William H. Gass Quotes

The right of vengeance was written into the first book of law for the Muslims. It was a very strong part of the culture long before Muhammad, amongst all the tribes. Before there were organized law enforcement agencies, family and tribal vengeance was the basic mechanism of law enforcement. Unfortunately for many cultures and people, it still is a legitimate method of law enforcement—even in many of the modern industrial democracies.

While some of the Serbian holidays commemorate loss of battles, the idea of a specific Day of Revenge is new.

This proverb only makes sense in the light of understanding the Arab concept of revenge—“blood.” In a rural desert environment where little can be expected of government, the Arabs have developed a law enforcement and peace keeping mechanism which while primitive from modern standards, nevertheless worked to some degree. It is that revenge—“blood” is a moral necessity and obligation of all people, and revenge is not limited by time or to the individuals involved in the first incidence. The immediate family are the first to extract revenge, but the extended family follows and often the entire clan. Sometimes revenge is tribal or even national. Anyone who fails to revenge a member in his group is not only a disgrace, but is a clear and present danger to the group because then they can be attacked with impunity. So revenge is a strong obligation of the group members and blood must be paid with blood no matter how many generations it may take. The only thing that keeps me and my family safe, is the surety what whosoever kills one of us will themselves be killed or if they die a natural death we will take revenge on one of the evildoers relatives. Crime must never pay!

This was one of Jackson’s official major justifications for his controversial Indian Removal policy. The logic was that since there had been some Indian raids on whites with whites being killed, the whites had a right to retaliate and a good way of doing that was by taking their land and removing them to lands far away. He saw a Christian virtue to the policy as they whites did not raid and kill the Indians. The “logic” such as it was, of course, ignored the fact that there had been white raids and massacres of Indians as well, but in both cases, they were done by a small minority of the Indians and Whites, Jackson’s view was that all Indians should be held responsible for the act of some violent Native Americans. However Jackson had used this guilt generalization before and even used the term “retaliatory vengeance” when he vowed revenge on the British for his treatment as a Prisoner of War in the American Revolution — See Quotation 621975.