The great Timothy Snyder has written an excellent post on the use of State Terror within the Trump administration. You can find it here. I recommend everyone read it.

I think he made a mistake with this sentence, though: “This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror”.  It may seem like the beginning for some people. But as this piece by Christina Greer in the New York Times argues, it is not a new thing at all. A key section from her piece is this:

“How can this be happening in America?” these people ask. “This is not the country I know, the country of rights and laws and due process.”

Needless to say, these people are almost all white and liberal and are not used to feeling this fear of arbitrary, brutal state authority. But this moment, the one that was explicitly promised by Project 2025 and Donald Trump when he was a candidate, looks a lot like what my grandmother experienced every day for much of her life. It is frightening and disappointing but not surprising if one knows anything about the Black experience in America. And not the sanitized just-so version of the Black experience in which America skips from slavery, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and somehow ends with a postracial America and Barack Obama.

Black people have seen this America before.

Japanese Americans have also seen this when they were interned by the U.S. government during World War II. And they weren’t the only ones interned: German Americans and Italian Americans have also been thrown into American concentration camps in the 20th century. I can go back further and include the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans during the Trail of Tears in the 19th century. The list of State Terror activities within the United States of America is a long one.

Trump may be unique in the way he goes about using State Terror this time. But it is not a new thing in America.

(Image is a map of the locations of internment camps for German enemy aliens during World War II. From Wikipedia.)