State terror has definitively arrived

What has been unfolding in Minneapolis for weeks can no longer be described as the escalation of individual operations, not as a series of regrettable mistakes, not as a security operation that spun out of control. It is something else. Something more fundamental. The federal government is no longer merely pursuing the goal of governing this country. It is creating a state of permanent fear. A fear of violence that spares some temporarily but leaves no one truly safe. This is not a rhetorical assessment. It is the new reality. State terror has arrived.

Since early January, since the immigration agency massively expanded its operations in Minneapolis and St. Paul, one incident has followed another. Renee Good, a white middle class mother, was shot dead. A pregnant attorney was threatened in the parking lot of her law firm. Several US citizens were detained, including a man dragged out of his home in his pajamas. Car windows were smashed, occupants taken away, including a woman on her way to medical treatment after a severe brain injury. Flashbang grenades and tear gas were detonated next to a vehicle carrying six children, including a six month old baby. An airport was searched, papers demanded, more than a dozen people working there arrested. A five year old child was detained. And now another US citizen is dead. Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care nurse, with no criminal record. Officers already had him on the ground, under control, when they apparently fired at least ten shots at close range.

Faced with this sequence, the human mind searches for explanations. For details that might restore order. For distinctions that might offer reassurance. Renee Good was married to a woman, her partner sharply confronted an officer. ChongLy Thao, the man in pajamas, immigrated from Laos, is not white, speaks with an accent. The woman on her way to the clinic was driving through an area with protests. The family of the five year old child did not have secure residency status. About Pretti, little was initially known beyond the fact that he may have participated in protests and may have been legally armed. These details are not collected to justify the violence. They are collected to reassure oneself. To believe that there are rules. That one is safe if one stays silent, takes detours, avoids protests, happens to be white, heterosexual, born here. Or, if not, if one remains invisible. Whoever believes they can predict the consequences believes they still possess agency.

That is precisely not how state terror works.

People who lived through Stalinist terror later often told remarkably precise stories about why their relatives were arrested or shot. Envious neighbors, denunciations, coerced statements. These narratives were passed down, solidified, believed. But they were constructions. Attempts to create meaning where none existed.

For that became clear later, when archives were briefly opened: the secret police worked with quotas. A certain number of people had to be arrested. Exactly who was often a matter of chance. Friends, colleagues, family members were taken along out of convenience. The terror was not targeted. It was arbitrary. And that is precisely what made it effective.

Repressive systems have boundaries. One knows what is forbidden. Open protests lead to arrest, conversations at the kitchen table do not. Writing texts is dangerous, quietly passing them on usually is not. A system of terror, by contrast, lives from the fact that no one knows where the line runs. Anyone can be struck. Anyone at any time. In hindsight, we tend to understand past terror regimes as logically organized, as if their leaders worked through lists. This is how the well known poem by Martin Niemöller is often read. But the people who lived then did not know who would be declared the next enemy. The fear lay precisely in that uncertainty.

In the 1930s it was secret police and paramilitary thugs who spread this fear. Even their own leadership was not safe. Stalin regularly had people killed from within his own ranks. Terror was not the goal, but without it nothing that followed would have been possible. The toolkit is limited. Arrest quotas. Armed units intoxicated by their own violence. Public, seemingly random violence in the streets. Post hoc defamation of the victims. All of this is now visible. That many try to find logic in it is human. But the logic already exists. It has a name. State terror.