It would be too much to say that the sentencing of the leader of the Oath Keepers, Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other crimes doubled as a seminar in comparative literature. Yet Rhodes did tell Judge Amit Mehta that “I feel like I’m the lead character in Kafka’s ‘The Trial.’ I feel like it was a preordained guilt from Day One.” He vowed to be an “American Solzhenitsyn,” after the Russian literary nationalist.

That strikes us as vainglory. Rhodes is clearly an intelligent figure (he studied law at Yale and clerked on the Arizona Supreme Court). The comparison with Kafka, though, strikes us as inapt. Kafka wrote “The Trial” in 1914 and 1915, just as war broke out in Europe. Its protagonist, Josef K, is arrested on his 30th birthday, for charges that are never made clear. So his efforts to investigate his guilt come to naught. In the end, Josef K is executed — “like a dog.”

Yet Rhodes, who could have read  “The Trial” at Yale, is no Josef K. There are reports of shocking abuses by federal prosecutors dealing with the January 6 riot. Rhodes’ trial, though, was  nothing like the nightmare Kafka imagined. Rhodes was afforded due process, was notified of the charges against him, and ended up convicted by a jury of his peers, who found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. His right to appeal is preserved.

He claims to be a “political prisoner.” So was Lenin. “I dare say, Mr. Rhodes,” intoned the judge, “and I never have said this to anyone I have sentenced —  you pose an ongoing threat and peril to our democracy and the fabric of this country.” He marked seditious conspiracy as “among the most serious crimes an American can commit. It is an offense against the government to use force. It is an offense against the people of our country.”

Yet it requires no defense of the January 6 rioters — or, for that matter, President Trump, who is ensnared in his own labyrinth of legal challenges — to sense something of Kafka when politics and criminality are increasingly intertwined and where district attorneys and special prosecutors are almost nakedly political. Mr. Trump called for Secretary Clinton to be locked up, only to be ensnared in what turns out to be the fiction of “Russiagate.” 

Then there is District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Mr. Trump. It’s for falsification of business records, a misdemeanor for which the statute of limitations has passed. So a second charge has been handed up, but of what the prosecutors won’t say. Opinions are mixed on whether this is a departure from the constitutional due process. Yet one needn’t be a literary or legal sage to detect echoes of Kafka in a prosecution that is mum on the charges. 

Which brings us to Solzhenitsyn. He, like Rhodes, was a right-winger, but, unlike Rhodes, he wrote towering novels and non-fiction works, like “The Gulag Archipelago” (in which he was held for a decade). During the Soviet era, when we were on the Wall Street Journal and preparing for a trip to Russia, we sent Solzhenitsyn a letter inviting him to lunch. In exile at Vermont, the Nobel laureate couldn’t get to New York. He did, though, send a reply by mail.

Solzhenitsyn, in a letter typed on foolscap, wrote that he hoped our “own experience” would guard us from “mistakes and incorrect vision.” The “main weakness of the contemporary Western world,” he typed, “is that it does not believe in the clear division of Good and Evil, and that truth actually exists* in the world. Instead of this: pluralism, ‘there is no truth’, and it is always necessary to consider things ‘fifty-fifty’.”

We have thought about that advice often over the years. What our own newspaper life has taught us is that the membrane between good and evil can be thin, and it’s not impossible to start out with high ideals and fetch up on the dark side. This is no doubt why many of the Shays, the Fries, and the Whiskey rebels were pardoned in the end, even in some cases while awaiting the gallows. All of which will give Rhodes something to think about behind bars.

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* The emphasis is Solzhenitsyn’s.

An “experiment in literary investigation” is the way Solzhenitsyn described the genre of “The Gulag Archipelago.” The genre was incorrectly given in the bulldog.