no, retributive justice doesn’t actually fix anything. but at the same time i truly do not blame any comrades who crave it based on the disgraceful and violent world we inhabit (I crave it too, fairly often). and if it motivates someone to be a more active organizer and agitator, then eh, i guess it can have some use. but ultimately i’d say revenge (to the extent it’s actually a reasoned and position, which in most cases it’s not - it’s emotional and driven by lived visceral feelings of anger and hate) is more lib than the alternative. wanting to inflict pain and enact vengeance presupposes a certain Individual Responsibility and Personal Agency on those who do evil, rather than seeing them as products of preexisting material systems and cultural norms & hierarchies.

I don’t think it’s possible to separate this idea’s specific nature of appeal in the contemporary age from its modern roots as a latent fear in the West that there will come an inevitable day where the 500 years of genocide, settler-colonialism and imperialist butchery that they’ve commited will come back to roost. Most “peaceful” decolonialization movements in the 20th century were only permitted by the former Western colonial power because the new leaders at the top promised to turn the other cheek with regards to the collective trauma and destruction inflicted by the West.

India is the most notable example of this where the British promoted “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” Gandhi as the spiritual voice of the new Indian nation. There’s a self-serving calculus to why the West treats figures like Gandhi with such hyperbolic praise, even successfully shooing off pressures for assessing his anti-African racism during the brief 2020 moment of racial consciousness, where he’s one of the only post-colonial leaders the Western educational standard curriculum will ever cover in a positive light. He’s the poster boy of the West’s ideal attitude for what their formerly colonized should adopt.

The repressed collective retributive desires of the new South Asian nations in the post-colonial era, rather than disappearing, were then redirected from the target of Britain towards each other and their neighbours which has resulted in many conflicts since.

I always felt it was interesting from an intellectual sense how much that contemporary Western political philosophies and media loves to revisit the “retributive justice (“revenge”) is bad” trope. It wasn’t until I started learning about post-colonial movements - which ones succeed, which ones failed, who were the leaders feted by the West and which were the ones silenced (nearly always the communist groups) - that I begun to connect the dots. It’s no surprise that there was such an overreaction and fixation on the Oct 7th uprising by the West, when the oppressed ignored Gandhi and went for the eye, and why the West cared little for patient explanations of the history that led up to that moment.

This is not to say that the idea of “revenge is bad” should be inherently discredited, but the fixation upon this narrative as an article of faith and a philosophical mantra in the Western media, and collective consciousness in general, should be recognized. Its appropriation as a means to tautologically condemn (“revenge is bad because, well, revenge is bad”) any retributive justice character of decolonial movements is a way to invalidate and dismiss the history which led up to it through the inherent “ontological evil” nature of that retributive character itself. This process is both a historical and ongoing motif.

I always found it funny when on TV the protagonists would have no problem beating up or killing the Bad Guy’s minions but would spare the Bad Guy because “violence is wrong”.

I would say that your answer is hidden in the way you phrased the question.

The idea that revenge is bad is indeed liberal idealist bullshit. What matters is, as usual, the material reality of whatever the circumstances are. Will revenge being taken in the specific circumstances you’re talking about end up doing more material harm than good? Revenge is not an inherently bad thing and it can be an extremely good motivating force behind very good and necessary actions. It can also be detrimental and end up harming people even in completely unintended ways, including the ones who are trying to enact their vengeance for entirely justifiable reasons.

It all depends on the situation. But I think we can safely say that revenge as an idea being either good or bad is a liberal-style framing or misunderstanding.

Its good when bad things happen to bad people, and its bad when bad things happen to good people.

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Only a Sith deals in absolutes, dear.

The way I see things right now, revenge is a motivator which is at its core morally neutral, and what matters most in understanding it is simply cause and effect. One of my personal favorite historical figures, Ned Kelly, was very much motivated by revenge. He managed to garner widespread public sympathy on the one hand, but he also had his excesses and mistakes on the other, which ultimately resulted in Ned Kelly becoming a flashy folk hero without strictly succeeding in his political aims.

is it restorative and transformative revenge?

torturing biden wouldn’t help any of the people he’s harmed but taking all his shit and redistributing it among his victims might.

would be less revenge and more preventing further harm, but the last time we did a president they created the FBI so probably not a good idea.

Usually it’s lib yeah. Revenge is usually conflated with the just outcome and so “don’t seek revenge” becomes conflated with, “don’t seek justice”.

Depends on how petty you are. I’m petty as fuck so I love a good dish of revenge served up piping cold.

The world is run by bad people. Those who are in power pay for and set the framework for what is acceptable in popular culture. In popular culture we are told that revenge is bad.
If I was a bad person, I would want people to believe that they would be just as bad as me, if they treated me as I treat them.
I believe you should be treated like shit if you treat people like shit

That’s the dialectic: revenge is both bad and fucking awesome. It’s important to know when and how to enact revenge and when to take the better path.

revenge is not cool. we live in a society. we are yet to invent a kind of feud that will never spill into relations of the initial feud-ers, and until we do i cannot endorse it

retribution in general is pig morality. you strike against your enemy to defeat them, not to punish them or to gratify yourself.

It’s such a broad concept, just like plenty of ethical truisms it can serve multiple ends. I am sympathetic to the people in here saying it’s an idea ghouls hide behind to avoid justice but come on, back and forth family blood feuds lasting multiple generations is all about revenge and it ruins the lives of those involved. Don’t get bogged down by the mental loop of trying to uncover some moral system that has never been used by cynical status quo supporters, killing and violence have been tragic necessities for upending oppressive systems but like others have said, it should be about justice and not about vengeance at the core.