{"id":311990,"date":"2026-01-19T12:01:56","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T12:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=311990"},"modified":"2026-01-17T07:16:48","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T07:16:48","slug":"the-machinery-of-terror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/01\/the-machinery-of-terror\/","title":{"rendered":"The Machinery of Terror"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Missing Link – by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

11 Jan 2026\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0I have seen the masked goons who terrorize our streets before. I saw them during the \u201cDirty War\u201d in Argentina, where 30,000 men, women and children were \u201cdisappeared<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

I saw them in El Salvador, when death squads were killing<\/a> 800 people a month. I saw them in Guatemala under the dictatorship of Jos\u00e9 Efra\u00edn R\u00edos Montt. I saw them in Augusto Pinochet\u2019s Chile and in Saddam Hussein\u2019s 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\u2019s Syria. I saw them in Bosnia, where Muslims were herded into concentration camps, executed and buried<\/a> in mass graves.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Terror works.<\/p>\n

The iron doors have not yet shut. There are still protests<\/a>. The media is still able to document state atrocities, including the Jan. 7 murder<\/a> of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross. But the doors are closing fast. ICE has deported<\/a> over 300,000 people and detained nearly 69,000 others \u2014 as well as been involved in<\/a> 16 shootings, including four killings \u2014 since Trump began his campaign against immigrants.<\/p>\n

ICE, our Americanized Gestapo<\/a>, is being birthed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A bloody airbag seen where Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.
(Photo by Alex Kormann\/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Resistance must be collective. We must assert not only our individual rights, but economic, social and political rights \u2014 without them we are powerless. Resistance means organizing to disrupt<\/a> the machinery of commerce and government. It means preventing arrests by patrolling neighborhoods to warn of impending ICE raids. It means protesting<\/a> outside detention facilities. It means strikes<\/a>. 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\u2019s inhumanity.<\/p>\n

If we fail, the dimming flames of our open society will be snuffed out.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in \u201cThe Gulag Archipelago<\/a>\u201d notes that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny \u201cwas stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed.\u201d He called the process \u201ca grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat 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?\u201d Solzhenitsyn asks. \u201cOr 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\u2019d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur \u2014 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\u2019s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!\u201d<\/p>\n

Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz, in \u201cThe Captive Mind<\/a>,\u201d also documents the creep of tyranny, how it advances stealthily, until intellectuals are not only forced to repeat the regime\u2019s self-adulating slogans but, as our leading universities did when they caved<\/a> to false allegations of being bastions of antisemitism, embrace its absurdism.<\/p>\n

Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes a population \u2014 often unconsciously \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

The historian Robert Gellately, in his book \u201cBacking Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany,<\/a>\u201d argues that state terror in Nazi Germany was effective not because of omnipresent state surveillance, but because it fostered a \u201cculture of denunciation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rat out your neighbors and coworkers and survive. If you see something, say something.<\/em><\/p>\n

The worse it gets, the more established institutions, desperate to survive, silence those who warn us.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people emerges, people who are that and nothing more,\u201d Solzhenitsyn writes of those who see what is coming. \u201cAnd how they were laughed at! How they were mocked!\u201d<\/p>\n

The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, whose early warnings about the rise of fascism were largely dismissed, and who told fellow intellectuals to stop<\/a> naively appealing to \u201cthe remains of a European conscience,\u201d 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<\/a> nearly 23,000 titles in public schools since 2021.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> is a shining example of this willful self-immolation. Nothing is as it is presented.<\/p>\n

There are increasing numbers of violent kidnappings<\/a> by masked ICE agents in unmarked cars on our city streets. People are ripped<\/a> from their vehicles and beaten. They are arrested<\/a> outside schools<\/a> and day care centers. They are raided<\/a> at work, thrown<\/a> onto the floor, handcuffed, driven away in vans and shipped off to concentration camps<\/a> in countries such as El Salvador. They are seized<\/a> when they appear at court for a green card application or interview to finalize a visa.<\/p>\n

Once detained, they disappear into the labyrinth of over 200 detention centers<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cLaws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,\u201d Hannah Arendt<\/a> writes in \u201cThe Origins of Totalitarianism<\/a>.\u201d \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The FBI, in an example of how justice is perverted, refuses to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in Minneapolis, blocking<\/a> access to any evidence that would allow them to file criminal charges against Jonathan Ross.<\/p>\n

Killing of unarmed citizens by the state is carried out with impunity.<\/p>\n

ICE has more than doubled the size of its force since early 2025 \u2014 to 22,000 agents \u2014 hiring<\/a> 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<\/a>, will range from $49,739 to $89,528 a year, along with a $50,000 signing bonus \u2014 split over three years \u2014 and up to $60,000 in student loan repayments.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> as part of the largest deportation effort in American history.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in Iraq. A night raid in Chicago, with agents rappelling<\/a> from a helicopter to storm an apartment complex filled with terrified families, does not look any different from a night raid in Fallujah.<\/p>\n

Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, the Martinician playwright and politician, in \u201cDiscourse on Colonialism<\/a>\u201d writes that the savage tools of imperialism and colonialism eventually migrate back to the home country. It is known as imperial boomerang.<\/p>\n

C\u00e9saire writes:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: \u201cHow strange! But never mind\u2014it\u2019s Nazism, it will pass!\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe majority sit quietly and dare to hope,\u201d Solzhenitsyn writes. \u201cSince you aren\u2019t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It\u2019s a mistake!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Maybe, the fearful say, Trump and his minions are only being bombastic. Maybe they don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

These self-delusions prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being constructed in front of us.<\/p>\n

Authoritarian states start by targeting the most vulnerable, those most easily demonized \u2014 the undocumented, students on college campuses who protest genocide, antifa, the so-called \u201cradical left,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 Jan 2026\u00a0–\u00a0The 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. Repression in Iran is merely a replica of the US version. ICE, our Gestapo, is being birthed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":269548,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,3480,1924,1110,2394,558,3455,1126,1660,1050,3324,103,718,2159,880,249,70,2659,498],"class_list":["post-311990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-anti-immigration","tag-authoritarianism","tag-civil-disobedience","tag-civil-resistance","tag-dictatorship","tag-gestapo","tag-hegemony","tag-ice","tag-imperialism","tag-north-america","tag-racism","tag-resistance","tag-rogue-states","tag-state-terrorism","tag-trump","tag-usa","tag-white-privilege","tag-white-supremacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311990"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311997,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311990\/revisions\/311997"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}