The Law and Justice: There Is a Difference
We've talked about this before, but it's time to discuss it again. When does the law stop being about justice?
Justice and the legal system don’t always go hand in hand.
Ideally, in a democratic society they would at least aim in the same direction on paper. But throughout history we have been reminded over and over again that when a certain sort of person gets the reins of power, the law can be turned into a weapon.
We’re seeing it again now.
The State Monopoly on Violence — which we have discussed before, if you recall — is being wielded against immigrants and American citizens alike. Federal agents are being allowed to shoot people in the streets, murdering people exercising their Constitutionally-guaranteed rights, and facing no accountability.
Again, as we have discussed before, when there is no peaceful and legal way of obtaining justice, people tend to turn to other options.
I don’t think it’ll be much longer before people start taking a page out of Luigi Mangione’s book. Remember when we talked about that? About how making peaceful revolution impossible makes violent revolution inevitable?
That’s a quote from an American President, by the way. Remember when they used to care about that sort of thing?
“For the victims of UnitedHealthcare, there wasn’t going to be any legal recourse.
For CEO Brian Thompson, there was never going to be any penalty brought down on his head. There were never going to be any handcuffs. No court date. No jury of his peers, no judgment. No prison.
No justice.
The law was on his side, and the people who were hurt by his company were considered nothing more than a statistic. A number typed on a spreadsheet somewhere.
Their humanity was completely ignored.
Is it truly surprising that someone felt that their only hope of justice was to take matters into their own two hands? Peaceful revolution was impossible, so violence was inevitable. Justice delayed was justice denied.”
Is this a state of affairs the Trump administration wants to establish? Because I have news for them about who the CEO is in this allegory.
He can fire Bovino and throw out Noem all day every day, but he still holds the blame.
He’s still the one people will look to when deciding who carries the weight of all their rage and grief.
He’s ultimately responsible for everything that’s going wrong. People aren’t stupid…
But they are furious.
I don’t believe in the death penalty, and I don’t condone violence. But that doesn’t mean I can’t look through the lens of history and recognize what’s coming. And frankly, I’m terrified.
What will they say about Renee Good and Alex Pretti?
We felt the weight of standing there after the January 6 coup attempt, looking at the pristine white steps where so much violence had taken place not that long ago.
I wrote about that feeling a while back. On the same visit, we went to the Smithsonian — a lifelong dream of mine which he insisted we make a reality — and of course, we visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
It was a harrowing experience. Especially after what we’d watched livestreamed a couple of years before. Let me give you a quote from my reflection about the visit, just to give you an idea of how it felt:
“I walked on cobblestones taken from the streets of the ghettos. I saw the rubble left behind when the Nazis attempted to destroy a camp. I saw a casting of a road to one of the death camps, where the Nazis desecrated Jewish cemeteries and used their tombstones to pave the trails.
I saw an old sewing machine owned by a Jewish tailor and felt the jolt of surprise when I realized we had the same antique model when I was a kid. I’d used it to sew Halloween costumes as a child.
I saw a replica of a crematorium door and of the infamous gate to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I stood staring at one of the tables where the Nazis forced prisoners to strip the dead of their gold teeth and valuables before they were burned.
I saw videos of emaciated corpses being dragged and tossed into pits. I saw pictures of charred corpses burning in a pile. I saw documentation and videos of horrific medical experiments.
But through it all, what struck me the hardest was those damned train tracks from Treblinka. How many people were trapped in railcars like that one? Rattling down those tracks, with no idea of what was waiting for them at the other end?
How many people that stepped off those tracks were dead within an hour of their arrival?
Standing in that railcar, I took in the darkened interior with a heart of lead inside my chest. It was small. I knew from my research that it would have been packed with people, too many people. Some of them would have died in that car, and left inside with those still living until they disembarked.
It’s hard to imagine. But do it anyway. We have to do it anyway.
Stepping out of the railcar was like being able to breathe again. On the other side was a wall, full of pictures and notes about the people who, once upon a time, were forced to travel on those tracks.
It described the fate that waited for them at the end. Their last hours. I turned around for one last look at the train, and I was confronted with a sight that will stick with me for the rest of my life.
I hadn’t seen them behind me, they must have come up while I was reading. They stepped out of the railcar, arm-in-arm, holding hands with their heads held high but eyes downcast.
The couple clearly felt the weight of where they were, and what they were looking at. The facts of history laid plain. The lady had her hair covered in a scarf.
The gentleman was wearing a yarmulke.
