The Language of Public Violence; My Conversation with the Anti-Authoritarian Experts of STROIKA

US government agents behave like Fascist blackshirts and state security forces in Turkey, Iran, and other autocracies.

The Logic and Language of Public Violence and Humiliation

We are all reeling from the brutality of federal government forces in Minneapolis, where so many principled and courageous people have been protesting in subzero temperatures. Rather than back down in the face of this resolute nonviolent dissent, the Trump administration escalates with more public executions. These deliberate shows of extreme violence, which they know will be witnessed, filmed, and shared, are an attempt to traumatize and break the city’s population and subjugate the city’s elected leaders: we will execute your people until you stop your defiance, is the message.

They also want to show that no one is safe and everyone can be a target for harassment, detention, disappearance, or public murder. U.S. citizens, mothers with stuffed animals in their car, veterans and those who help them —like Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the VA Medical Center, who was executed on the street, for all to see. After the execution, the agents just left, to show that they were above the law and above post-incident procedures that democracies follow. Pretti’s fellow citizens were the ones to guard his body and mark off the space of his killing so it could be documented.

US government forces are operating under authoritarian codes of conduct and also following the laws of military engagements in battlefield zones. Once the enemy has been successfully neutralized, you don’t hang around; you move on.

This is the domestic forever war.

The behavior of ICE and CBP agents reminds me of the Fascist blackshirts who arrived in trucks, armed with clubs, knives, guns, and castor oil, to subjugate towns in early 1920s Italy, before Benito Mussolini declared dictatorship.

Like the original Fascists, ICE agents want their violence to be public. They want the world to understand that anyone who challenges their authority and occupation of public space can be “taught a lesson,” humiliated (parading their victims around in their underwear was a Fascist specialty, too) or eliminated.

A band of Fascist squadrists arrive to beat up people in Lucca, 1922.

A band of ICE agents arrive to beat up people in Minneapolis, 2026. Gregory Bovino, who has publicly performed a Fascist salute, is at the center with his Fascist-style overcoat.

The United States has its own history of using organized public violence in neighborhoods and cities. We need only think of the role of violence in sustaining the Jim Crow South (which was a regional form of authoritarianism) and the lynchings of Black people that could happen at any time, and then the shootings of civilian protesters during the Civil Rights movement.

Yet those around the world who watch the behavior of DHS operatives may make comparisons to military juntas abroad and other foreign regimes. Shooting protesters is standard practice where war is waged on domestic populations and even peaceful public dissent is considered a form of terrorism. People were shot for protesting in Belarus in 2020; in Turkey, anti-regime protesters have had chemical agents sprayed directly at their faces or in their mouths.

In Iran, women were shot in the face and the eyes during the 2022-2023 protests, leaving many of them blinded. As Firouzeh Nahavandi has written, such acts “are part of a political rhetoric that is echoed throughout Iran’s long history, in which aiming for the eyes symbolically signifies stripping someone of their personal, political capital.”

In all of these cases, state security forces are given license to kill and torture to shut down the sights most threatening to them: people showing the world through nonviolent protests that they do not fear the regime and will not lose their civic courage no matter what happens. This is the message that Minnesotans are sending to the world right now.

Learning from Foreign Dissidents: the Wisdom of STROIKA

I am making available to everyone the video (at bottom of post) of my conversation with Yelena V. Litvinov and Tatyana Margolin, co-founding partners of STROIKA, whose mission is to reverse the tide of rising authoritarianism by building, resourcing, and connecting resistance movements around the globe. Litvinov is a trans Jewish immigrant from Ukraine and lifelong activist, and Margolin came to the United States from Belarus and worked for a decade at the Open Society Foundations. They bring their expertise in anti-authoritarianism to U.S. civil society.

I asked them what might differentiate the Trump administration from foreign autocracies. They spoke about the speed of implementation, which has no parallel in the first years of autocrats who come to power via elections. They felt that this speed could end up being a liability for the government because it could backfire among the public due to its brutality. We see this starting to happen.

Tatyana also talked about the difficulty Americans had in believing that authoritarianism could happen in their country, and how this has been a disadvantage, as has the lack of attention to corruption. This is why civic education is so key, and it is something STROIKA does well - and why Lucid exists.

We can learn from the experiences of other countries, and the lessons of foreign dissidents, one of which is to always have faith in our abilities to change history through our actions.

I hope you find this exchange helpful.