"Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?"
About this Quote
Gibran’s question is a moral trapdoor: step onto the familiar ground of law-and-order, and suddenly you’re falling into the abyss of state hypocrisy. He starts with the comfortable premise that political power earns legitimacy by punishing individual crimes. Then he flips the scale. If the state can hang a murderer and imprison a thief, what authority does it have to commit mass murder and theft under a flag?
The intent isn’t to score a clever point about inconsistency; it’s to expose how language launders violence. “Justice” becomes a costume political power wears when disciplining citizens, then tosses aside when expanding territory. The subtext is that the state’s monopoly on force doesn’t just enforce morality - it manufactures it, defining murder as “war” and plunder as “security” or “destiny.” Gibran makes that definitional fraud feel obscene by pairing the intimate (“the murderer,” “the plunderer”) with the industrial (“killing thousands”), forcing the reader to confront the arithmetic of sanctioned harm.
Context matters: Gibran wrote in an era shaped by empire, World War I, and the carving up of Arab lands under European mandates. As a Lebanese-American poet attuned to both colonial power and spiritual ethics, he’s arguing that modern politics often operates like an organized crime syndicate with better branding. “Pillaging the very hills” lands as biblical indictment: even the landscape is treated as loot. The question doesn’t ask for a policy tweak. It demands a reckoning with the state as a moral actor - or an admission that “justice” is often just force with paperwork.
The intent isn’t to score a clever point about inconsistency; it’s to expose how language launders violence. “Justice” becomes a costume political power wears when disciplining citizens, then tosses aside when expanding territory. The subtext is that the state’s monopoly on force doesn’t just enforce morality - it manufactures it, defining murder as “war” and plunder as “security” or “destiny.” Gibran makes that definitional fraud feel obscene by pairing the intimate (“the murderer,” “the plunderer”) with the industrial (“killing thousands”), forcing the reader to confront the arithmetic of sanctioned harm.
Context matters: Gibran wrote in an era shaped by empire, World War I, and the carving up of Arab lands under European mandates. As a Lebanese-American poet attuned to both colonial power and spiritual ethics, he’s arguing that modern politics often operates like an organized crime syndicate with better branding. “Pillaging the very hills” lands as biblical indictment: even the landscape is treated as loot. The question doesn’t ask for a policy tweak. It demands a reckoning with the state as a moral actor - or an admission that “justice” is often just force with paperwork.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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