State-sponsored domestic terrorism
The US has created a domestic masked secret police force1 that plucks residents out of their homes and disappears2 them. An organization of poorly trained, gun-wielding, masked agents who shoot people, citizens, in their own communities, with administrative approval from the regime in charge, and for which Congress has authorized a massive increase in budget. These activities have been well-documented by others in this age of sousveillance where everyone is watching everyone, but it doesn’t seem to stop them, though they do seem to run away if there is sufficient resistance.
These activities are intended to intimidate the masses and almost assuredly designed to provoke an incident from the unintimidated: once one of these agents is hurt or killed, that will justify a further crackdown, ratcheting towards the imposition of martial law, and an attempt to selectively suspend elections.
The large numbers and violence involved suggest it would be a miracle if such an incident did not occur.
This rise to power has been facilitated by the preemptive compliance of putativelyindependent institutions that have handed over their powers at the mere whiff of a suggestion that the supreme leader wants it. Every reduction in friction makes the next move easier and less costly.
We should have been trained by decades of dystopian science fiction and other media to identify fascist states. Some of the most popular movies of all time hit this very theme. And yet the majority of Americans, while perhaps not approving, just acquiesce to this not-very-slow transformation of their country.
We have been trained by centuries of imperialism to know how it comes back to bite the imperialists. Yet those who oppose “imperialism” when asserting A does it to B, are silent when C does it to D, and raise not a peep when their own country does it to E. Almost as if the imperialism wasn’t the real issue, but which power the opponents are aligned with.
We have been trained by millennia of wars to understand the nature (and disposability) of young males. From time immemorial, old men have treated young men, demographically the most aggressive group, easily organised into a hierarchical command structure like the police or army or militia or gang, as disposable tools in the struggle for power. Anyone above the age of 25 (and probably most of those younger) well understands this dynamic.
And yet here we are, dispatching armed militias of mostly young men into US cities like Minneapolis, where I lived from 1999-2017, to punish the regime’s enemies and deport those with skin color, heritage, and accents different than their own, apparently constitutionally stopped and detained solely for those reasons, arresting or killing those who get in the way.
Digging yourself out of a hole is far more difficult than never getting into it in the first place.
Secret police: Armed agents exercising state power while obscuring identity and agency in routine public operations ↩︎
https://humanrightsfirst.org/the-trump-administration-is-forcibly-disappearing-migrants/ ↩︎
See also George Santayana ↩︎
