Number my sorrows,
will you ?
And measure them.
One comes and
the next one
rivals it.

  • 9 Posts
  • 529 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: May 1st, 2024
  • TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.comtoNews@lemmy.world•Kilmar Abrego Garcia to remain in jail while attorneys debate whether he’ll be deported if releasedEnglish
    17·
    18 days ago

    “I can tell you,” my colleague went on, “of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom.”

    “And the judge?”

    “Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know.”

    -from They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer.

    I guess that I have been waiting for a parallel to this story since Trump’s first election.

    And here we are.