The "Strange Fruit" was often female

[Sweeney]

1. Group responsibility

Last edited Sat Dec 20, 2014, 11:30 PM - Edit history (1)

One of the reasons law does not work in a money economy is that law destroys community, and community enforced laws on its own in honor societies. You see at work here one facet of community: Group responsibility. If you could not take the party you knew was guilty of a trespass against you, any one of them would do, and this was good for society if not fair, because it tended to cull the weak and weak minded who made easy victims. There is group responsibility as well, and the black who killed the white should have understood that his whole group would be held responsible. There is a united defense of its members in a community as well as group control of the individual. This system worked well for ever, and was common to all people. Law destroyed community law among the Anglos Saxon, and the Germans who found it in force among Native American.
Here is the problem today. While Black people as a group and individually are held responsible and made to suffer for the crimes of a minority of them, they have no power over their own, so to hold them responsible is wrong. It is hardly within the power of parents to correct their children under the threat of law let alone for a whole community to correct their own. It is a myth that people are individually held responsible for their crimes. Punishment is often beyond severe to make up for all those who escape law, and to teach a lesson to people who could care less for it. Law is a failure, but the moots and dooms and things are of the past. The myth of the individual is false, but law could not work at all without it. Communities cannot defend nor control their own. They cannot demand community obligation or service, and they have no power over their own so they cannot correct their own before the individual comes into conflict with the larger society. Look only at what primitives paid for their law, and what we pay for ours. Costs such as our failures of law would have broken them, and yet they had both peace and law, and often without having to kill even those guilty of murder. Honer often required revenge, and every death, even a death caused by self defense required blood money.
Sweeney