State Terror Has Arrived -- by M. Gessen (formerly known as Masha Gessen)

[ancianita]

https://archive.ph/azgrq

... After the secret police arrested most of the senior staff at the newspaper where my grandfather was a deputy editor, he waited for the knock on his door. When the secret police failed to show up night after night, week after week, he became so distressed that he checked himself into a mental institution. It could be that was how he avoided arrest. Or it could be that the secret police had filled their quota of arrests for that month.

For this was the secret about the secret police that became clear when the K.G.B. archives were opened (briefly) in the 1990s: They were ruled by quotas. Local squadrons had to arrest a certain number of citizens so they could be designated enemies of the people. That the officers often swept up groups of colleagues, friends and family members was probably a matter of convenience more than anything else. Fundamentally, the terror was random.
That is, in fact, how state terror works.

The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive. Even in brutally repressive regimes, including those of the Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe, one knew where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lay.
Open protest would get one arrested; kitchen conversation would not.
Writing subversive essays or novels or editing underground journals would get one arrested; reading these banned works and quietly passing them on to friends probably would not.
A regime based on terror, on the other hand, deploys violence precisely to reinforce the message that anyone can be subjected to it.
When we think of the terror regimes of the past, it is tempting to superimpose a logical narrative on them, as though totalitarian leaders had an extermination to-do list and worked their way through it methodically. This, I think, is how most people understand Martin Niemöller’s classic poem “First They Came.”
In reality, though, the people living under those regimes never knew which group of people would be designated an enemy of the state next.

In Niemöller’s day, terror was carried out by the secret police and the paramilitary forces — especially the SA, more commonly known as the Brownshirts — whose job it was to instill fear in the population. In 1934, Adolf Hitler had an estimated 150 to 200 members of the SA’s own leadership arrested and its top generals executed in the ultimate demonstration that no one was immune from the state’s deadly violence. Stalin regularly carried out similar purges. Terror itself was not the end goal of those regimes, but nothing that followed would have been possible without it.

The toolbox isn’t particularly varied. President Trump is using all the instruments: the reported quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence, particularly in city streets; the postmortem vilification of the victims. It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.