“It’s a free country.” I first heard this at age four, from a kid in the neighborhood (who was probably doing something wrong). Our “freedoms” are not absolute: we are not legally free to steal others’ property or watch child pornography, but we are free to speak our mind, subject only to a few important exceptions where the First Amendment does not apply.
Stuart Rhodes was exercising his free speech rights when ––as the leader of the “Oath Keepers” recently sentenced to 18 years in prison for “seditious conspiracy” –– he claimed he was a “political prisoner,” comparing himself to Nelson Mandela and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian literary giant who “shook the foundations of the Soviet state with his works exposing the horrors of the Communist regime.”
Yes, it’s a free country, and thanks to the First Amendment, anyone can make absurd statements, like comparing yourself to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His remarks have gone mostly unnoticed, mostly because most people misunderstand free speech laws relating to the First Amendment, and what “political prisoners” actually are, instead of the concept that Mr. Rhodes offers: that anyone prosecuted by the U.S. government is now a political prisoner. (If Donald Trump is convicted for secreting highly classified documents and lying about it, the claims of “witch hunt” will almost surely change to claims that he is a political prisoner.”
Let’s start with free speech and the First Amendment. A fine explanation can be found in this Amicus podcast from Slate, with First Amendment scholar Mary Ann Franks of the University of Miami Law School.
As Professor Franks notes, the Brandenburg case ––about the Ku Klux Klan’s free speech rights ––protects even the most hateful, racist speech, unless it poses “an imminent threat of harm” to the safety and welfare of others.
So . . . what did Stuart Rhodes “say” before the Jan. 6 insurrection? As the New York Times reported:
“. . . Rhodes and his co-defendants planned to forcibly block the transfer of Presidential power. In an online meeting recorded ahead of a planned protest in November, 2020, Rhodes discussed stationing an armed “quick-reaction force,” or Q.R.F., outside of Washington, D.C., and contended that Trump had the power to invoke the Insurrection Act and call the armed group into action. “That Q.R.F. will be awaiting the President’s orders. That’s our official position,” Rhodes explained, to members of the group. “And the reason why we have to do it that way is because that gives you legal cover.” Prosecutors rejected the defense’s interpretation of the Insurrection Act as unconstitutional: “no government official, including the President, has authority to authorize an attack on the Capitol or the government more generally.”
If he is a political prisoner, he is a prisoner because his “free speech” went way too far –– creating the danger of imminent harm to others –– and is the kind of speech that any government would be justified in penalizing. The legal defense that he was taking orders from President Trump was properly rejected, and should be rejected by any government where the rule of law (and democracy) matter.
Compare Rhodes’ “political prisoner” rhetoric with the reality facing actual political prisoners. See, for example, the recent Washington Post article describing how good people around the world have been imprisoned just for sharing a post critical of their governments.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/political-protest-new-generation-faces/
In one example, consider Marfa Rabkova, who worked for Viasna, a Balarusian human rights organization, sentenced to 15 years in prison for “inciting hostility toward the government.” What kind of incitement? She had begun documenting evidence of torture and abuse by Belarusan authorities. She has been recognized by Amnesty International as a political prisoner.
In each of the cases noted in the Washington Post article, we can see true moral courage: the political prisoners are speaking truth to power, not falsehoods in service to an authoritarian “leader.” So, Mr. Rhodes, please note that your hero, Donald Trump, has more in common with Putin and his predecessors than he has with Solzhenitsyn.
On his death in 2008, NPR had this to say:
“Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian literary giant who shook the foundations of the Soviet state with his works exposing the horrors of the Communist regime, died Sunday night at his home outside Moscow. He was 89 years old and, according to his son, died of heart failure.”
“Solzhenitsyn did not start out as an anti-Soviet crusader. He was born in southern Russia, in 1918, the year after the Bolshevik Revolution. He grew up fatherless, in extreme poverty, during the tumultuous formative years of the Soviet Union — an era of civil war, famine and repression. Solzhenitsyn was sent to a gulag for eight years for writing a letter to a friend that was critical of Stalin, a mass murderer.”
“For years, Solzhenitsyn had written with scant hope of seeing his works in print. Then, in 1962, during the brief post-Stalin thaw, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev ordered the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”
“The story was set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s and describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, a day that was unremarkable for millions of prisoners like him, despite the brutal hardships. And so, Solzhenitsyn, an unknown math teacher from the provinces, leapt to fame. But when Khrushchev was ousted from power, the hard-liners who replaced him stopped publication of his new works and had him expelled from the Soviet writers union. This did not silence him, however. He had his work smuggled out of the country and published abroad, where the literary greats of Europe and the U.S. took up his cause. Solzhenitsyn came to personify resistance to Communist repression.”
In 1970, the Nobel committee awarded him the literature prize, citing “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.” He did not travel to Stockholm to receive the prize, for fear he would not be allowed back into the Soviet Union.
Memo to Mr. Stewart Rhodes: you are not, and never will be, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. You are not opposing an oppressive, totalitarian state like Stalin’s USSR, regardless of what you might think. And Solzhenitsyn never advocated violence against his government. You will spend time in a reasonably comfortable federal prison, while Solzhenitsyn was stuffed into a gulag under horrible conditions. One other difference?
Solzhenitsyn didn’t have an eye patch from shooting himself in the eye.