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.
Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, its officers have killed Renee Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm’s parking lot; detained numerous US citizens, including one dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed car windows and detained their occupants, including a US citizen on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury center; set off crowd-control grenades and tear gas next to a car containing six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding papers and arresting more than a dozen workers; detained a 5-year-old; and killed another US citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse with no criminal record. It appears he was white. Agents had him on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least 10 shots at point-blank range.
Confronted with a list like this, we look for details that might explain why these people were subjected to such treatment, details that might reassure us that we, by contrast, are not in danger. Good was married to a woman, and her wife spoke impertinently to an ICE officer. ChongLy Thao, dragged out of his house in his underwear, is an immigrant from Laos. The woman on her way to a medical appointment and the family with six children drove through areas where anti-ICE protests were taking place. The 5-year-old’s family lacks permanent status. Little is known about Pretti, but his father said he participated in protests and may have been legally carrying a gun.
We focus on these details not to justify ICE’s actions, which are plainly brutal and unjustifiable, but 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 stay quiet — we will be safe. Conversely, we can choose to speak up and take a risk. Either way, we tell ourselves that if consequences are predictable, we have agency.
But that’s not how state terror works.
In the 1990s, when I spoke with people in the former Soviet Union about their families’ experiences of Stalinist terror, I was struck by how much people seemed to know about what had led to arrests or executions. Neighbors had informed on them, or colleagues had named them under duress. These stories were passed down through generations. How could they know so much? They couldn’t. People crafted narratives from suspicions and hints to satisfy a desperate need for explanation.
Lydia Chukovskaya’s short novel Sofia Petrovna captures this process. The protagonist, loyal to Stalin, loses her mind trying to make sense of her son’s arrest. My own family history contains a corollary. After the secret police arrested most of the senior staff at the newspaper where my grandfather was a deputy editor, he waited for the knock on his door. When it didn’t come, night after night, he became so distressed that he checked himself into a mental institution. That may have saved him. Or it may be that the secret police had already filled their arrest quota.
When the KGB archives briefly opened in the 1990s, it became clear that quotas ruled the system. Local units had to arrest a set number of citizens to designate enemies of the people. Sweeping up colleagues, friends, and relatives was often a matter of convenience. Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is how state terror works.
Randomness distinguishes a regime based on terror from one that is merely repressive. Even in brutally repressive systems, one knows where the boundaries lie. Open protest leads to arrest; private conversation does not. Writing subversive essays gets you arrested; quietly passing them on probably does not. A terror regime deploys violence precisely to reinforce the message that anyone can be subjected to it.
When we think of terror regimes of the past, it’s tempting to imagine a methodical plan, an extermination to-do list. This is how many people read Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came.” In reality, people living under those regimes never knew which group would be designated an enemy next.
In Niemöller’s day, terror was carried out by secret police and paramilitary forces such as the SA. In 1934, Adolf Hitler ordered the arrest and execution of the SA’s own leadership, demonstrating that no one was immune. Stalin carried out similar purges. Terror was not the end goal, but nothing that followed would have been possible without it.
The toolbox is not particularly varied. President Donald Trump is using all the instruments: reported ICE arrest quotas; paramilitary forces drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence in city streets; and postmortem vilification of victims. It’s natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we’re seeing. There is a logic, and it has a name. It’s called state terror.
The New York Times