Yves here. While this post focuses more on what a paramilitary is, as opposed to what we consider to be police, yours truly follows Confucius regarding the importance of calling things by their proper names. One point this otherwise useful piece misses is the significance here of the ICE paramilitary as a national force.Fom a 2011 post Progressively Losing by Richard Kline, arguing that the purported power of the right was considerably exaggerated:
Those anywhere to the liberal side of the Anglo-American political spectrum have been on a long losing streak. As of this summer of 2011, they are wholly in disarray. In my considered view, ‘progressives’ lose because they do not have it as a goal to win. Their principal concern is to criticize the moral failings of others in society, particularly the moral failings of those in power.
At best, progressives seek to convert. In the main, they name and shame – ineffectively. American ‘progressives’ distrust political power, period, are queasy about anyone having it, and suspicious toward anyone who actively seeks it, including other putative progressives. The contest as progressives conceive it is fundamentally a moral one: they believe they are right, and want their opposition to see the light and reform/conform. Thus, they don’t frame what they engage in as a fight but rather as a debate…..
I would loosely divide the left side of the political spectrum in America into liberals, ‘progressives,’ and radicals. The first two have deep roots in the primary sociological communities of the country; the third did not. Progressives and radicals have largely been distinct communities of activism. I’ll discuss both in some detail below. (Actually, the range is not a spectrum but a three- or four-dimensional position space, but that is a separate issue. I happen to particularly dislike the term ‘progressive,’ but I’ll skip my reasons and use it for the sake of clarity.)
Liberals are great believers in ‘the law,’ and happy enough to live and let live until they are in a pinch or have to give up something for the greater good—at which point they scream for a cop or start in on how ‘we’ can’t afford X. Liberalism isn’t primarily a moral position but a practical attachment to personal liberty and property. If one abandons that allowance for others, one is soon threatened as well since power unchecked makes few fine distinctions, so it’s a ‘hang together and don’t rock the boat’ perspective rather than one of commitment. I’m not going to spend verbiage here discussing this community because they go with the flow rather than push any program. As such, they shape little in the way of policy. The principal asset to left activism provided by liberals is their inertia, since the American political tradition is a significantly liberal one, and American governmental institutions are substantially so on paper. Fascism and oligarchy are pushing on a mountain of lard in trying to shift liberal inertia, with limited success. The only way really to move the ‘liberal muddle’ is to set fire to its peripheries….
“The ‘Right’ is too strong.” The oligarchy specifically and the Right in general are far less strong in American society apart from what their noise machines and bankroll flashing would make one think. The great bulk of the judiciary remains independent even if important higher appellate positions are tainted. Domestic policing is, by tradition and design, highly decentralized, with a good deal of local control, making overt police state actions difficult, visible, and highly unpopular (think TSA). While the military is a socially conservative society in itself, it is also an exceptionally depoliticized one, with civilian control an infrangible value.
Now we have a Trump engaging in a monster personal power grab, and being very success due to a decided lack of muscularity among liberals, and their successful campaign against the true left (which we define as having economic grievances, such as wanting a better deal for working classes). And he is greatly increasing the role of a national paramilitary to help achieve his aims.
Other sightings:
Stephen Colbert: “Do not compare ICE or Border Patrol agents to the Nazis. That’s an unfair comparison. The Nazis were willing to show their faces.” pic.twitter.com/4meqDVAk6S
— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) January 27, 2026
WOW! An ICE agent in Minneapolis tells an American citizen “If you raise your voice, I will erase your voice.”
Stop telling me that the Trump administration isn’t Fascist. They are threatening people for “raising their voice,” and how exactly will ICE “erase our voice?”
Kill… pic.twitter.com/h0pRcWrsc1
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) January 27, 2026
🚨ICE agents are threatening to assault and illegally arrest U.S. citizens in Portland, Maine.
In the video, a man is legally observing ICE activity in his own neighborhood.
Agents walk up to his car window and ask, “Are you following us?”
The man replies, “Yeah.”
An agent… pic.twitter.com/NNHEBOyQOM
— Jesus Freakin Congress (@TheJFreakinC) January 28, 2026
By Erica De Bruin, Associate Professor of Government, Hamilton College. Originally published at The Conversation
As the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have intensified over the past year, politicians and journalists alike have begun referring to ICE as a “paramilitary force.”
