Political Justice [Jay Guevara]

by Your Raving Roving Science Correspondent: Jay Guevara

With increasing frequency we seem to be encountering "political justice," which bears the same relationship to justice as "social justice" does, i.e., prepending a modifier that entirely negates the noun.

I recently re-read Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," in which in one passage he describes how politicization of the Weimar Republic's judiciary contributed to its downfall.

The failure to clean out the judiciary was another. The administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for reactionary political ends. “It is impossible to escape the conclusion,” the historian Franz L. Neumann declared, “that political justice is the blackest page in the life of the German Republic.” 4 After the Kapp putsch in 1920 the government charged 705 persons with high treason; only one, the police president of Berlin, received a sentence— five years of “honorary confinement.” When the state of Prussia withdrew his pension the Supreme Court ordered it restored. A German court in December 1926 awarded General von Luettwitz, the military leader of the Kapp putsch, back payment of his pension to cover the period when he was a rebel against the government and also the five years that he was a fugitive from justice in Hungary.

Yet hundreds of German liberals were sentenced to long prison terms on charges of treason because they revealed or denounced in the press or by speech the Army’s constant violations of the Versailles Treaty. The treason laws were ruthlessly applied to the supporters of the Republic; those on the Right who tried to overthrow it, as Adolf Hitler was soon to learn, got o either free or with the lightest of sentences. Even the assassins, if they were of the Right and their victims democrats, were leniently treated by the courts or, as often happened, helped to escape from the custody of the courts by Army officers and right-wing extremists.

I hadn't remembered this from my first reading, but in light of recent developments in America, this passage had a lot of resonance with me. Reverse the political polarity from monarchists to communists, and mutatis mutandis, he could have been writing about America in 2021.

Consider the Chauvin trial. A physically formidable ex-con arrested for passing counterfeit currency resists arrest, is subdued by a departmentally-sanctioned and -taught method. The ex-con then dies from pre-existing heart disease and having three times the lethal concentration of fentanyl in his bloodstream. The video of the subdual looks bad, however, and the deceased was from a politically favored group (this would have been a non-story if Floyd had been white). Thus Chauvin was convicted in a case that had reasonable doubt written all over it.

In the Rittenhouse trial, Judge Schroeder asserted that this "wasn't a political trial," to which DA Binger responded with an eye roll. It shouldn't be a political trial, but quite obviously, it is. Rittenhouse shot three fun-loving patriotic scamps (aka "antifa" thugs) for no reason, and he is being prosecuted for it, even if the prosecution has to torture the evidence, logic, common sense, and yes, common decency, to make a go of it. Apparently you have no right to self-defense even when previously threatened with death - twice - and chased by a number of previously-convicted lawbreakers who try to seize your weapon, who kick you in the face, who hit you over the head with a skateboard - twice - and run up to you pointing a pistol at you.

All of this follows the antifa/BLM riots ("mostly peaceful protests") that characterized the summer of 2020, participants in which suffered no consequences. Contrast that with the treatment of the 6 January "insurrectionists," many of whom are held even now in solitary confinement, without arraignment (IIRC), and no one utters the phrase "habeas corpus."
Why? Because many members of the criminal justice system objectively support the hard-left. Some, e.g., Chesa Boudin and several other Soros acolytes, make no bones about doing so. A much larger contingent, however, clearly share the same predilections, but without stating it in so many words. Leftists who commit crimes oftentimes aren't even investigated, much less prosecuted, whereas those opposed to the leftists face the full brunt of the law. Consider again the Rittenhouse trial, wherein the FBI had drone footage (including high resolution drone footage, which they conveniently "lost"). Where exactly is their drone footage of the riots of 2020? Were drones unavailable then, perhaps? Was facial recognition only invented in time for the 6 January "insurrection?"

Politicians and all too often police exhibit the same behavior. Politicians refuse to enforce the law; instead, they offer rioters "room to destroy," as in DC, to establish their own little "summer of love" enclaves, as in Seattle, or to run amok over wherever they feel like, as in Portland. Part of that, of course, is garden-variety cowardice on the part of squishy leftist politicians. Enforcing the law would alienate a key constituency of theirs, viz., criminals. Instead, they hoped that Daddy - in the form of Donald Trump - would clean up their messes for them, giving them the opportunity to strike a noble pose in opposition to him. That would be a win-win for them: the mess gets cleaned up, and they can score political points by opposing Trump. Unfortunately, for them, Trump refused to play, so eventually even Seattle had to call a halt to the nonsense it had generated and encouraged.

In each case, "political justice" undermines actual justice, and thereby generates and encourages chaos. To which the question has to be asked: Cui bono?

posted by Open Blogger at 02:55 PM

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