Each of these grim appraisals can feel devastatingly true when you are standing amidst the violence, squalor, and rank injustice of the poorest communities in the developing world today, but I think that is largely because we are unable to be transported back with equal vividness to the realities of the “developed world” a century or more ago, where bloodthirsty mobs summarily executed suspects in acts of grotesque vigilante justice and abused, oppressed, and looted their ethnic minority neighbors, with no accountability from—and often with the endorsement of—the criminal justice “system;”
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