Nietzsche meets Gandhi: Revenge is for the Weak

As the reincarnation of an Icelandic berserker-poet, I'm very familiar with revenge and blood-feuds. The thing about blood-feuds is that they never end. And if you're lucky, you realize it's turning you into a monster while there's still time to recover your humanity. When blood-feuds are elevated to a political ideology, that's when you get, oh, let's say, Abu Ghraib, just to pick one. Or Gitmo. Or 9-11. Or the massacres of Afghans, Taliban and civilian. Or pretty much the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its current state. And legalized torture as a permanent state of exception.

We don't need revenge. We need justice. Christian, Jewish, Muslim theology confuse these things. God's "justice" is weighed against God's mercy. But this is worse than a false dichotomy. It is the perpetuation of a barbaric ideology of retribution that humanity ought to want to transcend. Instead, the US turns Afghanistan and Iraq (and Gitmo and Abu Ghraib) into the fiery lake of Revelation and we sit and enjoy the sights, sounds, and smells of the suffering of the guilty.

I'm not a pacifist, but it seems to me (and I'm deeply conflicted about this) that violence ought to go somewhere. Justice misconstrued as revenge, as payback on a debt you're owed, is like trying to dig your way out of a hole.

How fucking hard is this to understand?