cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/54268663
As authoritarianism accelerates — as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights — people are scrambling for reference points.
But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn’t Afghanistan. This isn’t Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn’t who we are.
These statements are meant to comfort. They are meant to regulate fear, to calm the nervous system with the promise that no matter how bad things get, this country is somehow exempt from the logic of repression. Instead, they reveal how deeply many people still misunderstand both this country and the nature of authoritarian power.
They rest on a dangerous fiction: that large-scale state violence, political terror, and repression belong somewhere else — to “failed states,” to the Global South, to places imagined as perpetually unstable. This is not only historically false; it is how people in the U.S. have been trained not to recognize what is being built in front of them.
The idea that large-scale state violence and repression are foreign to US soil is a dangerous fiction.
Large-scale state violence and repression is more Anglo-American than apple pie.
And the article is still racial and xenophobic as it doesn’t understand the situation in Afghanistan, Iran or China.
Each of these countries have had to deal with movements equal to the Jan 6ers,
a group of radical anti-democratic people that wants to take their country a step backwards from the current one,
except in their countries, these groups are more emboldened by US monetary support and therefore more violent.What’s happening in Iran for example are “pro-king” rallies instead of “no-king” rallies,
so the protesters in Iran fly directly into the face of what Minneapolis protesters stand for
and it’s the Iranian people and their government that is fighting back against these monarchists.