The Star Chamber was an English court which sat at the royal Palace of Westminster, from the late 15th century to the mid-17th century, and was composed of Privy Counsellors and common-law judges, to supplement the judicial activities of the common-law and equity courts in civil and criminal matters. The Star Chamber was originally established to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against socially and politically prominent people so powerful that ordinary courts might hesitate to convict them of their crimes. However, it became synonymous with social and political oppression through the arbitrary use and abuse of the power it wielded.
The Star Chamber was created during the reign of Henry VII (Henry Tudor), and was initially regarded one of the most just and efficient courts of the Tudor era. In addition to fair enforcement of the laws against the upper class, the Star Chamber also acted like a court of equity, which could impose punishment for actions which were deemed to be morally reprehensible but were not in violation of the letter of the law, giving rise to the concept of thought crimes such as criminal libel. This gave the Star Chamber great flexibility, as it could punish defendants for any action which the court felt should be unlawful, even when in fact it was technically lawful.
Henry VII used it to break the power of the landed gentry which had been such a problem during the Wars of the Roses. But by the time of his son, Henry VIII, it had become a political weapon for bringing actions against those who opposed the policies of the king, his ministers and his parliament. And by the time of Charles I, it had become synonymous with misuse and abuse of power by the king and his circle. It was known for holding secret trials where the accused was not entitled to hear the evidence, know his accusers, or even sometimes what the actual crime was. Its methods were inquisitorial. Charles used it to destroy the lives of his political opposition.
The Star Chamer was abolished in the English Civil Wars by the Habeas Corpus Act of 1640. That was not so far in the rear view mirror for the authors of the US Constitution and is regarded as among the reasons for the prohibition of compelled self-incrimination embodied in the 5th Amendment.
Today, the term star chamber refers pejoratively to any secret or closed meeting held by a judicial or executive body, or to a court proceeding that seems grossly unfair or that is used to persecute an individual. We're not supposed to have star chamber trials in this country.
Except we do.
This is something I've been thinking about for a few years now, and Anne Applebaum has written a truly disturbing survey of the situation, where people can have their lives and careers destroyed by anonymous accusations without even knowing what they were accused of.
It is fashionable on the reactionary right to shield oneself from accusations of racism, authoritarianism, and exploitation by shouting "cancel culture." The problem is, that usage is itself an exploitation. There is a cancel culture that really exists, and is really a problem. The star chamber trials are not operated by governments, but by individuals on social media and in the boardrooms of private companies and universities, in places where fact checking and context do not exist. In a number of cases, the crime is simply being in proximity of someone who was accused.
"The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualized apologies, the public sacrifices—these are rather typical behaviors in illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes, enforced by heavy peer pressure. This is a story of moral panic, of cultural institutions policing or purifying themselves in the face of disapproving crowds. The crowds are no longer literal, as they once were in Salem, but rather online mobs, organized via Twitter, Facebook, or sometimes internal company Slack channels. . . . What many of these people—the difficult ones, the gossipy ones, the overly gregarious ones—have in common is that they make people uncomfortable. Here, too, a profound generational shift has transpired. “I think people’s tolerance for discomfort—people’s tolerance for dissonance, for not hearing exactly what they want to hear—has now gone down to zero,” one person told me. “Discomfort used to be a term of praise about pedagogy—I mean, the greatest discomforter of all was Socrates.”
The one sour note is that Applebaum takes a stab at arguing that this phenomenon is not largely a product of the progressive left. But almost all the myriad examples she describes are examples of far left crucifixion of the merely left or moderate. They are examples of progressive on liberal violence.
"... they openly told me that I was being punished based on allegations. Just because they didn’t find evidence of it, they told me, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
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