Rep. John Mannion, a New York Democrat, called ICE “a personal paramilitary unit of the president.” Journalist Radley Balko, who wrote a book about how American police forces have been militarized, has argued that President Donald Trump was using the force “the way an authoritarian uses a paramilitary force, to carry out his own personal grudges, to inflict pain and violence, and discomfort on people that he sees as his political enemies.” And New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie characterized ICE as a “virtual secret police” and “paramilitary enforcer of despotic rule.”
All this raises a couple of questions: What are paramilitaries? And is ICE one?
Defining Paramilitaries
As a government professor who studies policing and state security forces, I believe it’s clear that ICE meets many but not all of the most salient definitions. It’s worth exploring what those are and how the administration’s use of ICE compares with the ways paramilitaries have been deployed in other countries.
The term paramilitary is commonly used in two ways. The first refers to highly militarized police forces, which are an official part of a nation’s security forces. They typically have access to military-grade weaponry and equipment, are highly centralized with a hierarchical command structure, and deploy in large formed units to carry out domestic policing.
These “paramilitary police,” such as the French Gendarmerie, India’s Central Reserve Police Force or Russia’s Internal Troops, are modeled on regular military forces.
The second definition denotes less formal and often more partisan armed groups that operate outside of the state’s regular security sector. Sometimes these groups, as with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, emerge out of community self-defense efforts; in other cases, they are established by the government or receive government support, even though they lack official status. Political scientists also call these groups “pro-government militias” in order to convey both their political orientation in support of the government and less formal status as an irregular force.
They typically receive less training than regular state forces, if any. How well equipped they are can vary a great deal. Leaders may turn to these informal or unofficial paramilitaries because they are less expensive than regular forces, or because they can help them evade accountability for violent repression.
Many informal paramilitaries are engaged in regime maintenance, meaning they preserve the power of current rulers through repression of political opponents and the broader public. They may share partisan affiliations or ethnic ties with prominent political leaders or the incumbent political party and work in tandem to carry out political goals.
In Haiti, President François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s Tonton Macouts provided a prime example of this second type of paramilitary. After Duvalier survived a coup attempt in 1970, he established the Tonton Macouts as a paramilitary counterweight to the regular military. Initially a ragtag, undisciplined but highly loyal force, it became the central instrument through which the Duvalier regime carried out political repression, surveilling, harassing, detaining, torturing and killing ordinary Haitians.
Is ICE a Paramilitary?
The recent references to ICE in the U.S. as a “paramilitary force” are using the term in both senses, viewing the agency as both a militarized police force and tool for repression.
There is no question that ICE fits the definition of a paramilitary police force. It is a police force under the control of the federal government, through the Department of Homeland Security, and it is heavily militarized, having adopted the weaponry, organization, operational patterns and cultural markers of the regular military. Some other federal forces, such as Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP, also fit this definition.
The data I have collected on state security forces show that approximately 30% of countries have paramilitary police forces at the federal or national level, while more than 80% have smaller militarized units akin to SWAT teams within otherwise civilian police.
The United States is nearly alone among established democracies in creating a new paramilitary police force in recent decades. Indeed, the creation of ICE in the U.S. following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is one of just four instances I’ve found since 1960 where a democratic country created a new paramilitary police force, the others being Honduras, Brazil and Nigeria.
ICE and CBP also have some, though not all, of the characteristics of a paramilitary in the second sense of the term, referring to forces as repressive political agents. These forces are not informal; they are official agents of the state. However, their officers are less professional, receive less oversight and are operating in more overtly political waysthan is typical of both regular military forces and local police in the United States.
The lack of professionalism predates the current administration. In 2014, for instance, CBP’s head of internal affairs described the lowering of standards for post-9/11 expansion as leading to the recruitment of thousands of officers “potentially unfit to carry a badge and gun.”
This problem has only been exacerbated by the rapid expansion undertaken by the Trump administration. ICE has added approximately 12,000 new recruits – more than doubling its size in less than a year – while substantially cutting the length of the training they receive.
ICE and CBP are not subject to the same constitutional restrictions that apply to other law enforcement agencies, such as the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure; both have gained exemptions from oversight intended to hold officers accountable for excessive force. CBP regulations, for instance, allow it to search and seize people’s property without a warrant or the “probable cause” requirement imposed on other forces within 100 miles, or about 161 kilometers, of the border.
In terms of partisan affiliations, Trump has cultivated immigration security forces as political allies, an effort that appears to have been successful. In 2016, the union that represents ICE officers endorsed Trump’s campaign with support from more than 95% of its voting members. Today, ICE recruitment efforts increasingly rely on far-right messaging to appeal to political supporters.
