https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/29/collective-guilt/
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Orestes Pursued by the Furies, by John Singer Sargent (1921)
It was was one of ancient Greece’s worst punishments. In cases of political assassinations or high treason, the citizens’ assembly could deliver a sentence of kataskaphê, the destruction of the culprit’s home and the banishment of their family. This punishment, historian Walter R Connor writes, was the city’s way of giving physical form to ‘the extirpation of the individual and his immediate kin from the society’ (1). Every bit of their property was to be turned to dust to stop it being sold or bartered, and sometimes even their ancestors’ remains were dug up and thrown out of the city.
When it came to collective punishment, imperial China was no less inventive. For centuries, it applied the principle of kin punishment, which could entail the extermination of some criminals’ families. This could extend to an entire lineage, including in-laws and sometimes even more distant relatives. In 1402 the scholar Fang Xiaoru was accused of challenging the emperor’s legitimacy and executed along with his entire circle, from his nephews to his pupils and friends – 873 people in all.
Such draconian punishments, which were common in antiquity and the Middle Ages, would be thought barbaric today. Isn’t modern justice based on the principle of personal responsibility? And doesn’t international law classify collective punishment as a war crime? No one should be punished for wrongs they did not commit; even the most authoritarian regimes recognize this principle, on paper at least.
In Palestine, however, the era of collective punishment endures. For decades, Israel has demolished the homes of Palestinians accused of terrorism, even before any judicial conviction, leaving their families homeless for the sole purpose of vengeance, humiliation and intimidation. This also affects residents of East Jerusalem, who can lose their residency rights because of a relative’s actions. Like many states at war, the IDF also targets neighborhoods, shelling whole buildings to reach a suspect and, since the attacks of 7 October, turning its fire on an entire city: every resident of the Gaza Strip is having to pay for Hamas’s massacres.
In France too, there’s a whiff of guilt by association in the air. As soon as an immigrant commits a crime, voices are raised demanding a law that penalizes all foreigners. And there’s no shortage of politicians eager to punish parents for their children’s misdeeds. Valérie Pécresse (Les Républicains) wants to take away their family benefits; Éric Zemmour (Reconquête) is keen to evict them from social housing; Éric Ciotti (Les Républicains) would lock them up… Like in the US, where parents can spend several days behind bars if their offspring skips school too often – a method that has never produced results, except to make the situation of already struggling families yet more precarious.
Once the preserve of the far right, the idea has recently won over the Macron camp. ‘We need a simple way to sanction families financially right from the first offense, a sort of minimum tariff from the first stupid action,’ the president proposed following the riots in the summer 2023. This is mafia logic: an individual is all the more compliant when they know their relatives are threatened. Tasked with refining this project, France’s minister for solidarities Aurore Bergé has promised to introduce community service for ‘inadequate parents’, a criminal sanction accompanied by the threat of imprisonment for non-compliance.
Fans of kataskaphê are devising a new social contract: at the top of the ladder, every success deserves individual reward; down at the bottom, every failure demands collective punishment.
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