The Wild Reed: Chris Hedges

Showing posts with label Chris Hedges. Show all posts

Monday, May 11, 2026

Chris Hedges: “The Genocide in Gaza Is the Beginning. Welcome to the New World Order”

Following (with added links) is the transcript of a speech delivered this past March by award-winning journalist Chris Hedges.

In his speech, Hedges makes a compelling case for understanding the Israeli government's genocide in Gaza as being the beginning of a new world order where international law has collapsed, Western moral authority is finished, and the same forces destroying Palestinians abroad are dismantling democracy at home – in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia and other Western countries.

This reality, says Hedges, leaves us with only two choices: obstruct or surrender.

________________

The genocide in Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs. We watch this madness daily with the war on Iran, the saturation bombing of southern Lebanon and the suffering in Gaza.

International bodies such as the United Nations have been neutered, transformed into useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished. The most psychopathic rulers of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance, opening up a vast moral abyss.

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges – who will soon be purged – domestically and in international bodies such as the International Court of Justice is contemptuously violated. Savagery abroad. Savagery at home.

The BBC’s Lucy Williamson reports that Israel is destroying south Lebanon “using Gaza as a model – a blueprint for destruction used again as a path to peace.”

Over 1 million people have already been displaced in Lebanon – one-fifth of the entire population of a country that already hosts the world’s highest number of refugees per capita – in just a few weeks. Add to this 2 million displaced in Gaza and 3 million displaced in Iran. 6 million people rendered homeless.

For four decades Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying for the U.S. to go to war with Iran. Previous administrations, Republican and Democrat, have refused, in no small part because of fierce opposition within the Pentagon, which did not view Iran as an existential threat and did not project a positive outcome for the U.S. or its regional allies.

But Donald Trump, encouraged by his inept negotiating team of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and fellow real estate developer and golfing partner Steve Witkoff, each fervent Zionists, took Israel’s bait. Britain’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, who attended the final talks between the U.S. and Iran, dismissed Kushner and Witkoff as “Israeli assets.”

Joseph Kent, who resigned from his position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center to protest the war, wrote in his resignation letter that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

The public rationale for the war on Iran since it began on February 28 has been protean. Is it to shut down Iran’s nuclear program? Is it to thwart Iran’s ballistic missile program? Is it because the U.S. carried out pre-emptive attacks on Iran, as Marco Rubio said, to ensure the safety of U.S. assets once Israel decided to strike? Is it because the Iranian government carried out lethal repression, killing hundreds of anti-government protestors during massive street protests? Is it regime change? Is it an attempt to shut down Iran’s so-called state sponsored terrorism? Or are these subterfuges for something else?

Certainly, Israel and the U.S. seek regime change. But here it appears the U.S. and Israel diverge. Israel also apparently seeks, as in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Lebanon, the physical disintegration of Iran, the breaking apart of the country into warring ethnic and religious enclaves, the transformation of Iran into a failed state.

Persians in Iran constitute roughly 61 percent of the population with various minority groups, who often suffer state repression, making up the remaining 39 percent. These ethnic groups include Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Lurs, Balochs, Arabs and Turkmens, along with religious minorities such as Sunnis, Christians, Baha’i, Zoroastrians, and Jews. The shattering of Iran into antagonistic ethnic and religious enclaves would leave Israel as the dominant power in the region, giving it the ability to, if not occupy its neighbors directly, control and subjugate them through proxies, part of a long-held desire for a Greater Israel. It would also make it possible for foreign states to control Iranian gas reserves, the second largest in the world, and its oil reserves, 12 percent of the global total.

Israel’s crusade against the Palestinians, the Lebanese and now the Iranians is justified by the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. But it is not lost on the Global South, especially Palestinians, that nearly all Holocaust scholars have refused to condemn the genocide in Gaza. Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter.

Holocaust scholars, with a handful of exceptions, have exposed their true purpose, which is not to examine the dark side of human nature and the frightening propensity we all have to commit evil, but to sanctify Jews as eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of its crimes of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide.

The hijacking of the Holocaust, the failure to defend Palestinian victims because they are Palestinian, has imploded the moral authority of Holocaust studies and Holocaust memorials. They have been exposed as vehicles not to prevent genocide but to perpetrate it, not to explore the past, but manipulate the present.

Any tepid recognition that the Holocaust may not be the exclusive property of Israel and its Zionist supporters is swiftly shut down. The Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles deleted an Instagram post that read: “NEVER AGAIN CAN’T ONLY MEAN NEVER AGAIN FOR JEWS” after a backlash. In the hands of Zionists, “never again” means precisely that, never again, only for Jews.

Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the nègres d’Afrique.”

The near-annihilation of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 – then British prime minister Winston Churchill referred to Hindus as “a beastly people with a beastly religion” – along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on civilian targets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrates something fundamental about “Western civilization.”

Genocide is not an anomaly, it is coded in the DNA of Western “civilization.”

“In America,” the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modelled them on laws designed to disenfranchise Blacks. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos – although they lived in the U.S. and U.S. territories — was emulated by the German fascists who stripped citizenship from Jews. American anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage, were the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans. American jurisprudence classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry – the so-called “one drop rule” – as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish.

