This is something I think about a lot nowadays.
Witnessing such vile, rabid levels of hatred towards immigrants, refugees, and groups that are given labels such as "illegal" or "criminal," I think to myself, "How does a person get to be that way?"
I am made of the same ingredients as them. I am capable of feeling violent hatred. It is not a mystery that lives in others, it is a basic emotion. So I look at fascists, and their desire to punish and hurt others, and I think: When have I felt something like that?
One of the things I have been thinking about a lot, without having any useful epiphanies, is how the emotion of "righteous anger" is so close to the urge to retaliation, which is in turn so close to the urge to dominate and humiliate others. I don't have a good answer for the question, "What does it mean to desire justice, and what would the fulfillment of that desire look like?"
Because hurting someone who has wronged you, or seeing that person hurt, can be so pleasurable and gratifying and rewarding. And I can see that intense pleasure and gratification in the fascists that delight in the dehumanization and torture of people.
Are the emotions of someone oppressed towards someone with power over them different from the emotions of someone with privilege towards a person they think is inferior? I'm genuinely not sure about it.
A lot of racists feel a sense of being wronged or an urge for punishment when they see a person of color being relatively successful or rewarded, or simply being free to act in a way the racist doesn't like. They want to "put them in their place." But "putting someone in their place" violence (enforcing a difference in power and privileges) and "giving someone what they deserve" violence (correcting a perceived wrong in how power and privileges were given or exercised) are so, so close together.
To illustrate, in Trump's State of the Union address he claimed that Somali refugees were cheating the welfare system out of 19 billion dollars. One of the speakers in Trump's Madison Square Gardens rally claimed that "illegals" were given access to "five-star hotels." On top of that, they widely publicize incidents of immigrants committing crimes; at the State of the Union address they brought in a little girl who had become disabled after being hit by a truck that was (supposedly) driven by an immigrant (I'm listing these from memory so there might be some mistakes.). The Laken Riley Act was named after a woman who was murdered by a Venezuelan immigrant, with her story being widely publicized as a representation of the effect of immigration.
Therefore hatred of immigrants is often rationalized as anger and frustration at people that receive privileges and preferential treatment that other people are denied, and/or a desire for justice for people who have been harmed in a way that could have been prevented.
The feelings themselves aren't wrong to feel. So where does it all go so horribly wrong?
Where it goes wrong first is when people believe complete lies, but where it REALLY goes wrong is thinking it's okay to treat people like they're not human and torture them as long as they have done something to "deserve" it.
Because "deserving" can easily be twisted into whatever you want, as it has been with immigrants, labeling every undocumented immigrant "a criminal" (for entering the country illegally) and therefore in the same category as a person who committed murder, and therefore acceptable to torture and subject to inhuman treatment.
I feel that even the most evil of people often perceive their own anger as righteous and their own violence as justice.
I have been thinking of this another way: instead of asking when is violence acceptable, maybe I should start with when does violence happen in reality
The murder of Brian Thompson by the Claims Adjuster was so remarkable because an event like that, where a very powerful person responsible for a lot of suffering is killed by someone without much power in society, is so incredibly rare. In the USA, murder happens constantly and mass murder of schoolchildren in a school is a regular event.
I don't really know how the psychology of murder and violence might be different in other societies, so I can't comment on that. But in this society at least, the vast, vast, vast majority of people that are mentally capable of killing someone else and decide to do it at some point, don't target people that are their oppressors or that possess real power.
Basically, I'm curious about how the idea of justified political violence, or violence as a form of justice, compares with the real-world psychology of violence.
Perhaps the most common type of violent behavior in this society, the violence of adults towards children, is very clearly both an "enforcement of hierarchy" violence but also rationalized as "justice" violence (the adults think they are disciplining the kid for doing wrong). Which is interesting because literally everyone was a child at some point, meaning that everyone is vulnerable to this kind of violence in their life.
Even more interesting, people that endorse violence against children often use their own experience of violence as a child to justify it. It's like being the perpetrator of violence is more rewarding than being the victim of violence was painful.
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