Politics & Power Quote by Bram Fischer

What makes Fischer's line so unnerving is how calmly it strips the courtroom of its favorite disguise: the idea that prosecutions are about discrete crimes, neatly labeled and neutrally judged. He concedes the bureaucratic theater of "fifteen charges" only to puncture it with a lawyer's precision. Labels, he implies, are props. The real allegation is identity.

The specific intent is strategic and moral at once. As an advocate, Fischer is collapsing a complex indictment into a single, legible motive: the state is punishing political affiliation and organizing, not adjudicating particular harms. That move forces the listener to confront an uncomfortable legal question: if the charges "all arise" from membership, then the prosecution is about policing belief and association. It's a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the proceedings, delivered in the cool register of someone trained to respect procedure even as he exposes its corruption.

The subtext is a refusal to bargain for innocence by disowning comrades. Many defendants survive by performing repentance; Fischer does the opposite. He doesn't deny the Party. He denies the state's right to convert participation into criminality. In apartheid-era South Africa, where the law was engineered to defend racial hierarchy, "Communist" functioned less as a description than as a solvent: a word used to dissolve due process, to smear anti-apartheid politics as foreign contagion. Fischer names that mechanism. By doing so, he turns his own case into a brief against the system: not "judge my acts", but "notice why you're calling them crimes at all."