AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION ...

destroy them; a contradiction, to put it mildly. More likely than
not this contradiction will loom higher on people's minds in the
aftermath of a war than whatever were the roots of the original
conflict. The perspective changes as violence unfolds. If I
steal your car today, burn down your house tomorrow and kill a
member of your family the day after chances are that the last
event will be on top of your mind; only later you may eventually
return to the car issue. Thus, violence can be used intentionally
to make people forget the root conflict.
Against starting with reconstruction only; behaving like ants
in an ant-hive. Some damage is wrought, e.g., by naughty boys,
and the ants start reconstruction immediately. Admirable, but some
causal analysis with possible resolution might have been even more
appropriate. The counterargument would be that except for some
very special types of ants there is not much they can do to
complete the 3R syndrome, making reconstruction alone look like an
instinct-driven act of despair. Precisely, and that was the
argument except for one point: it might, just might, give those
naughty boys some second thoughts.
Against starting with reconciliation only: this is like
preaching reconciliation between slave and slave-owner, serf and
feudal lord, workers paid below subsistence wages and employers,
without doing anything about the underlying contradiction. Adding
reconstruction work to reconciliation may soften the
contradiction. But the root conflict is still there, and has to
be tackled as part of the "aftermath", "after violence", work.
Moreover, there is a synergy between the three R's, brought
out in the ho'o ponopono case. The conflict is there, that it is
102