FBXL Social

2023/06/01 1:40:02 AM UTC

One should be very careful about cheering for corruption to be applied to their enemies.

Make no mistake, what's going on with Trump is corruption, whether you like him or not. That's why it keeps on failing, because at least for now, America's legal system isn't completely corrupt (but it's only a matter of time at this rate). The press runs with stuff that isn't true because they don't like the guy(Pretty much everything connecting Trump with Russia was false, and the Clinton Campaign was fined for their cheating in that election), or they frame stuff as if it's really bad when it's relatively common. The same week of the Mar-a-lago raid, it turned out Biden had a bunch of classified documents in his house, and had since he was vice president 4 years earlier.

Equal protection under the law in the US is a constitutional right, so if two people commit the same crime, and are not punished equally, or worse -- if several people commit the same crime and are not punished but one person who is unpopular is, then that's a violation of fundamental justice.

Once a corrupt action becomes acceptable, often the cat is out of the bag and it won't go back in. Assassination was considered unusual in the Roman Republic until 133BC when a group of senators who opposed one tribune of the pleb's policies assassinated him and hundreds of his supporters to prevent the loss of aristocratic power (an early populist!). After that, assassination became a more and more commonplace tool in the late Roman Republic. Another example is the conquering of Rome by a Roman army as a political tool is a good example of corruption that was unthinkable until it was common. General Sulla marched on Rome in 88 BC, and the Roman Republic was gone 61 years later (which sounds like a long time, but Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon much earlier than the republic was gone, and the Roman Republic existed for 600 years and the western Roman empire existed for 500 years). After that unprecedented invasion, it became routine for armies to march on Rome in political struggles for the crown of emperor.

Corruption can also start a cycle of hatred and retribution. The Mongolians came down under Genghis Khan and totally wiped out the ruling class and took over the country, oppressing the Han who lived there, but then later on the Han took back over and the new regime wanted to restore Han culture such as Confucianism, and so marginalized the Mongolians. That example is one where they got lucky.

I recall the story of the Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda, that when the white colonial powers came, they assumed the more "white looking" people were the superior people and so they ended up with power, even though they were demographically the minority. That ended up resulting in tragedy later because after years of oppression under the minority, the majority engaged in some very bad things in retribution.

A similar story occurred in the former Yugoslavia, where Tito kept the communist country made up of the Serbs and Croats in one piece through force of personality (and just a little bit of crimes against humanity). Once he died, however, the balance shifted and people who were previously empowered suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of some very bad things.

History is complicated and a single paragraph doesn't tell the story of thousands of years of history leading to a certain moment. However, the simplified historical examples I provide do serve somewhat to illustrate my core point that one should not cheer for corruption.