Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon is suspended

The BBC news has the following article. I will only be quoting part of it:

High-profile Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon has been suspended from his post by the country’s judicial body.

The decision was unanimously adopted by the General Council of the Judiciary.

He is due to face trial on charges that he abused his powers by opening an inquiry in 2008 into crimes committed during Francisco Franco’s rule.

Mr Garzon was later forced to drop the investigation into the crimes committed during the 1936-39 Civil War in Spain, which are covered by an amnesty.

Controversial judge

In February, a Supreme Court investigating magistrate ruled that Mr Garzon had ignored the 1977 amnesty by launching the investigation. . .

I for one am very glad that the investigation was started, and cheerfully hope that he will truly be dismissed. Why do I say that? Well, we were living in Perú when this judge had President Augusto Pinochet arrested in October of 1998. There were many around the world who said this was a good thing, that finally a murdering dictator was being brought to justice. But, I saw the problems that this brought to the country of Chile.

You see, Chile had resolved its military dictatorship by granting amnesty to those involved in those years, up to and including General Pinochet. The reins of power were peacefully handed over and Chile is a thriving democracy. We did the same thing after our Civil War, which is why General Robert E. Lee was able to retire and become an university president and why we never tried and hung President Jefferson Davis even though he was charged with treason after he was captured in 1865. Let’s face it, he helped lead tens of thousands of young men to their death in a treasonable act. But, peace would have never come to this country if we had insisted in wholesale trials.

Sadly, the murder of President Abraham Lincoln led to a ten-year period of Radical Reconstruction beginning in 1867 and ending in 1877. In fact the period of the Radical Reconstruction led to long-term damage in the South. What could have been the healing time envisioned by President Abraham Lincoln instead led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and many of the evils of the South after Reconstruction ended. It was not until another necessary and vital government intervention, by way of Supreme Court rulings and civil rights laws, that the South finally began to change. Even then, the change was violent and grudging with people killed, George Wallace standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama, and Lester Maddox going on his rants.

Which brings me back to the judge. Both Chile and Spain chose the same path as the United States of America. Chile managed to avoid a civil war and Spain managed to not have a second civil war by being willing to grant amnesty. And, having seen the example of the USA, they chose to follow the better path of Abraham Lincoln rather than the path of the Radical Reconstructionists. Everyone was rehabilitated and allowed to run for office, etc. The conflicts that had led to physical violence were transmuted into political conflicts, with lots of hot air but no deaths. The one exception was the ETA, the Basque Liberation Front.

All three countries chose a difficult moral path. The difficult path that was chosen was to decide that it was more moral to stop the deaths than to try to extract every last bit of justice possible. To some extent, it could be said that they had the trust that there is such a thing as eternal justice and, thus, even if our justice is deficient here on Earth, yet there will be a place of true justice. But, more than that all three countries have a basic Christian underpinning. And, underlying each of the cultures is an understanding that sometimes there is a place for undeserved mercy. That is, there is sometimes the understanding that undeserved mercy will be more likely to call out repentance and change than unrestrained and unremitting justice. This is why one of the most powerful stories in the New Testament is that of the woman caught in adultery. “Go and sin no more,” can sometimes bring significantly more change than hauling them up before judges to pay every last bit of what is owed.

It is all this that this judge undermined by having Pinochet arrested and trying to do an inquiry into the Spanish Civil War, even though there was a law preventing that. He convinced all too many people, and he should have been stopped back in 1998. Unremitting justice always sounds like the moral alternative. I will just say that it is a good thing that our God does not believe in that.