by Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts:
America’s reputation as “the land of the free” is rooted in the Anglo-Saxon legal and political tradition, not in diversity and multiculturalism. Law as a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of rulers is a British achievement that Britain’s American colonies inherited. It was the accomplishment of a specific ethnicity known as Anglo-Saxon. Bringing rulers to the same accountability to law as the lowest peasant was a centuries-long process beginning with Alfred the Great in the 9th century and culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1680.
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In this legal tradition law is based in the customs and mores of the people, not on edicts issued from rulers, government bureaucrats, regulatory agencies, and activist judges. Obviously, this conveys an ethnic basis to law. A Tower of Babel–the fate of all diminishing white countries today–has no common customs and mores and no basis for law other than rulers’ edicts enforced by power.
Throughout the Western World today the people have lost the protection of law as a shield and suffer under rulers who wield law as a weapon. In the United States today demonstrators and rally attendees are turned into “insurrectionists” and sentenced to prison. Even US President Donald Trump is being subjected to four fake felony prosecutions in order to prevent him from being elected president.
During my youth law was seen as a shield of our rights, not as a weapon to be used against us. US Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland explained in 1934 that the purpose of law was to discover innocence or guilt, not to dispose of an enemy:
“The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocent suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor–and indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.”
US Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson saw it the same way:
“Any prosecutor who risks his day-to-day professional name for fair dealing to build up statistics for success has a perverted sense of practical values, as well as defects of character. . . . A sensitiveness to fair play is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.”
In 1940 Jackson said that unethical prosecutors are a threat to justice because of the danger that the prosecutor
“will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm–in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political view, or being personally obnoxious, or in the way of the prosecutor himself.
Robert Jackson’s 83-year old description of unethical prosecution precisely describes all of the “investigations,” impeachments, and indictments of President Trump that have been ongoing since 2016 for 8 years and show no sign of abating. The prosecutions of Trump are clearly prosecutions for the purpose of getting rid of a leader who presumes to challenge the ruling establishment. The prosecutions of Trump underline the termination in the US of the impartial rule of law.
Today try to find in the US a prosecutor as defined by Sutherland and Jackson. Try to find a prosecutor who has any interest in justice. They are only interested in coerced plea bargains in order to build their conviction rate and run for higher office on their name recognition. If you dare to go to trial, exculpatory evidence is withheld and prosecutors bribe witnesses to testify against you. The judge is angry because you are adding to his case load. High profile targets such as Michael Milken, Leona Helmsley, Martha Stewart, Donald Trump are favorites even when there is no personal animosity of the prosecutor against them. When the prosecution is driven by animosity, as it is in Trump’s case, it signifies the legal system’s acceptance of law as a weapon, not as an instrument of justice.
Try to find a honest prosecutor or judge prosecuting Trump supporters and sentencing them to tens of years of imprisonment for attending a political rally. Unarmed people conducted by police on a tour inside the capital, as the videos released by the House Speaker show, are tried as “insurrectionists” attempting to overthrow the government and establish a “Trump coup.” The use of law as a weapon by the Biden Regime has sent 1,000 American patriots to prison on this false charge. Law schools don’t protest, Bar Associations don’t protest. The judiciary aids the false convictions. The Congress does nothing. The media eggs on the false prosecutions.
Every one of these prosecutors and judges are abusing power for the sake of factional politics. If you don’t know what factional politics is, look it up. It was defined by our Founding Fathers. They feared it would destroy democracy and the rule of law.
In my book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions published 23 years ago, I pointed out that “law and order conservatives” enabled government to set aside protective aspects of law in order to easier and more certainly convict the Mafia, drug users, child abusers–whoever the target was at the specific time. I said that the law that is set aside in the interest of easier conviction is also set aside for the rest of us who are not Mafia, drug and child abusers, and that this conversion of law into a weapon would destroy nine centuries of Anglo-Saxon accomplishment in shielding people from arbitrary prosecution by rulers.
This has now happened. The British who created civil liberty and the Americans who inherited it have lost the protection of law.
“Law and order conservatives” determined to incarcerate criminals, “patriotic conservatives” anxious to protect “national security” from “the Muslim threat,” and woke ideologues determined to demonize and even criminalize white people as racists, while overrunning the ethnic basis of their countries with immigrant-invaders, together brought about the destruction of law as a shield of the people.
One can understand the frustration of Americans when criminals escape justice and when the country’s security seems to be undermined by treason. But when Americans accepted asset forfeiture laws in order to more easily convict criminals and accepted Presidents Bush and Obama’s claims that the “terrorist threat” justified suspending habeas corpus and due process, they forgot Sir Thomas More’s warning. In A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England, asks his critic, who is urging him to disregard the protective features of law in order to better pursue wrongdoing, what will happen to the innocent if the law is cut down? When the law turns on us, Sir Thomas asks, “where will we stand?” This is the question President Trump’s lawyers are pondering, and the question applies to everyone of us. If a President of the United States can be ruined because a couple of blacks in positions of power for which they are unqualified hate Trump, what protection does law afford the rest of us?
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