The 'misuse' of people with mental or other disabilities, to commit serious
crimes, has at least a 3500-year history in the Middle East.
Elena Cassin (1987) has two chapters discussing "Le droit et le tordu" in
the region, one being titled "Handicapés et marginaux dans la Mésopotamie
des IIe-Ier millénaires" (72-97). In this, she notes that the risk was
foreseen (around the 14th century BC) that some rogue might use a mad,
deaf, blind or otherwise disabled person as an unwitting agent to commit a
sacrilegious act, so that the resultant curse should be diverted from the
instigator (pp. 81-82, 92).
Falk (1972 / 1978) makes passing reference to a similar phenomenon in
Jewish law, "He who sets fire by the hand of a deaf-mute, an imbecile or a
minor..." (I: p. 29), i.e. who takes advantage of the legal non-liability
of people in these categories. Marcus (1980) does so from Akkadian law,
mentioning the practice whereby someone causes a blind or otherwise
disabled person to move a boundary stone or damage a monument, to avoid the
penalty or curse that would otherwise fall on the instigator.
In each century no doubt there were also plenty of disabled people who had
full agency, getting out there and taking Direct Action Now to rid their
town of unwanted foreigners, arrogant able-bodieds, and people who
were 'asking for it'. Nil novem sub solemn -- nothing new, nor entirely
serious.
With regard to people having impaired mental capacity, E. Leipolt notes
that "A civilised society treads a careful balance between supporting and
guiding people with impaired capacity and allowing them to make certain
decisions for themselves." The parallels in geopolitics are interesting.
No doubt the rulers of certain powerful, western, anglophone nations also
imagine themselves to have preserved such a delicate balance with the
entire populations of some Middle Eastern nations whom they regard as
having an 'impaired capacity' to run their own affairs, and whom therefore
they treat as moral imbeciles -- to be guided with a firm hand (and if
necessary to be 'bombed back to the Stone Age' where they can rediscover
their own ancient law codes) so that the territories occupied by those
populations can be freed up for the wise and careful extraction of oil, and
made safe for the spread of McDonalds, porn videos, and Demoxy with hanging
chads. (Among the populations on the receiving end of this 'benevolent
guidance', there are even some who maintain that it is the foreigners and
their armies who are the moral imbeciles, while the superior civilisation
is the indigenous one... Those among their children who manage to survive
and grow up amidst the well-intentioned wreckage of their country will no
doubt spend another 50 years energetically expressing their views on these
difficult issues.)
CASSIN, Elena (1987) Le semblable et le différent: symbolismes du pouvoir
dans le Proche-Orient ancien. Paris: Découverte.
FALK, Ze'ev W (1972, 1978) Introduction to Jewish Law of the Second
Commonwealth. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill.
MARCUS, David (1980) Some antiphrastic euphemisms for a blind person in
Akkadian and other Semitic languages. J. American Oriental Society 100: 307-
310.
kind regards,
miles
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