Imitating the Fascists
Back in the early 1930s when Hitler came to power, there was a horrible fire in Germany's Reichstag. The Reichstag was the seat of the German legislature and can therefore be viewed as a rough equivalent to our U.S. Capitol. The Nazis immediately concluded that the communists had set the fire as an act of “insurrection." The fascists, therefore, rounded up and imprisoned every communist in sight and threw them in prison without a trial. Three of the communist leaders were thereupon murdered with the false explanation that they had tried to escape from jail. A diligent non-Nazi investigated and sought to charge the guards and warden with the crime, but nobody in government would sign the necessary papers. The communists, after all, were insurrectionists (although they may well have had nothing to do with setting the fire).