@fmf said
Some modern dictionaries and current usage may consider the two words to be equivalent.
This is what makes this topic interesting. The reality of modern usage on one hand, and trying to extract some objective [or maybe academic] stance on the difference between the words on the other.
'Webster's unabridged dictionary' would be vital in a courtroom or legislative ass ...[text shortened]... ideas when it comes to weighing the difference between retribution and vengeance in the real world.
The framers of the U.S. Bill of Rights were wise and educated, and chose their words carefully. We should heed them in their original sense, not in a post-modern 'alternative fact' ad hoc sense which might suit the moment's expedience.
Real world: when one listens carefully to Trump's various 'justifications' for assassinating a foreign general, for example, one hears such things as that it prevented immediate harm to American interests (this would be based on some military intelligence which, for national security reasons, Trump is loath to reveal -- as this might compromise the sources of the intelligence). But then, almost immediately, he starts to threaten "52 sites" in Iran with swift and terrible consequences if Iran were to retaliate. The number "52" is of course significant and not chosen at random; it represents the Americans once held as hostages when the U.S. embassy was overrun in Tehran in 1979. Moreover, Trump claimed, the general should have been killed before (by Trump's predecessors). And finally, Trump claims the general was the number one terrorist operating in the ME (with the implicit implication that terrorists are fair game and that due process of law does not apply to them).
Examine these various 'justifications' closely; they are of markedly different characters.
Is killing a general 40 years after a hostage crisis justifiable? When the general had nothing to do with the hostage crisis as it unfolded? Hardly. He's the wrong guy; but even supposing he had had something to do with it, then as a young man, killing him is not proportionate, since none of the hostages was killed. Threatening "52 sites" with terrible swift destruction, 40 years later, is pure vengeance, passion-loaded dissociated rage, not just retribution. But that's how Trump thinks (or rather,
feels)--Trump is a hot-head--, and it re-invigorates a raw nerve among Americans who were alive then (as I was) and recall the anguish of those 444 days when the U.S. was powerless and at the mercy of mob-driven forces they could neither control nor understand.
I won't bother to further analyze Trump's other claims in this matter; he sprays the buckshot so far and wide, it is little more than a rambling, incoherent tirade. The unfortunate thing about Trump is that his rambling incoherent tirades have become the new norm, in defiance of the clear thinking and clear language of the framers of the Constitution and the BoR. Trump not only lives in a world of 'alternative facts' where truth is infinitely malleable; he also blurs useful distinctions (such as that between retribution and vengeance). This makes it hard to argue against his sort of mindset, and that is a great danger to a free society.