They stepped down out of the railcar, passing by the wall of records and the pictures of waiting lines of concentration camp prisoners, being sorted to determine who would live and who would die.
It must have hurt them to see all of these things. It must have been painful, terrifying to see what happened in the past. It must have been awful to contemplate what might have been, had they been born back then instead of now.
But they went anyway. To remember. To ensure that they would never be able to forget. To ensure that the fact of what happened remains in history and is never allowed to fade.
So should everybody else.” — Never Forget: Looking Back on the Holocaust by Sam W.
Too many people have failed to learn these lessons from history. And so, when the ICE thugs of today are compared with the Gestapo of Hitler’s Germany, they scoff.
They call it hyperbole, or an exaggeration. “They’re just enforcing the law!” they exclaim, shocked that people could malign such distinguished Federal agents.
It’s not hyperbole. It’s not an exaggeration. We’re calling it like we see it.
ICE is acting like state secret police. They’re creating an atmosphere where dissent is treated as terrorism and protesting is a death sentence. They’re creating an atmosphere where fear for your life compells you to be silent.
And it’s not an accident.
I need you to understand something. It’ll sound hysterical, and you might feel the urge to roll your eyes and check out for the rest of this article, but I’m dead serious. I need you to read this, understand it, and internalize what it means.
Hitler did this.
Hitler turned ordinary citizens into thugs for his agenda. He villified an ‘Other’ to give the people an enemy to unite against as a way to consolidate his power. He used the threat of this ‘Other’ to keep people afraid so he could continue stripping away their rights and make them feel like they had to comply — if they gave up their rights, he could keep them safe.
That’s what he promised them, and it was a promise he kept breaking. Like with Renee Good, like with Alex Pretti.
He didn’t keep his people safe, he made their country into a nightmare they could not wake up from, one where they were scared to speak out or risk getting shot and having their names dragged through the mud, to be called a terrorist to justify their murder.
Hitler. Did. This.
‘Comply or die’ was practically the motto of the Nazi SS, at least at first.
Later on, when the train cars were rattling down the cold iron tracks to Treblinka, ‘comply and die’ became the letter of the law.
Remember, the first country that the Nazis invaded was their own. That’s what we’re witnessing right now.
Every government wields the State’s monopoly on violence.
No world leader is flawless, no country exists that doesn’t have skeletons in its closet.
You can praise FDR for saving the U.S. from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl — two major events that were inextricably linked, by the way — and also remember the horrors of Redlining and the Japanese Internment Camps of World War II.
I love my native Canada, but I can’t forget how we treated our native peoples.
There is a bizarre tendency for some people to try and deflect, to say hey, Trump isn’t unique, other leaders have done similar things and you weren’t up in arms, yadda yadda yadda.
Sure. Bad actions are bad actions regardless of who is doing it.
But Whataboutism isn’t helpful right now, because it does absolutely nothing to change what’s happening in the present. You can rail about Obama’s deportations or drone strikes — and you should. Later.
But right now, we’re talking about Trump, because he is the one holding the reins.
He has the power, and he is abusing it.
We’re talking about how he’s dehumanizing people, how he and his regime are lying to you about what they’re doing, spreading misinformation and dragging murdered American citizens through the mud.
We’re talking about families being torn apart and little five-year-old children being used as bait by masked, unidentifiable Federal thugs who murder people with no accountability or expectation of justice.
We’re talking about how he wants to be a dictator, how he idolizes dictators like Putin and Kim Jong Un, and how he is actively attempting to disengage the U.S. from the world’s most successful and prosperous mutual-defence agreement.
How he’s threatening NATO allies, turning the American economy into a ticking time bomb that will blow up global stability when it goes off.
We’re talking about how we’re on the cusp of another World War, with an egomaniacal demented fiend holding the nuclear football.
We’re talking about people being stripped of their rights, about the end of due process, about systemic hate being normalized and encouraged.
We’re talking about a nightmare that we cannot wake up from.
We are talking about how the law is no longer aligned with justice.
And now we need to talk about what Americans are going to do about that.
I hope peaceful revolution is still possible. Because as we know, the alternative is something nobody wants to see.
Solidarity wins.
Brilliant breakdown of how state power can drift away from justice when wielded without accountabilty. The historical paralel to early Nazi tactics is especially sobering, the shift from 'comply or die' to 'comply and die' took time but happened because folks normalized the first steps. I've been thinking alot about how fear makes people look the other way when rights get stripped incrementally.