The indictment of Donald Trump and 18 people who support him in some way is something a totalitarian regime would do. It takes away the rights of those who oppose them. Cuba’s communist dictatorship held a mass trial last year for 21 people who disagreed with the party in power. Turkey is run by an autocrat. In 2020, 500 people were jailed for life for a 2016 coup participation.
Another indictment
Cuban authorities held a trial last year for people who protested communism. Both children and adults with mental health problems were prosecuted along with healthy people in one big trial.
All were allegedly present and participated in the protest and face charges of sedition. But the “crimes” vary wildly. The allegations vary from punching and stoning police officers to filming the protest to simply being there.
The indictment for thinking
If you’re a “counterrevolutionary” the state may imprison you. A Turkish court sentenced 475 people for long prison terms. Some were multiple life sentences. It was a mass trial for “traitors” in a 2016 attempt to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Erdogan is most eager to prosecute a Pennsylvanian that the United States refuses to extradite. Fethullah Gulen supposedly masterminded the coup attempt. He vehemently denies having this role. The United States says there’s no evidence at all to say he did this.
The indictment follows this path
Almost 100,000 arrests have been made in connection with the attempted coup and 150,000 Turkish people have been fired from their jobs if they were found to have connections to Gulen’s group. Egypt and South Africa are on this list too for political persecution. In 2014 Egypt sentenced 170 supporters of the elected former President Mohammed Morsi to death.
In 1956 the South African apartheid regime tried 156 people at the same time for being against the government’s racial discrimination policies in what became known as the Treason Trial. Those who were charged eventually had their cases dismissed. District Attorney Fani Willis of Fulton County, Georgia held a press conference in the dead of night, near midnight, to announce she was going to try all 19 defendants at once.
