The Felon and ICE: State Terror Has Arrived

For years now, some "friends" and acquaintances have chided me for "over reacting" about the threat the Felon poses and for calling out the parallels between the Felon and his regime and Hitler's Nazi regime. Others have said they "don't want to talk about politics" rather than have serious discussion about immorality of these individuals who want to close their eyes to the deliberate cruelty - and now the murder of white American citizens -  of the Felon's regime and the hideousness of ICE operations. Still others parrot the regime's lie that those being swept up in ICE raids are "criminals" even though the vast majority of those being brutalized have no criminal records and instead are cooks, landscape laborers, domestic workers and simply those working to try to give their families a better life.  This failure to admit the ugly truth about the Felon and his regime becomes complicity as a blind eye is turned towards cruelty and brutality. This deliberate blindness to cruelty and now murder of U.S. citizens also displays the moral bankruptcy of apologists who are seemingly fine with any horror so long as it does directly impact them.  These people happily believe the regime's lies even when confronted with video evidence that proves that the regime is flat out lying. All of this has delivered the country to a place where state terror against citizens is now official policy of the Felon's regime.  A column in the New York Times looks at the state terror that has arrived:

After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.

Please look at this list with me. Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., federal officers have: killed Renee Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm’s parking lot; detained numerous U.S. citizens, including one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a U.S. citizen who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury center; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas container next to a car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding to see people’s papers and arresting more than a dozen people who were working there; detained a 5-year-old. And now they have killed another U.S. citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse with no criminal record. It seems he was white. The agents had him down on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least 10 shots at point-blank range.

Confronted with a list like this — a deluge like this — we look for details that might explain why these people were subjected to this treatment, details that might reassure us that we, by contrast, are not in danger. Good was in a relationship with a woman, and her partner, who is butch, spoke impertinently to an ICE officer, so there, Good wasn’t your average white mother after all. Chong Ly Thao, the man who was dragged out of his house in his underwear, is an immigrant from Laos; he is not white, and presumably he speaks with an accent. The woman on her way to the medical appointment and the family with six kids drove through areas where anti-ICE protests were taking place.

We don’t focus on these details in order to justify the federal agents’ actions, which are plainly brutal and unjustifiable; we do it to force the world to make sense, and to calm our nerves. If we don’t talk back, if we alter our routes to avoid protests, if we are lucky enough to be white, straight, natural-born Americans — or, if we are not, but we lie low, stay quiet — we will be safe. Conversely, we can choose to speak up, to go to protests, to take a risk. Either way, we tell ourselves, if we can predict the consequences, we have agency.

In the 1990s, when I talked to people in the former Soviet Union about their families’ experiences of Stalinist terror, I was repeatedly struck by how much people seemed to know about their circumstances. . . . My favorite book about state terror is Lydia Chukovskaya’s “Sofia Petrovna,” a short Russian novel that has been translated into English. The protagonist, a middle-aged woman loyal to Stalin’s Communist Party, loses her mind trying to make sense of her son’s arrest.

[T]he secret about the secret police that became clear when the K.G.B. archives were opened (briefly) in the 1990s: They were ruled by quotas. Local squadrons had to arrest a certain number of citizens so they could be designated enemies of the people. That the officers often swept up groups of colleagues, friends and family members was probably a matter of convenience more than anything else. Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works.

The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive. Even in brutally repressive regimes, including those of the Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe, one knew where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lay. Open protest would get one arrested; kitchen conversation would not. Writing subversive essays or novels or editing underground journals would get one arrested; reading these banned works and quietly passing them on to friends probably would not. A regime based on terror, on the other hand, deploys violence precisely to reinforce the message that anyone can be subjected to it.

When we think of the terror regimes of the past, it is tempting to superimpose a logical narrative on them, as though totalitarian leaders had an extermination to-do list and worked their way through it methodically. This, I think, is how most people understand Martin Niemöller’s classic poem “First They Came.” In reality, though, the people living under those regimes never knew which group of people would be designated an enemy of the state next.

In Niemöller’s day, terror was carried out by the secret police and the paramilitary forces — especially the SA, more commonly known as the Brownshirts — whose job it was to instill fear in the population. In 1934, Adolf Hitler had an estimated 150 to 200 members of the SA’s own leadership arrested and its top generals executed in the ultimate demonstration that no one was immune from the state’s deadly violence. Stalin regularly carried out similar purges. Terror itself was not the end goal of those regimes, but nothing that followed would have been possible without it.

The toolbox isn’t particularly varied. [The Felon] President Trump is using all the instruments: the reported quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence, particularly in city streets; the postmortem vilification of the victims. It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.