From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   Using what you fear as the excuse to do what you fear, wilson.   
      
      
   After years spent documenting state terror, I know it when I see it.   
   And I see it now in the US and Israel   
      
   Janine di Giovanni   
      
   It’s chilling to watch as Trump and Netanyahu adopt the methods of   
   regimes their countries once condemned   
      
      
   In Syria, where I worked during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s terror,   
   people were often taken away to torture cells before dawn by masked   
   men. The timing was deliberate. It disoriented them at their most   
   vulnerable, ensuring the torture to come would be even more agonising.   
   The testimonies I recorded from survivors almost always contained the   
   same phrase: “The morning they came for me.” One young woman,   
   shattered by rape and violence, later told me that her life had split   
   in two – before and after the masked men came for her.   
      
   In Iraq, those who spoke against Saddam Hussein – even abroad, even   
   casually – were punished in cruel ways by a vengeful leader determined   
   to crush any hint of dissent.   
      
   In Egypt in 2016, Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian academic   
   researching labour unions, was abducted, beaten and tortured to death,   
   it is thought, by president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s security services.   
   His own mother had difficulty recognising his mutilated body.   
      
      
   During the second Chechen war, I met the journalist Anna Politkovskaya   
   in Chechnya. She repeatedly attacked Vladimir Putin’s policies,   
   documenting human rights abuses during Russia’s military campaigns. To   
   punish her, a bullet was put in her brain on Putin’s birthday – a   
   warning to other truth-seekers. Stay silent or die.   
      
   In the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli soldiers, masked and unmasked,   
   kill, torture and imprison Palestinian doctors, journalists, teachers,   
   activists and scholars not for what they have done – but because of   
   who they are.   
      
   After decades of documenting state terror, I know how it starts.   
   Governments begin to use words like security, order, deterrence. Every   
   excuse for Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct in Gaza is framed as   
   “security”. ICE agents are trained in a language of order in which   
   violence becomes procedure.   
      
   What happens when democratic states adopt the methods of the regimes   
   they once condemned? Terror is not only masked men and arbitrary   
   detention. It also operates through fear. Policies are designed to   
   make people more compliant, more submissive. As the historian Timothy   
   Snyder warned in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, this is how societies   
   slide into danger: people obey in advance.   
      
      
   In Donald Trump’s US, I have watched CEOs, academics, journalists and   
   government officials allow fear to override decency and moral   
   authority. I have seen this pattern before. It begins with claims that   
   certain people are dangerous. That ordinary legal safeguards should   
   not apply to them. It ends with a society diminished – more compliant,   
   more cynical, more brutal. State terror is rarely announced. In my   
   experience, it becomes normalised. It seeps quietly into the machinery   
   of government.   
      
   Authoritarian regimes make no serious claim to moral legitimacy. Their   
   violence is explicit. Saddam did not apologise when he killed 182,000   
   Kurds during the Anfal campaign. Sisi did not apologise when about   
   1,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters were mowed down in Rabaa and   
   al-Nahda squares in central Cairo. Hafez al-Assad never acknowledged   
   the tens of thousands killed in Hama in 1982. (To this day, the exact   
   numbers remain unknown and the disappeared unaccounted for. The regime   
   cynically built hotels over mass graves).   
      
   Democracies operate in an entirely different way. Their actions are   
   often technically above the law. Constitutions are invoked and obscure   
   laws brought back to defend aggressive policies. Governments talk of   
   “necessary action”. They point to courts that still function, a press   
   that is still somewhat free, elections that still take place – even as   
   all of these institutions disintegrate. This is how democracies begin   
   to resemble the regimes they once condemned. It is a subtle,   
   devastating shift.   
      
   The tools are familiar. A journalist whose reporting aligns closely   
   with the political interests of the US president and the Israeli prime   
   minister is installed to lead CBS, once one of the most respected   
   networks in the US. On university campuses, surveillance now includes   
   photographing students who attend or lead pro-Palestinian   
   demonstrations, and are deemed troublemakers. I was told by one   
   student at an Ivy League university that some are quietly warned they   
   will never find work on Wall Street, at the best law firms, or in   
   government offices if they continue. Other student activists are   
   removed from their homes, illegally detained, and threatened with   
   deportation.   
      
   Academic deans face threats of punitive funding cuts unless they   
   impose requirements that constrain academic freedom. At Northwestern   
   University in Chicago, students were forced to complete antisemitism   
   training that they said was inaccurate and biased in favour of Israel   
   before they could enrol in classes.   
      
   Instructors are quietly told to toe the line. Journalists are   
   disciplined through language that is carefully crafted as editorial   
   policy – then some of them are arrested. Those who resist are   
   increasingly labelled enemies of the state.   
      
   ICE tactics themselves are not new. They have long been used   
   disproportionately against political radicals, Muslims, Black   
   Americans and migrants. What has changed is their visibility – and   
   increasingly, their acceptance. Today, ICE mirrors the same patterns   
   of state terror I have documented for decades: arbitrary detention,   
   secret evidence, militarised policing. The criminalisation of dissent.   
   All of this is justified by the guardians of legality: the White   
   House, the Knesset, the office of the prime minister.   
      
      
   Bit by bit, lists are drawn up. Loyalty tests reminiscent of the red   
   scare have returned. Dual citizens are facing pressure to choose a   
   country of “loyalty”. Immigration enforcement is reframed as a hunt   
   for “criminals” rather than a legal process. Activists, NGOs and   
   humanitarians are punished. In Gaza, organisations such as Doctors   
   Without Borders are told that unless they provide lists of healthcare   
   workers – placing those staff at grave risk – they will not be allowed   
   to operate.   
      
   The United Nations, founded to prevent the scourge of war, is rendered   
   toothless. Then sidelined and derided.   
      
   True, the US and Israel are not Russia or North Korea. But democracies   
   erode. The early stages are not just the national guard on the street,   
   but legal arguments over definitions. Judges deferring to power.   
   Congress taking money from powerful lobbying groups, then using social   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)