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

model would be a village, a town, a district recently hit by
natural disaster. There are local fault-lines and enmities;
although nobody accuses anybody on the other side of a fault-line
of having caused, even willed, the disaster. There are
casualties, there is massive bereavement. Flags on half mast,
people in black, the shared, joint sorrow across fault-lines. Of
course there is healing in this. Right after a war may be too
early for joint sorrow. But after some years the time will come.
That opportunity should be made use of.
[10] The joint reconstruction approach. Again, the point is to do
it together./79/ German soldiers used scorched earth tactic in
Northern Norway, leaving nothing to the advancing Red Army,
driving out the inhabitants. Would it be possible for those
inhabitants to cooperate with the soldiers after the war is over,
making the scorched earth blossom again, coming alive with plants,
animals, and humans, with building and infrastructure?
The good thing, which should not be seen as an enemy of the
perfect, would be to have civilians from the same nation come and
participate in the reconstruction. Of course, they would not be
representatives of the perpetrators of the violence, they may even
be their antagonists (like sending conscientious objectors to
clean up after the soldiers, the non-objectors). But they would
show that there are hard and soft aspects of that nation, as of
any nation, and that counts toward depolarization. Moreover, there
would not be the direct confrontation between perpetrators and
victims; years may be needed before that event. And nevertheless
that is what one should aim at. Which brings us back to the point
about revenge: by having violence both ways not only harm but also
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