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State Terror – A brief guide for Americans
Thinking About, Timothy Synder: “Yesterday the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.
This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped. So let’s begin with language, because language is very important. When the state carries out criminal terror against its own people, it calls them the “criminals” or the the “terrorists.” During the 1930s, this was the normal practice.
Looking back, we refer to Stalin’s “Great Terror,” but at the time it was the Stalinists who controlled the language. Today in Berlin stands an important museum called “Topography of Terror”; during the era it documents, it was the Jews and the chosen enemies of the regime who were called “terrorists.” Yesterday in the White House, the Salvadoran president showed the way, referring to Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a “terrorist” without any basis whatsoever. The Americans treated him as a criminal, even though he was charged with no crime. The first part of controlling the language is inverting the meaning: whatever the government does is good, because by definition the its victims are the “criminals” and the “terrorists.”
The second part is deterring the press, or anyone else, from challenging the perversion by associating anyone who objects with crime and terror. This was the role Stephen Miller played when he said yesterday in the White House that reporters “want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children.” The control of language is necessary to undermine a legal or constitutional order. Our rule of law begins with notions such as the people and their rights. If politicians shift the framework to “criminals” and “terrorism,” then they are shifting the purpose of the state. In the United States, we are governed by a Constitution.
Basic to the Constitution is habeas corpus, the notion that the government cannot seize your body without a legal justification for doing so. If that does not hold, then nothing else does. If we have the law, then violence may not be committed by one person against another on the basis of namecalling or strong feelings. This applies to everyone, above all to the president, whose constitutional function is to enforce the laws.
Trump spoke of asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to find legal ways to abduct Americans and leave them in foreign concentration camps. But by “legal” what is meant are ways of escaping law, not applying it. It is that anti-constitutional escapism that enables abuse. State terror involves not just the malignant development of state organs of oppression, such as masked men in black vans, but also the withdrawal of the state from its role as a guardian of law. What aspiring tyrants present as “strength,” the ability to terrorize innocent people, rests on what might be seen as a more fundamental weakness, which is the withdrawal of the state from the principle of the rule of law. When we have law, we are all stronger; when we lack law, everyone is weaker except for the very few who can direct the coercive power of the state against the rest of us. In the history of state terror, the escape from law into coercion takes three forms, all of which were on display, incipiently, in the White House yesterday: the leader principle; the state of exception; and the zone of statelessness. The leader principle, or in German Führerprinzip, is the idea that a single individual directly represents the people, and that therefore all of his actions are by definition legal and proper. In discussions in the White House and thereafter, we see this notion being advanced. Trump’s advisors claim that what he is doing is popular. The claim (as in legal filings) that the president is acting from a personal “mandate” from the people has the same problem. Asked on Fox News about the abduction of Americans and their transfer to foreign gulags, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “these are Americans he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country.” If it comes down to what “he is saying,” then he is a dictator and the U.S. is a dictatorship. Trump spoke of the need to deport people who “hate our country” or who are “stupid.”..