Anyone who thinks this needs to look a little more closely.
The corruption of the judicial system, along with the educational system, is key to destroying the society we once knew. It's not a playground, it's a battleground -- or would be if there were a systematic, as opposed to sporadic, defense from the Right.
(Did I say "defense"? Where's the major effort to re-take lost ground?)
I have posted the following several times in the past few weeks; I hope those who have seen it before will forgive me for doing so once more. But it is so apropos to what the Right has been doing at least for a few decades, based on personal observation (and yes, some of that is hindsight):
"THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: THE GERMANS, 1933-45"
by Milton Mayer
The University of Chicago Press
From the chapter, "But then it was too late" pages 169 to 172, 1966 edition.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?---well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty."
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'
"And you ARE an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh- pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have."
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to---to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait."
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worse act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked---if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jew swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in---your nation, your people--- is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibilty even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succesion of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably everyday, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany could not have imagined."
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done, (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the University when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
.
"You are compromised beyond repair"? I don't agree. You are not compromised beyond repair -- you can always change and work against what you supported, tacitly or actively. Saul the antagonist is better remembered as Paul the defender. (Need I add this is a Christian reference?)
Would that it were only you that were compromised.
What has really happened is that you compromised your society beyond repair. You stood by and did nothing when those with an agenda of destruction worked their changes, bit by bit, because it was always easier, it was always safer, it was less costly, at any one time to do nothing than to stand up.
And you did nothing when those who did stand up were attacked for their stance -- perhaps the time, or the issue, or the person wasn't right for you. But whatever the reason, the outcome is the same: your society is corrupted beyond repair.
Return for a minute to the judicial system: How is it that rights assumed to be inherent, or at least explicitly laid out in the constitution, somehow no longer exist? And how is that "rights" not found in the constitution somehow manage to be predominant in our society today?
The answer is, as I asserted earlier, that the judiciary is not a playground, it's a battleground.
And we're losing.
Because we're not fighting.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you."
For want of a nail, a shoe was lost...