Both ICE and CBP have been deployed against political opponents in nonimmigration contexts, including Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, in 2020. They have also gathered data, according to political scientist Elizabeth F. Cohen, to “surveil citizens’ political beliefs and activities – including protest actions they have taken on issues as far afield as gun control – in addition to immigrants’ rights.”
In these ways, ICE and CBP do bear some resemblance to the informal paramilitaries used in many countries to carry out political repression along partisan and ethnic lines, even though they are official agents of the state.
Why This Matters
An extensive body of research shows that more militarized forms of policing are associated with higher rates of police violence and rights violations, without reducing crime or improving officer safety.
Studies have also found that more militarized police forces are harder to reform than less-militarized law enforcement agencies. The use of such forces can also create tensions with both the regular military and civilian police, as currently appears to be happening with ICE in Minneapolis.
The ways in which federal immigration forces in the United States resemble informal paramilitaries in other countries – operating with less effective oversight, less competent recruits and increasingly entrenched partisan identity – make all these issues more intractable. Which is why, I believe, many commentators have surfaced the term paramilitary and are using it as a warning.
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https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/we-cannot-separate-imperialism-from-domestic-militarization-understanding-the-links-between-ice-gaza-and-u-s-foreign-policy/
ICE trains in Israel and certainly could be seen as an attempted Israeli-fication of the American scene. But the political backlash to Minnesota suggests that the transplant of 19th century settler colonial tactics is likely to be a lot less successful here than in that actual settler colonial state in the Middle East. In Israel one half of the population is trying to repress the other half whereas in the US the immigrants are nothing like that kind of demographic threat. In America the left behind underclass may resent the immigrants but also have little enthusiasm for the jackboot that could also be applied to them. The Trumpies as always have a reality problem.
Is this confirmed? The training between of western police forces by Israel/IDF is one of the developments I never imagined any sovereign state would tolerate, so ICE being sent over as well isn’t beyond the pale. Just a kind of official lunacy.
The closest analogy I can think of is the training of Gurkha’s or perhaps foreign military officers in the British Empire. Do US military officers have to train in Israel also? Little would surprise me at this point.
The New York City police department has LONG trained with the IDF. Bloomberg bragged about it as mayor.
A search engine is your friend. Easy to find confirmation:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-ice-minneapolis/
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2018/08/08/iceisraeladl/
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sl6Vdlxwjw0
thanks!
“A search engine is your friend.”
The problem today you can´t search what you don´t know about because the crucial dark truths are buried more than they used to be.
To quote MATRIX: “what good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?”
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-ice-minneapolis/
Not all of them obviously but the cultures are intertwined and the ADL and other organizations help sponsor these trips.
This is why israel is backed by both wings of the duopoly. Palestine is a training ground for the planned enslavement of all us proles.
The crowd cheered when it started late in 2001.
If ICE regulations say they can violate Constitutional rights with impunity, then ICE as a whole is violation of the Constitution and should be disbanded, by the military (which swears its oath to the Constitution) if necessary.
When federal officials block local investigations and potential prosecution of ICE murders and assaults, those federal officials should be indicted by the state courts for accessory after the fact, misprision of a felony, and obstruction of justice. I would guess a grand jury in Minnesota could easily be seated to deliver that indictment.
I agree with that.
The point that was made in this piece about ICE not HAVING to respect EVERYONES 4rth amendment rights, or any other constitutionally proscribes rights EVERYONE gets; for any reason they feel like or even “just because”, is really a big deal. IMO. It seems to me the whole idea of allowing ICE the agency to decide for itself what parts of the constitution they deem disposable, is completely insane.
Ice and Homeland security are both creations of dick cheney et al post 9/11 . Everything that was created post 9/11 for the war on freedom… ehhhh the war on terror, has to go. It is all rotten to the core.
From what I can gather, I can’t tell whether the debate is about the policy or the tactics employed by Ice.
If people are living in the US illegally then they have broken the law. Like any person who breaks the law they should be held accountable.
Bernie Sanders wants to defund ICE and I’m not sure what he means.
We live in a democracy and people elected Trump largely because he promised to deport illegal immigrants. Trump, always the bully, needed to be heavy handed and no doubt, shipping people to a prison in El Salvador terrified people into self deporting which is what he wanted.
Still, do Americans support the policy but they want ICE to be more transparent towards people who broke the law.
I’m sure many illegal immigrants are nice people who want a better life. But if everyone who wants a better life gets into the US then you won’t have much of a country.
It’s like a lifeboat and you want people to get on board but too many people will sink the boat for everyone.
