The Price of Conservative Judicial Corruption

The Attempt to Take Over Germany

The analogies between the career of a certain Adolf Hitler and the behavior of Donald Trump and his henchmen have become so numerous as to seem ordinary at this point, but I am about to make another one, related to this week's abominable undersentencing of Paul Manafort at the hands of a Reagan apponted right wing judge.  My comparison is to what happened after the Beer Hall Putsch.  For those of you who may recognize the name, but not the history of this event, here is a little background:

"From November 8 to November 9, 1923, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and his followers staged the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, a failed takeover of the government in Bavaria, a state in southern Germany...By November 1923, Hitler and his associates had concocted a plot to seize power of the Bavarian state government (and thereby launch a larger revolution against the Weimar Republic) by kidnapping Gustav von Kahr (1862-1934), the state commissioner of Bavaria, and two other conservative politicians. Hitler’s plan involved using Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937), the right-wing World War I general, as a figurehead to lead a march on Berlin to overthrow the Weimar Republic...

In the aftermath of the failed “putsch,” or coup d’état, Hitler was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in prison. He spent less than a year behind bars, during which time he dictated “Mein Kampf,” his political autobiography.  In 1933, a decade after the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. He went on to lead his country into World War II."

Hitler had engaged in a treasonous revolt against Germany.  For this he should have been executed or received a very long prison sentence, but instead a corrupt, right wing judge gave him a shockingly short sentence and then saw to it that he served only a small time in custody, for a massive, murderous crime.

Inside the Beer Hall

It is highly likely that, if this conservative judge had not been able to engineer this travesty of justice, the Beer Hall Putsch would have been the end of the Nazi party, and it is very possible that World War II, with its fifty million deaths would have never taken place.

This sort of judicial travesty is exactly what has just happened in the Manafort case.  A corrupt conservative judge (and of course, conservatism is not really an ideological position at all, but rather a form of corruption) has been allowed to mangle the justice system in our country to further the right wing cause.

We may certainly hope that the result of behavior like this will be far less horrible than it was in the case of Hitler, but then, in the early 1920's, no one could imagine the apocalypse that his light prison sentence would help bring about.  There seems to be little that can be done about what just happened, unfortunately, so we will just have to pray that episodes like this are not precursors to another march toward fascism.