Category? F*ckedupness
Chris Hedges has seen the signs before in other countries in S. America that have been subject to the kind attention of the US for the purpose of regime change or resource domination.
He also draws on past literary parallels in terms of what states looked like en route to becoming brutal.
Best read in the link
ED
#Chris Hedges: 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.
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 JosĂ© EfraĂn RĂos 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.