The millions of indigenous victims of colonial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo and Vietnam, for this reason, are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. They too suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their Western perpetrators.

Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state our Christian fascists and the far-right dream of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by the far right because it has turned its back on humanitarian law and uses indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants.

It was this distortion of the Holocaust as unique that troubled Primo Levi, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz from 1944 to 1945 and who wrote Survival in Auschwitz. Levi was a fierce critic of the apartheid state of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians. He saw the Shoah as “an inexhaustible source of evil” that “is perpetuated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.”

Levi deplored the Manichaeanism of those who “shun nuance and complexity.” He condemned those who “reduce the river of human events to conflicts, and conflicts to duels, us and them.” He warned that the “network of human relationships inside the concentration camps was not simple: It could not be reduced to two blocs, victims and persecutors.” The enemy, he knew, “was outside but also inside.”

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, known as “King Chaim,” ruled the in the Łódź ghetto on Poland on behalf of the Nazi occupiers. The ghetto became a slave labor camp that enriched Rumkowski and his Nazi masters. Rumkowski deported opponents to death camps. He raped and molested girls and women. He demanded unquestioned obedience. He embodied the evil of his oppressors. For Levi, he was an example of what many of us, under similar circumstances, are capable of becoming.

“[W]e are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit,” Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved. “His fever is ours, the fever of our Western civilization that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.”

“Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility,” Levi continued. “Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”

Levi understood that the line between the victim and victimizer is razor thin. We can all become willing executioners. There is nothing intrinsically moral about being Jewish or a survivor of the Holocaust. Levi, for this reason, was persona non grata in Israel.

Zionists find in the Holocaust and the Jewish state a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as a cloying moral superiority. After the 1967 war, when Israel seized Gaza the West Bank including East Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Israel, as American sociologist Nathan Glazer approvingly observed, became “the religion of the American Jews.” The Holocaust became their “moral capital.”

“Jewish suffering is depicted as ineffable, uncommunicable, and yet always to be proclaimed,” writes the European historian Charles S. Maier, in The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity:

It is intensely private, not to be diluted, but simultaneously public so that gentile society will confirm the crimes. A very peculiar suffering must be enshrined in public sites: Holocaust museums, memory gardens, deportation sites, dedicated not as Jewish but civic memorials. But what is the role of a museum in a country, such as the United States, far from the site of the Holocaust? Is it to rally the people who suffered or to instruct non-Jews? Is it supposed to serve as a reminder that “it can happen here?” Or is it a statement that some special consideration is deserved? Under what circumstances can a private sorrow serve simultaneously as a public grief? And if genocide is certified as a public sorrow, then must we not accept the credentials of other particular sorrows too? An American historian of Polish ancestry argues that, with the German invasion of 1939, the Poles became the first people in Europe to experience the Holocaust and that historians have so far “chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivistic terms – namely as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora.”

If Polish Americans claim their own “forgotten Holocaust,” what recognition should they enjoy? Do Armenians and Cambodians also have a right to publicly funded holocaust museums? And do we need memorials to Seventh-Day Adventists and homosexuals for their persecution at the hands of the Third Reich?

Unique suffering confers unique entitlement.

Any crime Israel carries out in the name of its survival – its “right to exist” – is justified in the name of this uniqueness. There are no limits. The world is black and white, a never-ending battle against Nazism, which is protean, depending on who Israel targets. To challenge this bloodlust is to be an antisemite, facilitating another genocide of Jews.

This simplistic formula not only serves the interests of Israel, but also the interests of colonial powers that carried out their own genocides, ones they also seek to obscure.

The sacralization of the Nazi Holocaust offers a bizarre quid pro quo. Arming and funding the state of Israel, blocking U.N. resolutions and sanctions that would condemn its crimes and demonizing Palestinians, and their supporters becomes proof of atonement and support for Jews. Israel, in return, absolves the West of its indifference to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust, and Germany for perpetrating it. Germany uses this unholy alliance to separate Nazism from the rest of German history, including the genocide German colonists carried out against the Nama and Herero in German South-West Africa, now Namibia.

“[S]uch magic,” Israeli historian and genocide scholar, Raz Segal, writes, “legitimizes racism against Palestinians at the very moment that Israel perpetrates genocide against them. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness thus reproduces rather than challenges the exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism that led to the Holocaust.”

Professor Segal, the director of the program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, wrote an article about the war on Gaza on October 13, 2023, titled: “A Textbook Case of Genocide.”

This denunciation from an Israeli Holocaust scholar, whose family members perished in the Holocaust, was a very lonely stance.

Professor Segal saw in the Israeli government’s immediate demand that Palestinians evacuate the north of Gaza and the blood-curdling demonization of the Palestinians by Israeli officials – the defense minister said Israel was “fighting human animals” – the stench of genocide.

“The whole idea about prevention and ‘never again’ is that – as we teach our students – there are red flags, that once we notice them, we’re supposed to work in order to stop the process that could escalate to genocide,” Professor Segal told me, “even if it’s not genocidal yet.”

