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  • Revenge or Justice? Obama Gets Osama
  • Paul Dumouchel (bio)

On the evening of May 2, 2011, President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, during a secret special mission carried out by a team of American Navy Seals. In his declaration he said, while talking especially to the families of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the twin towers, that “Justice has been done.” The next morning the New York Post headline read “Osama bin Laden Dead: Got Him, Vengeance at Last! The U.S. Nails the Bastard.” So was this vengeance or was it justice? Or was it perhaps both, or neither?

The Greeks had (at least) two words and two goddesses for justice: dike (Dike) and themis. Themis is the justice of the household, of the immediate group, while dike’s domain is the justice of relations between households. Dike relates to the rules regulating conflicts between separate and different groups. Our modern conception of justice unites and assembles both of these two aspects of justice, as the public conception of justice in Greek cities already did to some extent.1 In this context, it is probably not irrelevant that Dike was considered to be the daughter of Themis, born of her union with Zeus, the king of the gods. [End Page 9]

This distinction between two different aspects of justice is not unique to the Greeks, and we find just about everywhere a division between two forms of “justice,” one that is proper to and applies within the inner group and another one that regulates conflicts between groups or households. What interests me is that vengeance is, or was, exclusively the province of dike, but within themis there was no place for revenge. Vengeance was reserved for relations between groups or families; inside one family or household, revenge was unacceptable. It was properly forbidden. However between families, households, clans, lineages, and other more extensive groups, vengeance was the rule. It was not only permitted but instituted. It was made into an obligation, a duty that one could not easily escape and that, as many authors have argued, constituted, together with the conflicts between groups that it kept alive, an essential part of what held the society together.2

In those societies where vengeance was a part of intergroup justice, there was no such thing as private vengeance. Vengeance was by definition public. It was public, first, in the sense that it applied to conflicts between groups, rather than to quarrels between individuals within groups. In other words, he who brought vengeance upon the offending group did not do so in his individual name but as the representative of a group, for an offense of which he very oft en had not himself been the victim. He did it, so to speak, as “the deputy of a public collective force.” Vengeance was also public in that it was a publicly recognized obligation. Those who shunned the violent duty of vengeance against offenders of their group were at least ostracized (when the punishment handed out in the name of themis was not even greater). They were generally excluded from normal social interactions not only by members of their own group but also by the group of the offender. Vengeance then, though it was aimed only at sanctioning crimes committed by members of other subgroups of the society, was itself a universally sanctioned obligation that applied to everyone.3 It was public in the most extensive sense.

Themis in a somewhat inversely symmetrical manner was the justice of the household and therefore private. Its primary domain of jurisdiction was that of family relations and of the rules that organize the life of the inner group. While equality is central to vengeance, whose goal is to “get even” and which opposes groups of relatively similar size, themis is aimed against the lone individual, criminal or transgressor, the whole power of the group being viewed as the expression of a divine sanction. Themis is a sacrificial form of justice that has the “all against one” shape of scapegoating. In consequence, themis is also both private and public, for it is an expression of the...

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