"The Power to Prosecute Is the Power to Destroy"
Ambassador Chas Freeman gets straight to the point.
I could not resist re-posting my recent piece on Kamala Harris (amended with an introduction on Keir Starmer) one more time with these pithy and quotable words from former US Ambassador Chas Freeman.
If one political trend runs through the turbulent events of the last 4+ years and succinctly explains how our political system has been perverted and inverted from the freest on earth to one of the most repressive and quasi-totalitarian — one trend that explains why the radical Left was able to take control in the US and why the establishment Right let them — this is it. Consciously or not, this is the ultimate power that all the players in the hyper-professionalized politics of Washington (and increasingly the other western capitals) are fighting ferociously to acquire: the power to make criminals.1
Historian David Starkey seems shocked (37:42) to discover this about Keir Starmer: "Can you imagine a Prime Minister advertising that he was a public prosecutor?" After becoming PM in July, Starmer lost no time in providing a particularly vicious display of how useful this job qualification can be to the aspiring authoritarian seeking to silence his critics and cowe his own people into submission (and further displays seem to issue forth regularly from his government). But while Starkey finds this remarkable in a British politician, Americans are long habituated to being governed by politicians who build careers upon this “power to destroy”.
As Freeman explains, it does not matter whether you are guilty or innocent. The prosecution alone will destroy you financially and reputationally. (And criminal charges are not required; civil suits achieve the same purpose.) This is what the perpetrators of multiple “lawfare” operations against Donald Trump and his supporters understand. It is also why ordinary Americans have long feared their courts and see them as a path to ruin rather than dispensers of justice.2 This is also why free countries like the United States traditionally were at pains to provide protections against frivolous or politicized prosecutions, like the institution of the grand jury. Today, these protections are not only neutered and atrophied in the judiciary but forgotten by a political culture that has degenerated into such ignorance that it no longer understands basic principles of freedom.
Especially diabolical is that this power is bipartisan. While today it is wielded primarily by leftists, it is readily supported and enabled by conservatives — not only law-and-order conservatives, who believe in principle that prosecutors should be criminalizing more of us, but also mercenary rightists who use the law-and-order rhetoric to disguise their collusion with the far Left and hitch a ride on its road to power.
It is the politics personified by Kamala Harris, yes. But it is also embodied in Senator Josh Hawley and others who advertise their “family values”. Doubly ironic, they apply their prosecutorial ingenuity to dismembering and pilfering families that they value mostly for the revenue that the state can extract from them.
If we look back at the last 4 years, as the far Left seized and consolidated its hold on the US government, we will find that prosecutors played the decisive role at pivotal moments, including some that are not so obvious as others.
And the critical point to remember in understanding why is that expressions of outrage by media legal experts always cover up more than they reveal. They do not want you to know that what the Democrats do to Trump and his people are what the outraged legal experts themselves do to ordinary Americans all the time, or at least they look the other way while their colleagues do it.
To understand why prosecutors have amassed this power — virtually unchecked — to turn us all into criminals, we must accept the bitter truth that we first allowed them to have this power over others, less powerful than ourselves, while we averted our eyes and held our tongues.
Once we accept the full implications of our neglect, we will realize that there are no “conspiracies”. We needlessly expose ourselves to accusations of “conspiracy theorists”, accusations that should have told us something about what we were doing wrong. Yes, the powerbrokers of Davos, functionaries of the Deep State, and weapons contractors are quick to exploit our somnolence for their own empowerment and enrichment. But their tyranny and our enslavement is as much our own doing as theirs. Only by accepting this will we be able to free ourselves and defeat it.
Below are links to the two published versions of the article, originally in the New English Review, and as amended on the web site of the Forum for Democracy.
My article, “The Real Indictment Against Kamala Harris,” was picked up and re-published by the Dutch political party and think-tank, Forum for Democracy (FvD), with an added introduction showing that the recent outburst by Prime Minister Keir Starmer reflects the same prosecutor’s mentality that the way to deal with political opponents is to arrest them:
Keir Starmer has revealed his true colors as the first Stalinist prime minister of Britain. But has anyone noticed that he shares the essential trait that I recently identified with the aspiring next president of the United States: both rose to power by putting people in prison? (…)
Read the rest at the Forum for Democracy, here.
The original article below was published in the August issue of the New English Review:
The surreal prospect of Kamala Harris as a major party presidential candidate — and before that possibly the president of us all — offers irresistible temptations to the satirists and those who laugh to keep from crying. Her shallow philosophizing and word salads have filled us all with, shall we say, amusement (at least until now). Not since Dan Quayle has a VP offered such a tempting target for ridicule (and he was an intelligent man, as it turns out, whose bravery in stating unpopular truths has been vindicated).
I will resist the temptation and risk ruining everyone’s fun by posing a serious question: How did this hopeless mediocrity rise so high in American public life? Being a politician’s mistress offers one alluring explanation, but the real reason is more sobering. It is precisely the one that she herself has been playing up, but it is also the same reason why so many mediocrities wield so much power in Washington and across America: (…)
Read the rest in the New English Review, here.
If you want to read more analysis of this kind, you can find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.
Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. All his books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.
Compare the famous line from Ayn Rand: “There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
“At all levels of American society...the idea that American courtrooms strive toward justice is no longer taken seriously,” the Wall Street Journal observed more than two decades ago. “The courts are greatly feared for their ability to ruin, but they aren't much respected anymore by the American people.” Since then, no effort has been made even to place these abuses on the public agenda, so they have only become worse.
Grand Juries were once the province of the county freeholders. They were used to keep judges and politicians in check. They were also used to control the budgets of the counties. Then, in 1947, after WWII, the US District Attorneys Association seized the Grand Juries as their own. This is because too many politicians and judges complained that the local and even U.S. Grand Juries were being used to go after them for corruption, fraud, extortion, and the like. They claimed that grand juries were being used frivolously and maliciously against them. It is highly doubtful that grand juries were used frivolously and maliciously. Maybe in a small number of cases, but not in the overall scheme of things. Many politicians back then were as corrupt, malicious and criminal, as they are today.
Once the grand juries were seized to be used by county, state and federal prosecutors, We the People lost a major part of the 6th Amendment. It was not to be used by government entities to prosecute. Yes, it was all nice sounding that prosecutors would go after criminals and the grand juries would be a buffer to false or weak claims. But this is no longer the case. Grand Juries are used as a "baseball bat" against any political opposition, wealthy people, or powerful people that prosecutors don't like. This is especially evident in Marxist-Communist totalitarian "Blue States" like New York, California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, and even Arizona (where we have a fraudulently inserted Democrat Governor, Attorney General and Secretary of State running (ruining) the state there.
The way to take back grand juries is to stop funding them, and legislating them to be brought back to the Board of Freeholders (Executive Boards), and take it out of the hands of local, state and Federal prosecutors who are maliciously using it for any reason now.
I still remember my own shock when I realised that the Crown Prosecution Service in the UK refer unashamedly to convictions as "successes" - the matter of whether the man in question is actually guilty being of no interest to them. As they strive to maximise their "successes" their explicit support for the police's assistance in building a prosecution case follows. And as the prosecution is responsible for disclosure (in English law), the CPS's complicity in the endemic failures to disclose exculpatory evidence also follows.