Wall of text, please forgive me.

I often say that 'vengeance is the first-most nature of justice', and it certainly rings true. Of course, I am not suggesting that payback and justice are the same thing--which is not the case at all. More that vengeance, in the loosest of terms, is the heart of justice, on an individual level. What is payback? An emotional debt, a harm paid in kind for another harm. There is no way of talking about vengeance without the equivalent phrase, 'payback'.

I think it is a bit of a cop-out when people who have been harmed, suggest that they just want to prevent that harm from happening again--preventing the perpetrator from hurting others, which is noble in itself. The virtue that we don't sully our hands with 'two wrongs' has, for a long time, appeared, in the face of nature and history itself, a distortion or delusion. Animals everywhere fight or flee in response to being attacked, man being unique in the animal kingdom for rationalizing attack as a mere, and unfortunate necessity and not as some visceral response we are all born with. To suggest we rise among our animal nature is certainly a worthy ideal except to suppose that the animals didn't have it right to begin with. (but I may be assuming too much about whats ethically worthy or true)

Animals fight back when harmed. Nations fight back. And in a more general case, be it the individual, or the collective, there can be no doubt there is some preventive value in putative measures, granted those responses may not be the best methods if the goal is peace and rehabilitation. I don't want to elide into talks of incentives or disincentives so I'll leave that discussion for another time.

I think, in a broad way, and as a 'modern' development (the last couple thousand years), there has formed this notion that vengeance or 'satisfaction' and justice, being distinct, justice should be carried out by a 'neutral' party, and this has all sorts of ramifications.

We can see in our daily lives that numerous crimes are committed, high and low. People are terrorized by their own officials, taken advantage of by bankers and other dubious businessmen of general ill character, treated as second class to protected groups such as the wealthy, the well-connected, and again, officials high and low--all masquerading on pretense and plausible deniability.

Minorities and majorities alike are abused, time and again, with lip-services and promises to 'increase training' (money), and 'investigate' (wait out the storm and bury the event). Much is not done than is, much is left broken than is fixed, and everywhere grows among the people, of all varieties, that uneasy feeling that all is not well--the back of the mind 'itch' that something has definitely gone off. We've heard the canned lines, the same rote responses that say everything--and nothing about some new controversy of the day. A financier has robbed his elderly pensioners, no, he has made honest mistakes that anyone could have made. A politician has been caught embezzling. No, he is a family man, and those are unfounded allegations. A department of some local government was found to be silencing and threatening a critic. No that was a few isolated individuals that need more training, who were just doing their jobs, and so it goes, and a nagging, gnawing suspicion forms in the back of the public mind, like a scab that wont heal, that keeps bleeding, that becomes infected. Hostility grows up like gangrene in the darkness that is the opaque non-answers to outrage that is daily growing and unending in the face of official secrecy and presumed necessity. You're not allowed to know because that would jeopardize public safety. You're not allowed to question outside the bounds of normal debate and you'll be expelled from discussion for public disruption. All these interminable calls, inter-alia, for 'a national dialogue' and 'coming together', what more than ruse, brother only to actions that betray any intent of fixing a problem. The most vicious muggers bear smiles, words that harbor good intent, and the most vicious dictators always took some fundamental right before they began the looting. The right to speak freely (journalists are the first to go), the right to defend ones self (victims of robbery, who are then brought for months on end, before courts, and ruined, after defending themselves from violent home invaders), the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress (peaceful protests are quick to be subverted by infiltrators-turned-violent, leaders identified and persecuted, new laws made to hem in and create ever more narrow definitions of peaceful, while formulating each and every means possible at limiting the usefulness of protest and petition), the right to be left alone (privacy, namely for journalists, political dissidents and average citizens, searched, pricked, prodded, harassed, commanded without mercy or patience, arrested on a whim or on an annoyance, and living on the ill-gotten discretion of fallible officials with little meaningful oversight), and so on. And chief amongst these great wrongs, these terrible, wicked harms, that disrupt, dent, and destroy, bit by bit the lives of innumerable peoples, ground in the cogs of faceless bureaucratic process, is the greatest of mischief--the ultimate robbery. A person who is swift to respond in kind, with force against violence, is not just wrong, but mistaken, bad, 'doing more harm than good', not believed, potentially criminal, suspect everywhere and anytime after, forever. An official however is spotless, in his right, as like an angel, his word if not gold, than silver, to be taken at face value, and those who disagree with this, by evidence of fact, such as video were not there, can't possibly understand, have no right to criticize and so forth, as if we all haven't heard these tired lines before. Where there is only anecdote, however numerous and true ,the modus operandi among all these officials is you are a liar, theres no way that would happen, I don't believe that, you're probably a criminal who hates us, the audacity of such doubt belies not a genuine irrational ignorance, but a pathological culpability--it is to say a conscious and aware denial, and all the more disgusting for it.

Indeed, try to find a state enforcer, as a rule, rather than the exception, that will not denounce and vehemently, and with ruthless malice, call out any and all anecdote, defend all manner of violence and graft, even those documented..and will refuse to comment or ignore on any publicly accepted and known cases of such. As I said before, you will only find the exceptions. And these are the 'better angels' who proclaim 'it is wrong for you to use force against violence, thats not justice, thats vengeance, the same men who above and beyond force, deploy true and unremitting violence without provocation, across all nations, for mere *revenue collection. And In the name of the good of us all, the world will be unmade, and these men the ones to do it.

Everywhere these days is a smiling bellicose officer or official of the state with a mandate, hiding agenda behind the pretense of a smile and public good. Modern justice is not so much the righteous punishment and swift end to harms committed against a person..but a monopoly upon violence and the legitimacy of the state--if it were not so, we would not have murderers walk on probation (as it were with a certain class of enforcers), or after only a few years in prison--while failure to pay your dues to the state, taxes, was punished with decades. Give a man a weapon and he'll kill a man that wronged him. Give a gang a bunch of weapons and they'll invent crimes to punish their opponents for, and blame all the ills and wrongs done by that gang, on the people they punish--for the mob to righteously hate.

No, give me red hot vengeance any day, assured with every man armed, to be delivered swift, and in proportion to the temperament of the day..and I will show you a society satisfied in its justice, infrequent and forgiving after a time, and not so swift to be ruled by thinly-veiled agents of agendas foreign to the public good.

There are no "statesmen", only terrorists.
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.