Professor Segal paid for his honesty. The offer to lead the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which has issued no condemnation of the genocide, was revoked.

When professor Segal and I testified at the state capital in Trenton in opposition to the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) bill, which equates criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism, we were jeered by Zionists and our microphones were cut by the committee chairman. There we were, arguing that this bill would curtail free speech while we were in real time being denied free speech.

Genocide is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations, as it carries out genocide, has effectively imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West can no longer lecture anyone about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilization. The ruse, that somehow we as a nation promote democracy, equality and human rights, is finished.

“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century – just as the First World War was for a generation in the West,” Pankaj Mishra writes.

None of us who reported from Israel and Palestine, where I worked as a reporter for seven years, predicted this genocide. And yet, we were acutely aware of the genocidal impulse that lay at the heart of the Zionist project – the desire by large segments of Israeli society to eradicate and expel all Palestinians. This genocidal impulse was there from the inception of Zionism.

Victor Klemperer, a professor of linguistics and the son of a Berlin rabbi living under Nazi rule, noted in his diary, “To me the Zionists, who want to go back to the Jewish state of A.D. 70 (destruction of Jerusalem by Titus), are just as offensive as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient ‘cultural roots,’ their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world they are altogether a match for the National Socialists.”

I covered the extremist rabbi, Meir Kahane, who claimed that violence was a Jewish virtue and revenge, a divine commandment. He was, when I was based in Israel, barred by the Israeli government from running for office.

Kahane was assassinated on November 5, 1990, in New York City. His Kach Party in Israel was outlawed four years later after Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born doctor and Kach member, entered Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque and opened fire on worshippers, killing 29 Palestinians. Goldstein, dressed in his army captain’s uniform, was overpowered by worshippers and beaten to death. I was sent by my editors in New York to interview the survivors. When they received the copy, they insisted I do more interviews with Jewish colonists who justified Goldstein’s grievances with Palestinians, part of the game of balance, but really part of the effort to obscure the truth.

Kach, following its statements of support for the massacre, was declared a terrorist organization by the United States.

But Kahanism did not die. It was nurtured by Jewish extremists and colonists.

Kach’s racial intolerance and calls for mass violence against Palestinians infected larger and larger segments of Israeli society. It found near universal acceptance after the attacks of October 7.

I saw this intolerance at political rallies held by Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from right-wing Americans associated with AIPAC, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted Kahane-inspired slogans such as “Death to Arabs” and “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.

Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic on November 4, 1995.

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing these Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, who hung a portrait of Goldstein on the wall of his living room, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett.

Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, who worked as an assistant to the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was referred to by Benito Mussolini as “a good fascist,” was a leader in the Herut Party that called on Israel to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a party “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

There has always been a virulent strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project, mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately, for us and the Palestinians, these fascistic strains are ascendant.

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazis’ blood-and-soil ideology. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Amalekites who were massacred by the Israelites. Europeans and Euro-Americans in the American colonies used the same Biblical passage to justify their genocide against Native Americans.

Enemies – usually Muslims – who are slated for extinction are subhumans who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand.

Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of three of the most sacred sites for Muslims, supposedly built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple which was destroyed in A.D. 70 by the Roman army, to be demolished. These extremists call for it to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which zealots refer to as “Judea and Samaria,” is being annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by religious laws imposed by the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will soon mirror the despotic theocracy in Iran.

James Baldwin presciently saw this regression to our innate barbarism. He warned that there was a “terrible probability” that “Western populations, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen, and for which generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.”

The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.

The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Erich Fromm writes in The Sane Society.

We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Iran. We watch it in Lebanon. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media. The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza.

Those who name and denounce this evil, including the heroic students who set up encampments on campuses here and abroad, are smeared, blacklisted and purged. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us, the silence of all authoritarian states. We know where this ends. Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, speak out against the crime of genocide, and see your broadcasting license revoked, as Trump’s Chair of the F.C.C. Brendan Carr has proposed.

We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.

Those are the only choices left.

– Chris Hedges
March 2026

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Memes of the Times

NOTE: The above quote is from author Marianne Williamson.

Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Chris Hedges on ICE: “I Have Seen These Masked Goons Before”

Award-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges has written are very important and timely piece about how ICE, “our Americanized Gestapo,” is being birthed right before our eyes. Since early December 2025, ground zero of this birthing has been Minnesota, the U.S. state in which I live.

Here’s how my friend Ed describes what it’s currently like in the North Star State:

A friend from out-of-state asked me how I’m doing. I responded that everyday I feel more like I’m living in occupied territory. There are now more ICE thugs here than our police, and sometimes an individual "suspect" (usually a person of color) is surrounded by 50 of them. They are breaking into homes, abducting students – teenagers! – arresting protesters and spraying chemicals into their faces. And pumping three bullets into the face of an innocent woman. Fear, anger, apprehension are increasing. No one feels safe!

It’s in this context of rising brutality and unconstitutional actions by ICE agents in Minnesota and across the country that I share Hedges’s article in its entirety below with added links and images documenting the scene here in Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

_________________

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 January 7 murder of Renee Nicole Good [pictured at right with her son Emerson] 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.

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.