply the laws with common sense. Ultimately, all worked only because of Athena, who was also supposed to be the goddess inspiring common sense to humans.
Now, fast-forward to Taichung, Taiwan, on August 2, 2024, some twenty-five centuries after the trial of Orestes in Athens. Yet, there are some elements in common with the story told by Aeschylus. There is an old case that is in the interest of the common good to solve. In Athens, it was the feud in King Agamemnon’s dysfunctional family, which had been going on for almost thirty years. In Taiwan, it is the Tai Ji Men case, which is also going on for almost thirty years. The Tai Ji Men movement was the victim of false and politically motivated criminal accusations in 1996, including tax evasion, of which it was found innocent by Taiwan’s Supreme Court in 2007. However, as a by-product of the false accusations, fabricated tax bills were maintained against it. After protracted litigation, only one of these tax bills remained, for the year 1992, but it was enough to confiscate, unsuccessfully auction off, and nationalize in 2020 land Tai Ji Men regards as sacred.
Like in the case of the “Oresteia,” the Tai Ji Men case puts the social harmony and the reputation of a whole country at risk. And like the court convened by Goddess Athena in Athens, the High Administrative Court of Taichung, which had been asked to give back whatever was taken from Tai Ji Men as payment of the fabricated 1992 tax bill, had the opportunity to solve the matter elegantly and finally.
Alas, this did not happen. The court did not use the God-given common sense that inspired at least some in Athens in the case of Orestes, but flatly repeated arguments based on technicalities and refused to serve justice and give back their land to Tai Ji Men. It even suggested the absurd theory that the 1992 tax bill, which was maintained, was based on different underlying facts with respect to the tax bills for other years, that were corrected to zero. This was demonstrably false.
These are, after all, details, as important as they may be. The substance of the matter is the question whether courts of law are there to protect citizens from violence or to create violence. It was the question Goddess Athena dramatically brought to Athens twenty-five centuries ago. And it is a question to which the court in Taichung gave the wrong answer. Legal and tax violence against Tai Ji Men could have ended on August 2, but it didn’t. Violence is not necessarily bloody, and Tai Ji Men Shifu (Grand Master) and dizi (disciples) continue to be among the victims of acts of violence based on religion or belief that the United Nations invites us to remember today.