madmark.myfastforum.org

Mark · Site Admin Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 1052

Vengeance Is Ours

http://www.newyorker.com/reportin...21fa_fact_diamond?currentPage=all

Article by Jared Diamond in the Annals of Anthropology

Excerpt:

n 1992, when Daniel Wemp was about twenty-two years old, his beloved paternal uncle Soll was killed in a battle against the neighboring Ombal clan. In the New Guinea Highlands, where Daniel and his Handa clan live, uncles and aunts play a big role in raising children, so an uncle’s death represents a much heavier blow than it might to most Americans. Daniel often did not even distinguish between his biological father and other male clansmen of his father’s generation. And Soll had been very good to Daniel, who recalled him as a tall and handsome man, destined to become a leader. Soll’s death demanded vengeance.

Daniel told me that responsibility for arranging revenge usually falls on the victim’s firstborn son or, failing that, on one of his brothers. “Soll did have a son, but he was only six years old at the time of his father’s death, much too young to organize the revenge,” Daniel said. “On the other hand, my father was felt to be too old and weak by then; the avenger should be a strong young man in his prime. So I was the one who became expected to avenge Soll.” As it turned out, it took three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs before Daniel succeeded in discharging this responsibility.
...

State government is now so nearly universal around the globe that we forget how recent an innovation it is; the first states are thought to have arisen only about fifty-five hundred years ago, in the Fertile Crescent. Before there were states, Daniel’s method of resolving major disputes—either violently or by payment of compensation—was the worldwide norm. Papua New Guinea is not the only place where those traditional methods of dispute resolution still coexist uneasily with the methods of state government. For example, Daniel’s methods might seem quite familiar to members of urban gangs in America, and also to Somalis, Afghans, Kenyans, and peoples of other countries where tribal ties remain strong and state control weak. As I eventually came to realize, Daniel’s thirst for vengeance and his hostility to rival clans are really not so far from our own habits of mind as we might like to think.
...

Those words of Daniel’s have haunted me ever since, because, through the experiences of a relative who passed up the opportunity for vengeance and lived to regret it, I came to appreciate the terrible personal price that law-abiding citizens pay for leaving vengeance to the state. The relative was my late father-in-law, Jozef Nabel. As a result of being born Jewish in Poland in 1913, he witnessed during the Second World War the worst cruelties that modern state societies have invented. In September, 1939, when Poland was invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union, Jozef fought on the eastern front, where he was captured by the Soviets and shipped to a concentration camp in Siberia. Nearly two years later, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviets realized their need for more troops, remembered their Slavic brethren languishing in Siberia, and formed them into a Polish division of the Red Army, in which Jozef became an officer and fought his way westward to participate in such events as the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and the fall of Berlin, in 1945. During the six years since the start of the war, he had received no information about his parents, his elder sister, Ruzha, or his sister’s young daughter, Eva. In the summer of 1945, after Germany’s surrender, Jozef, while still on active duty in that Polish division of the Red Army, requested and received his commander’s permission to take an armed platoon of fellow-soldiers to his village of Klaj, near Kraków, in order finally to be reunited with his family or else to discover their fate.
...