It's a Funny Thing About Fascism
What once seemed impossible behavior quickly becomes tolerable and then normal.
The first time I was detained in Russia for walking home at night without my passport, I was scared as hell. My fear then gave way to shock as I sat in the police van and the young cops made small talk with me. Less than 30 minutes after I was brought to the local precinct for additional harassment, my growing anger transformed into belligerence. The only thing that saved me from an ass-whooping by those brainless thugs of the collapsed Russian regime — Yeltsin was the president — was my blue passport.
During the Yeltsin years, I was detained/arrested dozens of times. I was beaten countless times by rubber clubs, only to have the police later apologize to me when they realized I was an American. The Yeltsin years were not a precursor to today’s fascism. Boris Yeltsin may have been corrupt, and many of his ministers, like Putin, but he genuinely believed that Russia could turn the corner from authoritarianism and become a modern nation with a modern civil society.
Yeltsin supported a free press and freedom of speech, so even though the police were severely corrupt, you always knew that you could make a deal with them. The corruption was never a philosophical thing. It was usually never personal. It was just an opportunity to earn beyond your official salary because Russia was broke, inflation was high, and the society was still very much in a shambles. As much as you didn’t want to pay the bribe to make it home at night after an evening of beers with friends, you paid or you were detained.
On more than one occasion, as I learned the rules of how to survive the all-pervasive corruption, I began to harass the police. One night in 1999, as I neared my home, I heard the distinctive yellow breadbox-shaped police jeep pull up from behind. I listened to hear the four doors close, and then I whirled around and moved quickly toward the police. Saluting them, I demanded to see their documents (“Nu ka, davaite, dokumenti”). Two policemen obliged and took their documents out of their front shirt pockets.
An older, more experienced cop reprimanded them and verbally battled me for daring to check their documents. Knowing that I had successfully check-mated them in their attempt to harass me and demand money, he called me crazy, climbed into the jeep, and they drove away. I was home in 5 minutes.
From 2000 to 2005 or so, the first years of Putin’s rule, the police stopped harassing white foreigners. They started focusing more on dark-skinned immigrants from the Soviet Union’s former republics, wealthy Russians, and Russians in positions of cultural power (theater directors, newspapers, comedians, singers, actors, writers, etc.), opposed to the regime. By 2008, the police started to harass everyone again, and something noticeable had changed. There was no longer a way out. You couldn’t offer some money and have the matter forgotten. The police became the protectors of the budding fascism, and, beating by beating, the Russian people surrendered, and Putin’s fascist regime took root.
Over the years, before Russia became a full-fledged fascist dictatorship, absolutely crazy, unimaginable things happened that could be tied back to the Kremlin and Putin. Apartment buildings were blown up at night to justify the invasion of Chechnya. Subway cars were blown up to remind people that protesting the government “weakens it.” And as Putin said, 24 hours before a metro car was blown apart in St. Petersburg, “when the government is weakened, bad things happen.”
When I write these things, I am not shocked by them. When I write these things, I realize that I am leaving out thousands of incidents that would make the average American cry, imagining how many innocent people suffered at the hands of Putin since 2000. In the 1990s, when troops were needed for the war in Chechnya, young men would go to the store for milk and be caught up in sweeps by the military police. Weeks later, these boys would be dead in Chechnya. With little or no training offered, all they received were uniforms and guns. Parents would find out months and sometimes years later that their sons had died. It was shocking then, but today, during the war of genocide against Ukraine, it’s sad but considered normal.
American citizens are being harassed by ICE
Something very similar is taking place in the U.S. At first, Trump and his team of criminals and despicables said that ICE would only go after the worst of the worst. The immigrants they planned to catch on the streets and fly off to concentration camps in El Salvador were the gang members, the rapists, and criminals.
Mothers with children in their arms are being swarmed by sometimes 20 to 30 police officers and vanish. Protesting students with legal visas are vanishing. We are disgusted. The courts, to include the Supreme Court, are telling the Trump administration and his jack-booted thugs that they are breaking the law. The propaganda machine is repeating over and over that the arrested individuals are all criminals. And then, a child with stage 4 cancer is exiled from the country. We ooh and ahh. We scream that this is so bad, but it continues, and then the next time we don’t scream as loud.
ICE smashed in the windows of a man’s car with his son in a child seat in the back. It turns out it was the wrong man. They arrested the man and then released him without apologizing or indicating how he would be reimbursed for the windows. We are shocked but less so.
A family in Oklahoma City moved into a new home. They had arrived a few weeks prior from Maryland. In the dark of the night, 30 ICE agents break down the door and chase the whole family, including three kids, out into the cold and rain. ICE is looking for the man who lived there before this family moved in. These were American citizens. ICE checked their passports, birth certificates, and IDs, but still held them out while they ransacked the house. They then left without a word about how they would be reimbursed.
We are shocked. We are angry. But this is why fascism, once it starts to grow, is so hard to stop. Like a black mold, it takes hold in unseen places, under things, above things, and even when you think you might have scraped it away from the surface, it has burrowed down deep and it thrives, grows, and overwhelms healthy organisms. We get used to a few spots, then we get used to a bigger spot. Finally, we get used to an entire wall covered with black mold.
And then, we don’t even remember what the wall looked like before the mold took root. This is what the Trump administration, with Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Marco Rubio, JD Vance, and many more, is doing.
The time has come when someone steps forward and arrests these people.