It's just slow enough to blink and miss it

We aren’t descending into authoritarianism. We are already there. This is something odd that occurs. The news or social media tend to make claims that we are in danger of an authoritarian government or a constitutional crisis. We never want to admit that we have already hit that point. Maybe it’s delusion. Maybe it’s hope. Or maybe it’s happening slowly enough for us to not really notice it.

Images from the Nazi concentration camps or the Soviet gulags look incredibly dystopian. That’s because they are. There’s a part of us that wants to believe that since we aren’t seeing that, then we must not be there yet. The reality is, the most extreme things we see from history didn’t happen overnight. Hitler didn’t take over one day and build his concentration camps the next day. Stalin didn’t build the gulags overnight. People didn’t disappear or get arrested in one giant swoop where the millions who were imprisoned were all taken at once. The arrests happened day in and day out. They came for people in the daytime. They came for people in the night.

The German Jewish population wasn’t rounded up over one night, but over many nights. One by one they were loaded onto trains. Soviet dissidents were taken from their homes, taken from their jobs, and taken off the streets. One moment people were living their normal lives. The next moment they were in a different world. Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, implies this in its name. Stalin threw dissenters into the Gulag for any number of made-up reasons, many of which were political. Once a person was arrested and put into the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn saw that they were never really a citizen of the same country again.

An archipelago is a group of islands. Some countries like Japan or the Bahamas are archipelagos. The Gulag was a system of prison labor camps. Once arrested, a prisoner would bounce around from one jail to a camp to another. It was like hopping islands. The prisoners were isolated from the rest of society. They were cast away to a remote place, never to be seen again. A Gulag inmate may have been geographically in the Soviet Union, but they didn’t live in the same country as the rest of the population. It was worlds apart.

The United States hasn’t always been the good and honorable freedom lovers we claim to be. I guess you could make that claim, but we have never really extended that “land of the free” thing to all who live here. There are the historical and obvious ones; the Native Americans who inhabited this land first and African slaves our white ancestors treated as property and forced to labor under horrific conditions. As a whole, we collectively have never shared and lived in the nation together. There’s also the authoritarian (and often downplayed) step we took during World War II where Japanese Americans were forced into “internment camps.” We were not Nazis, obviously it’s different than the concentration camps (insert sarcastic tone here).

There has always been an immigrant class that has been seen as undesirable here as well. There was a time when the Irish were unwanted. German Catholics were treated similarly. Chinese immigrants have faced it numerous times in this country, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to COVID. Anyone with brown skin who looked remotely Middle Eastern was hated and faced threats or actual violence following 9/11. Mexican and Latin American immigration has faced numerous waves of political pressure and related societal pressure; mostly during recent Republican administrations.

Today, we face the same old racism that has always lingered about in the United States. In recent years, we have never seen anything like the current administration. Federal agents have become a modern-day Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, or "Secret State Police”). They are even recruiting local police to do their bidding. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has been the primary agency behind the federal arrests. They have been wearing masks, and the administration defends it. Oh, the irony of the Trump administration defending masks! I’ll save that rant for another article.

The basic Gestapo law passed by the government in 1936 gave the Gestapo carte blanche to operate without judicial review—in effect, putting it above the law. The Gestapo was specifically exempted from responsibility to administrative courts, where citizens normally could sue the state to conform to laws. Is that any different than ICE today? They have run amok and no one in the government seems to be able to stop them (or wants to).

Every single day in the United States, arrests continue to occur, and our fellow Americans (citizens or not) are being swept up and disappearing in the process. They enter the ICE archipelago, where they get shipped to after that is anyone’s guess. Just like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, people are being arrested one by one and in an instant, leave our world to be cast away to never come back to the same world we live in.

Many of us don’t see the arrests. Many of us may live in areas that don’t have an ICE presence or presence when it occurs. If we don’t look at the videos taken by others on the streets and shared on social media, then we never even know they are happening. It doesn’t feel real when it’s not happening to us or at least right in front of us. So when we hear someone on the news say we’re risking authoritarianism, it sounds like hyperbole. However, the truth is, authoritarian fascists are already here. They are making moves every day. While it may not feel like we are there yet, when it is literally happening in front of us or to us, we’ll finally feel like we blinked and it happened overnight.