[PEN-L:9633] Mens Rea (Tiresome Debates)

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

It is disingenuous to suggest that mens rea ("evil mind) or intent is
inferred or even established legally (domestic or international law) from
professed stated or written intentions alone. In law, if there are
inexorable highly probable consequences from a given act or set of policies,
that are foreseeable by a reasonable and prudent person (someone with an IQ
over 60 and without malisous intent or interests to deny the foreseeable
consequences) then intent to produce those consequences can be established
without any formal statement of intent to produce them--inferred intent.

In response to the homogenizing (downward) effects of neoliberal globalism
which in addition to producing equalizing (downward) interest rates, rents,
prices and wages across national boundaries produce wholesale destruction of
Indigenous cultures, the UN and international law established a distinction
between "Ethnocide" (destruction of whole cultures through forces of
assimilation without intent to destroy cultures--simply a product of
voluntary assimilation to gain advantages of dominant cultures or
homogenizing forces) and Genocide (actual intent to destroy members of a
group as a group which leads inexorably to the destruction of the whole
group which may occur without any formally stated intent to destroy a whole
group--Charles Brown's point).

First of all, it is not true that the language of the UN Convention came
from the USSR or "Stalinists" alone; but even if that were true, so what?
But it is not true as Charles has noted. The language came specifically from
the language, presentations, pleadings and most importantly, opening and
closing arguments and legal theories of all the participants at Nuremberg.
That is why the US refusal to sign the UN Convention until 1988, and even
then not being in full compliance at present with the Helms-Lugar-Hatch
"Sovereignty Clause" is particularly disgusting and revealing superpower
hypocrisy and hubris.

In the case of Slavery, the same case can be made about the working inmates
at Nazi Concentration Camps; the labor of the inmates had value and
therefore not in the interest of the nazis to destroy them; a disingenuous
argument that the nazis tries to make at Nuremberg and elsewhere. One of the
main contradictions of Slavery as a historical mode of production was that
the brutal realities and "relations of production" of Slavery, designed to
extract maximum surplus from the main force of production--the
Slaves--destroyed that main force of production--Slaves individually and
collectively--in the course of enforcing the brutal surplus-extracting
realities and relations of production. Those consequences were certainly
forseeable by any reasonable and prudent person--and were seen and struggled
against by Abolitionists--classical and neo--and therefore intent to destroy
a people as a people can be inferred and established easily by those without
motives or lack of awareness to do otherwise. Certainly the nazis used and
profited from concentration camp inmate labor but they had it calculated
down to an average life expectancy how long the average camp inmate would
last ( 9 months at Auschwitz); their intent and the inexorable consequences
of the concentration camp system was destruction of the inmates as
individuals and as members of a group they only sought to profit a little
more while doing it.

Slavery of US African Americans and Blacks elsewhere was indeed "Genocide"
according to the UN Convention. It comes down to the realities and how mens
rea is expressed/established in the real world.

See my attached Tribunal Findings on the UN-NGO-sponsored Tribunal on
Canadian Residential Schools and Genocide June 12-14, 1998 for references
and documentation on the above.

Jim Craven

James Craven
Clark College, 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd.
Vancouver, WA. 98663
(360) 992-2283; Fax: (360) 992-2863
blkfoot5@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~blkfoot5/
*My Employer Has No Association With My Private/Protected Opinion*

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