I had a job I was at for 4 years that I quit last year which was extremely toxic. The culture was one of victim blaming, racism and a general “club” no one but the top people were allowed in. A year into that job there was a coworker who was unstable and verbally abusive to everyone. She did it to me and I took it to the director, who feigned believing in me, took it back to her, then fully sided with her against me and saw me from that point forward as a liar/manipulator (actually, she just didn't want to confront her crazy worker and resented being asked to intervene and risk herself). Over the next few months this coworker went at it with five other people so we all banded together, went above the director's head to HR. This obviously was much to the director's chagrin because HR went to her and asked why she did nothing about such an egregious problem in the workplace. She lied her way out of that one.
Four years later she promotes me to a supervisor position and instructs her lower manager (a total sociopath) to set me up for termination with false accusations. Everyone there is afraid of their job, so naturally people went along with it or stayed out of the way. It was at the end when a coworker came to me and stated the manager asked her to file a fake HR harassment report and she'll get promoted. She told me she didn't and I brought this up to HR. Obviously, she lied about it to HR to protect her job and not make waves, but told me this is what happened to help me get closure as I was leaving the same day. The director then demands I go back to the branch (instead of protocol, which is going to main headquarters' IT department) to hand back my laptop to the lower manager personally (the one who was pressuring my coworker to lie for her and set me up). Knowing this could be potentially legally threatening (why else would you ask someone to go all the way up to the branch they were quitting and directly give company hardware to a manager who has been lying/fabricating things about you and is a known sociopath other than to create a situation where she can falsely accuse me of, I don't know, “disgruntled employee attacks boss”?) so I declined. She began gaslighting as if I was paranoid, so I blocked her, dropped off the laptop.
The culture at that company was horrid. I've personally known multiple people who were fired in various Machiavellian ways and management/leadership were a bunch of racist white women who only hired personal friends and family to management roles. In addition to the many who were set up and fired, a deluge of old coworkers quit within a year. The supervisor before me was bullied by leadership and took out medical leave to go to get psychiatric help after all the gaslighting and abuse. The supervisor before her was bullied for two years straight until she quit and had to go to therapy to deal with PTSD brought on by working for them. The worst part of all this is, despite the plethora of history of these people being scum, they always seem to succeed in setting the narrative that the people they harmed were bad/immoral workers. And people believe it for two reasons. The stupid or apathetic ones simply accept what they are told. The smart ones see how dangerous leadership is and go along with the narrative to protect their jobs. A culture of nepotism and ass-kissing permeated and any dissenters or outspoken types were set up like this and bullied until they left (my case because they feared I'd litigate) or were terminated. I have to hand it to the director, she'd be a great regular in Game of Thrones with how disgustingly clever and cunning she was. She had been running circles around HR for decades, and it's infuriating. They get away with it all because none of us have cheap or free access to legal representation, and by the time the abuse is done, we all are just too drained and terrified to retaliate.
I'm not a communist, but I totally understand why entire nations threw themselves at a cause that gave them a chance to settle scores with these people.