Imagine yourself a citizen of the old Soviet Union. (Plus there are other places this would/will apply)
And imagine you felt that the “American way” was superior to the “Soviet way”.
You’d better not say so.
We can all imagine you being sent to build a railroad using the bare hands of you and your fellow inmates in Siberia with only the clothes on your back at the time of arrest and a daily ration of one cup of cold, chicken foot quasi-soup per day. This would have happened to you not just because those who pissed off the communist party were toast, but because espousing some foreign political/social/economic policy really and actually did violate one or more of their statutes.
Stating that your Soviet society would be better off using western ways violated their law in a literal sense. I think of it as a ‘political crime’ and I think the Soviets used the same term.
It’s one of the reasons we despised the Soviets. And while I happen to think that our anti-Soviet attitude became hysterical and self-defeating in some ways, I’ll gladly agree that we were correct in despising and resisting a concept like this.
America does not recognize the concept of political crime. At least not in the sense of criminalizing the mere support of other ways of doing things. The 1st amendment to the Constitution obviously stands completely opposed to the very idea.
How about an American who passed intelligence to the Soviets? Not for money, but because they ‘believed in’ the Soviet Union? We’d be likely to say, “The politics of that situation takes a back seat to the fact that they did actual damage to us. That’s the crime”. Yes, it makes sense. But the political nature of this crime can’t be denied. Whether we’d care to recognize it or not, calling this a political crime would not be inapt.
Then there’s McCarthy-ism which sought to punish political activity more like my first example. Having been a communist party member briefly while in college was enough to wreck long standing State Dept careers for instance. (Alger Hiss is who brought that description to mind.)
This was an obvious 1st amendment violation. But, then, McCarthy and his enablers were behaving lawlessly. At least our statutes didn’t define communist party membership in itself as a crime.
Aside from anomalies like McCarthy-ism I’ve been unable to see instances where America has embraced the concept of political crime. At least we’ve been reluctant to actually write it into our laws.
Were the Confederates guilty of political crime? I’ve never heard anyone put it like that. But the idea seems compelling.
