Law in Contemporary Society

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MarkusVonDerMarwitzFirstEssay 5 - 11 Jun 2016 - Main.EbenMoglen
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  I am in no way suggesting this was the reaction of the entire country, or even the majority, but it was enough for me to recognize that in a way I sympathize with individuals who are more prone to crime and have developed a feeling of dissatisfaction with their situation in the country. It seems wrong to give such emphasis to individual actions. This surface level analysis misses the deeper roots of what causes the crime; the underlying tensions that have been building from a young age. What Zizek classifies as “subjective” violence often disguises underlying systemic forces that have given rise to this phenomenon.

This problem is in no way unique to Switzerland, and it is particularly salient in my country of origin, Sweden, where anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment is challenging the country’s liberal reputation. I am unsure what the exact fix is to this problem, but it seems unjust to deport groups of “criminals” because they have failed to fit into a system that on the one hand says that in order to stay they need to accept certain values, must live a certain way, and behave like model citizens and at the same time never really wanting to accept them and placing multiple barriers to the goal of achieving any real assimilation. This seems to be the conflict between the multiple personalities of the individuals making these claims that makes these incompatible views appear perfectly logical.

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If the real purpose of the draft is the discussion presently limited to the conclusion, then the best route to improvement is to get it out of the conclusion and make it the focus of the essay, cutting the discussion of your personal experience in Switzerland to a significant extent, in order to serve only as a comparison with the social structures that push immigrants into the underclass.

I do not think the comparison implied between Sweden and Switzerland is in any way fair to the Swedes. Sweden has been assimilating immigrants into its very comprehensive welfare state since the end of WWII. Although not a nation of immigrants like the US, it has no profound nativist tradition, because until the 20th century there were no people on Earth (except Finns) who wanted to move to Sweden. The Swiss, on the other hand, are a mountain people who have been xenophobes and nativists for thousands of years. They have no tradition of welcoming or assimilating immigrants. they do not marry out, they are (like most mountain people) rabid localists who will not even agree to be governed by one another, let alone by outsiders. Their democracy, their military organization, their educational and professional structures, are all adjusted to the task of maintaining sturdy independence from others' rule of law and are exclusivist by design. You were, as you say, an expat, cognitively well-endowed to learn how to act Swiss, and not in need of either citizenship or support. That made you a customer.

On the side where, as I say, this first draft really falls, I think your argument has a quality of naive discovery: you have observed from outside, as an idea, what people less privileged than you and I acquire as lived experience: Those who are poor, who are immigrants, who are cognitively or linguistically marginal to the culture of the ruling class, are already "deviant" from the point of view of that ruling class. The line that separates them from the forms of deviance that are subject to criminal punishment is thin or non-existent: individual fortune is all that stands between them and the harshest treatment meted out in society. That can be said quickly, and its relation to migration flows in a globalized world takes a few sentences more. But it isn't a great big discovery, just something we were fortunate enough to think of rather than live through. The question is: so what next?

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Revision 5r5 - 11 Jun 2016 - 08:00:24 - EbenMoglen
Revision 4r4 - 17 Apr 2016 - 22:07:28 - MarkusVonDerMarwitz
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