Here is a gift link to Masha Gessen’s new piece in the New York Times. But gird yourself. It’s as chilling as anything I’ve read in recent days:
“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.
“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.
Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”
It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.
Yikes. Read it all. This is where we are and all the people who say that if it can happen to these people it can happen to you are right. Trump and his henchmen are drunk with power and the one thing that people seem to like so far about Trump’s reign of terror is the authoritarianism. So far it’s limited to foreigners and that’s disgusting, especially considering what’s written on the Statue of Liberty. But it won’t be long before they use these powers against American citizens. Trump and his cronies are determined to exact revenge against his enemies and shut down dissent.