Re: Perhaps the time has come to bring back vigilante justice.
In the early 1830s, a group of high falutin' bankers worked a huge swindle on the people around Baltimore. They grossly enriched themselves while putting their depositors into penury. When the scandal over fraudulently issued bank notes was brought into state court, the bankers were able to bribe the judges into submission and no judgement was made against the obviously guilty swindlers. Those who were made impecunious were enraged, as they looked up at the hills surrounding them and saw the gleaming mansions of the very men who had impoverished them. A vigilante committee was formed and several of these mansions provided an early version of district wide street lighting. In the meantime, many of the swindlers were tarred and feathered and run out of town, never to be seen in that district again.
But they got off easy.
In her book, "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century", Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then after ten or twelve peasants violate the lady, with children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her husband and then killed her.
Now, that is class warfare. |
