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Comment by arunabha

3 days ago

I looked at the video and have no words. Why, just why?

ICE thugs have been recruited largely from white nationalist rallies and forums. Literally, not as some kind of metaphor. DHS executives post white nationalist propaganda hourly on Twitter. Stephen Miller, an out-of-the-closet Nazi, is the acting president of the United States. Their goal is to start a race war that they believe they can win by murdering 100 million Americans.

  • Just in case anyone thinks you are exaggerating: https://x.com/DHSgov/status/2006472108222853298

  • Lots of Department of Corrections officers have been recruited as well. There's going to be so many lawsuits after these guys go back to running the Federal prisons with this new attitude.

    • Yeah, the fact that Democratic state and local governments have tolerated the decades-long slide of sheriffs and prison guards and in some cases even the local police into white nationalist gangs will be looked upon as a strategic mistake.

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  • I don't think we can just blame white people for this. A lot of the ICE agents are non-white and many non-whites voted for Trump. In fact, most of the pro-immigrant people I meet are white!

    • Nobody is blaming white people. They're pointing out, correctly, that the United States is lead by a white nationalist regime.

    • You're correct that it would be wrong to just blame white people for this, but I don't think anyone is doing that. No one is claiming that all white people support ICE, or that all ICE agents are white, or that all white people are anti-immigrant.

      However, it is the case that American culture is and historically has been built upon white supremacist principles and that the default identity in the US politically and culturally is white, and that therefore white people generally enjoy a status of privilege and political power that other groups do not, and thus a responsibility that others do not. And the links between the Trump administration, alt-right movements and white supremacist groups in the US are well known and documented, even though minority groups voted for him as well.

      So it would be just as wrong to dismiss the premise that "white people" are to blame due to pedantry as it would be to blame all white people. "White people" do carry the lion's share of the blame as a community and culture even if not literally every white person does. That's the nature of systemic racism.

    • What good is blame going to do right now?

      Let's stop the bleeding before bike shedding over who done it.

Is it the first video of American law enforcement shooting someone that triggered this reaction?

This is from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc.

Extreme violence has been normalized among American LEOs for a long time now.

Look up "killology" for some more on this. If you're in US, check if your local PD or sheriff's office signed up its agents for a Dave Grossman seminar or training course; you might be unpleasantly surprised.

And now that ICE job ads are essentially an open invitation to come be violent for a "righteous cause", it's exactly those types of people that end up there in even larger concentrations. But make no mistake, none of this is new in any way other than the sheer scale of it.

There was an interesting take from Garry Kasparov. Excerpts:

>what’s happening in Minnesota is method, not madness. Trump wants violence, to radicalize & divide, to create pretext for crackdowns.

>...Having lived through a similar, nationwide version of this in Trump's model, Putin's Russia, it’s not easy to fight against (https://x.com/Kasparov63/status/2015126502845587957)

I'm not American and not saying it's right or wrong but maybe?

  • Kasparov as usually exaggerates. As a Russian, I can think of only 2 cases he may refer to: 2002 riot after world cup match, when a crowd watched Russia team lose to Japan, then went to destroy displays and cars in Moscow center. It was followed by wrenching the mass rallies laws. Some publicists later, in the '10s, suggested it was orchestrated, but the whole theory forgets that Russian team could have won. You don't create a plan where your pretexts may not take place at all.

    The other case he may think of is May 2012 protest, where a bottleneck created stampede, and a fight with police ensued. Random protesters got persecuted for whatever reasons. But the crackdown was already under way with the new state Duma passing ever tougher law amendments.

    Sociologically, it's nonsense to make a pretext by attacking the other side, because you don't know what how they react: maybe the opponents just hide, or go around. To make a crackdown, you stage the attack on yourself, and then react, and crack down. E.g. Hitler staged the opposition putting Reichstag on fire, and then reacted. In Trumps case, brutal attacks are a step too far, because people may react differently -- what if nothing happens? or if republicans change their mind and impeach him?

    Putin made a crackdown on media and civic liberties in a soft and gradual way: the media was taken down by stakeholders loyal to him, or maybe by a made-up bankruptcy case. Mass protests were made very hard to do, and needed a permission. But if any happened, the police wouldn't start a street fight, but would instead arrest and charge the organizers next day.

    What Kasparov usually writes is a big exaggeration. In 2015 he wrote a comment on social media, that Russia needs a pro-democratic dictatorship to fix it. I think this is exactly what technocrats and oligarchs thought when they supported Putin coming in 1999 -- that he was authoritarian, but would lead Russia away from communistic revenge.