I can’t prove whether or not karma is a real thing but I certainly like to think it is. I especially like to believe in karma when somebody falls prey to the very policies they promote:
In 1918, while a deputy chief of the Cheka in Ukraine, he [Martin Latsis] established the principle that sentences were to be determined not by guilt or innocence but by social class. He is quoted as explaining the Red Terror as follows:
Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror.
Latsis himself became a victim of the Soviet regime in the 1930s Great Purge, when he was arrested on November 29, 1937 and was accused by a commission of NKVD and Prosecutor of the USSR belonging to a “counter-revolutionary, nationalist organization”. He was executed in 1938 by firing squad.
A lot of people either knowingly or unknowingly advocate for a guilty until proven innocent justice system for certain crimes. Socialists of various flavors often promote such a system when an accused individual is a member of a class they aren’t fond of. The problem with such a system is that it gets abused pretty quickly. An individual having a feud with their neighbor might inform the police that their neighbor is a member of a persecuted class. People in power are quickly to label anybody they don’t like as members of a persecuted class. Since class membership becomes the important factor, not the facts of the case, the system quickly becomes a convenient mechanism for one to eliminate their enemies instead of a system for delivering justice.
It warms to heart to know that somebody like Martin Latsis, who promoted a system that issued judgements based on class membership instead of guilt of a crime, fell victim to that very system.