The Trump administration is consolidating the familiar machinery of terror of
all authoritarian states. We must resist now. If we wait, it will be too late.͏
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The Machinery of Terror
The Trump administration is consolidating the familiar machinery of terror of
all authoritarian states. We must resist now. If we wait, it will be too late.
| | | |
The Missing Link - by Mr. Fish
I have seen the masked goons who terrorize our streets before. I saw them
during the “Dirty War” in Argentina, where 30,000 men, women and children were
“disappeared” by the military junta. Victims were held in secret prisons,
savagely tortured and murdered. To this day, many families do not know the fate
of their loved ones.
I saw them in El Salvador, when death squads were killing 800 people a month. I
saw them in Guatemala under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt. I saw
them in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I saw them in
Iran under the rule of the ayatollahs where I was arrested and jailed twice and
once deported in handcuffs. I saw them in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria. I saw them in
Bosnia, where Muslims were herded into concentration camps, executed and buried
in mass graves.
I know these goons. I have been a prisoner in their jails and spent hours in
their interrogation rooms. I have been beaten by them. I have been deported,
and in several cases banned, from their countries. I know what is coming.
Terror is the engine that empowers dictatorships. It eliminates dissidents. It
silences critics. It dismantles the law. It creates a society of timid and
frightened collaborators, those who look away when people are snatched off
streets or gunned down, those who inform to save themselves, those who retreat
into their tiny rabbit holes, pulling down the blinds, desperately praying to
be left in peace.
Terror works.
The iron doors have not yet shut. There are still protests. The media is still
able to document state atrocities, including the Jan. 7 murder of Renee Nicole
Good in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan
Ross. But the doors are closing fast. ICE has deported over 300,000 people and
detained nearly 69,000 others — as well as been involved in 16 shootings,
including four killings — since Trump began his campaign against immigrants.
ICE, our Americanized Gestapo, is being birthed.
| | | |
A bloody airbag seen where Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by ICE agent
Jonathan Ross. (Photo by Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty
Images)
Resistance must be collective. We must assert not only our individual rights,
but economic, social and political rights — without them we are powerless.
Resistance means organizing to disrupt the machinery of commerce and
government. It means preventing arrests by patrolling neighborhoods to warn of
impending ICE raids. It means protesting outside detention facilities. It means
strikes. It means blocking streets and highways and occupying buildings. It
means providing photographic evidence. It means sustained pressure on local
politicians and police to refuse to cooperate with ICE. It means providing
legal representation, food and financial assistance to families with members
detained. It means a willingness to be arrested. It means a nationwide campaign
to defy the state’s inhumanity.
If we fail, the dimming flames of our open society will be snuffed out.
Authoritarian states are constructed incrementally. No dictatorship advertises
its plan to extinguish civil liberties. It pays lip service to liberty and
justice as it dismantles the institutions and laws that make liberty and
justice possible. Opponents of the regime, including those within the
establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist. They throw up temporary
roadblocks, but they are soon purged.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago” notes that the consolidation
of Soviet tyranny “was stretched out over many years because it was of primary
importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed.” He called the process “a
grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible
to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.”
“What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out
at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive
and had to say good-bye to his family?” Solzhenitsyn asks. “Or if, during
periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a
quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs,
paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on
the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly
set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes,
hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of
time those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be
sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what
about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur
— what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very
quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding
all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
Czesław Miłosz, in “The Captive Mind,” also documents the creep of tyranny, how
it advances stealthily, until intellectuals are not only forced to repeat the
regime’s self-adulating slogans but, as our leading universities did when they
caved to false allegations of being bastions of antisemitism, embrace its
absurdism.
Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes a population — often
unconsciously — conform outwardly and inwardly. It conditions citizens to
relate to those around them with suspicion and distrust. It destroys the
solidarity vital to organizing, community and dissent.
The historian Robert Gellately, in his book “Backing Hitler: Consent and
Coercion in Nazi Germany,” argues that state terror in Nazi Germany was
effective not because of omnipresent state surveillance, but because it
fostered a “culture of denunciation.”
Rat out your neighbors and coworkers and survive. If you see something, say
something.
The worse it gets, the more established institutions, desperate to survive,
silence those who warn us.
“Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people emerges,
people who are that and nothing more,” Solzhenitsyn writes of those who see
what is coming. “And how they were laughed at! How they were mocked!”
The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, whose early warnings about the rise of fascism
were largely dismissed, and who told fellow intellectuals to stop naively
appealing to “the remains of a European conscience,” saw his books tossed into
the bonfires in the spring of 1933 during the Nazi book burnings. So far, we
have not burned books, but have banned nearly 23,000 titles in public schools
since 2021.
The authoritarian state cannibalizes the institutions that foolishly aid and
abet the witch hunts. It replaces them with pseudo-institutions populated with
pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals and
pseudo-citizens. Columbia University is a shining example of this willful
self-immolation. Nothing is as it is presented.
There are increasing numbers of violent kidnappings by masked ICE agents in
unmarked cars on our city streets. People are ripped from their vehicles and
beaten. They are arrested outside schools and day care centers. They are raided
at work, thrown onto the floor, handcuffed, driven away in vans and shipped off
to concentration camps in countries such as El Salvador. They are seized when
they appear at court for a green card application or interview to finalize a
visa.
Once detained, they disappear into the labyrinth of over 200 detention centers,
where they are moved from one facility to the next to hide them from family,
lawyers and the courts. Due process, once a constitutional right afforded to
everyone in the United States, no longer exists.
“Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something
contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt writes in
“The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to
treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of
arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist
the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an
omnipotent police.”
The FBI, in an example of how justice is perverted, refuses to cooperate with
local law enforcement agencies in Minneapolis, blocking access to any evidence
that would allow them to file criminal charges against Jonathan Ross.
Killing of unarmed citizens by the state is carried out with impunity.
ICE has more than doubled the size of its force since early 2025 — to 22,000
agents — hiring 12,000 new officers in four months from a pool of 220,000
applicants. It plans to spend $100 million over a one-year period to hire even
more recruits, part of the $170 billion for border and interior enforcement,
including $75 billion for ICE, to be spent over four years. Salaries for these
new recruits, poorly trained and often haphazardly vetted, will range from
$49,739 to $89,528 a year, along with a $50,000 signing bonus — split over
three years — and up to $60,000 in student loan repayments.
ICE is building new detention centers nationwide in 23 towns and cities. It
promises that once it is fully operational, it will go door-to-door as part of
the largest deportation effort in American history.
ICE agents, intoxicated by the license to kick down doors while wearing body
armor and firing automatic weapons at terrified women and children, are not
warriors as they imagine, but thugs. They have few skills, other than weapons
training, cruelty and brutality. They intend to remain employed by the state.
The state intends to keep them employed.
None of this should surprise us. The repressive techniques used by ICE and our
militarized police were perfected overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya
and Occupied Palestine, and earlier in Vietnam. The ICE agent who murdered Good
was a machinegunner in Iraq. A night raid in Chicago, with agents rappelling
from a helicopter to storm an apartment complex filled with terrified families,
does not look any different from a night raid in Fallujah.
Aimé Césaire, the Martinician playwright and politician, in “Discourse on
Colonialism” writes that the savage tools of imperialism and colonialism
eventually migrate back to the home country. It is known as imperial boomerang.
Césaire writes:
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang
effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing
around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never
mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide
the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the
crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism,
yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that
they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved
it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been
applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism,
that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice
of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and
trickles from every crack.
During the interregnum between the last gasps of a democracy and the emergence
of a dictatorship, the nation is gaslighted. It is told the rule of law is
respected. It is told democratic rule is inviolate. These lies mollify those
being frog-marched into their own enslavement.
“The majority sit quietly and dare to hope,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “Since you
aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!”
Maybe, the fearful say, Trump and his minions are only being bombastic. Maybe
they don’t mean it. Maybe they are incompetent. Maybe the courts will save us.
Maybe the next elections will end this nightmare. Maybe there are limits to
extremism. Maybe the worst is over.
These self-delusions prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being
constructed in front of us.
Authoritarian states start by targeting the most vulnerable, those most easily
demonized — the undocumented, students on college campuses who protest
genocide, antifa, the so-called “radical left,” Muslims, poor people of color,
intellectuals and liberals. They strike down one group after the next. They
blow out, one by one, the long row of candles until we find ourselves in the
dark, powerless and alone. |
Chris Hedges
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