For those immigrants who are here illegally for years and have a normal life, they should at least have a chance to make a case for why they should be allowed to stay permanently. If not, the people have voted and they want illegals to leave.
Any serious effort to deport illegal immigrants would simply make it a felony to hire or rent to them but that would inconvenience Trump’s oligarch owners
Trying to arrest them one at at time in the Home Depot parking lot is not a serious effort and appears to be aimed at installing terror
If that were true, he would be going after the companies that hire them en masse like meat packing (Hormel in Austin, MN) and plantations which are mostly in red states. But that’s not the case.
The goal is to disrupt blue communities, harass blue politicians and attack brown skin people.
IMO, the endgame is creating a new class of serfs out of the working poor, which is also why you see lowering of working ages in those red states.
America is a democracy? Big if true.
But why on earth should it require a paramilitary force all jacked up like imperial stormtroopers to “enforce the law”?
And if that were the objective wouldn’t these surges be happening in places known to have an order of magnitude more “illegals” than Minneapolis (and now apparently Maine) ever thought of having?
Another commenter here said IIRC “Trump’s not running a government, he’s producing a TV show” which keeps seeming more and more apt…
For 100 years, the nation was dependent on seasonal immigrant labor who worked 8 or 10 months & then returned home to return the next season. This changed during the death squad period in the 70s & 80s and especially under Clinton, with the criminalization of migration & the imposition of NAFTA creating as many as 6-8 million, mostly indigenous, economic refugees. Add in the forever wars & sanctions & you have the situation today. Please don’t blame the victims of neoliberalism. For the most part they are doing the dirty, hard jobs for minimal pay & no benefits that fat cats refuse to pay citizens a living wage to perform.
True that Trump ran on scapegoating immigrants (migrants), but remember that Obama deported more people than all previous Presidents combined.
I think when people use the phrase “these people are breaking the law”, you can tell that they really haven’t put much thought into what they are saying.
There is always a consideration of proportionality.
Being in this country without papers is “illegal”. I believe it is a civil offense. Not a criminal offense.(And I am no lawyer, and I don’t play one on TV, either)
Now, Isn’t going 10 miles an hour over the speed limit “illegal” Does that mean someone should jump you, crash into your car, and take your children, and kidnap you?
or, when a cop is speeding, they are required to use their safety lights. If they don’t that is “illegal” Should the cops be arrested?
Not following orders of a judge is illegal? taking people without judicial warrants is illegal, killing people for no actual reason is illegal. lying about it in court, is illegal.
Boy, it just seems so obtuse to think wholly un-constitutional conduct can be explained away because someone else did something that is “illegal” too.
It is also illegal to drive without registration (or even insurance in some states), speed, park next to a hydrant, etc, etc. It is breaking the law. Would it be justified to deploy unidentifiable, militarized forces against civilians, drag people out of cars, separate parents from their children, throw them in detention centers without due process, and generally deny anyone their 4th amendment rights in order to round up people with outstanding traffic violations?
Oops, rob beat me to the punch. And said it better!
Thanks for this. The militarization of domestic law enforcement has been increasing steadily for a long time. It has occurred in phases, generally using instances of notable domestic violence to justify the next step, e.g.: urban protests in the 1960s, the Oklahoma City bombing in the 1990s, and, of course, the biggie – 9/11. The author cites her own more detailed paper which provides a useful historical overview of this expansion:
https://issforum.org/policy/ps2021-61
As with all the other examples of domestic or foreign policy development that have occurred over the last forty or fifty years, the trajectory of this policy has been in one direction, and bipartisan.
It goes back further than that. The oligarchy has always used militarized forces against unions and the working poor trying to achieve dignity and respect. Whether it was the miners, railroad or factory workers, they have used Pinkerton, National Guard and federal troops as far back as the 1800s. Oppression really took off after the Bolshevik revolution with the robber barons attempting to squeeze socialism out of the US.
There’s great a film about the bunker wars called Matewan, directed by John Sayles.
Paramilitary fits but with a pinch of secret police, an aspiration to praetorian guard and an odor of shirts, black brown and blue. As yet it is none of these and lacking the focus and discipline, it comes across as muscle with attitude. We can hope it never gets its act together.
I was thinking Amazon and UPS just added a couple score of thousands to potentially take on the $50K signing bone-us.
Middle of the night wake up last night (have to qualify which night, nowadays) was that we will NOT have an election November 2026. Trump is NOT going to go to jail, NOT risk impeachment, and T will sow so much discord and chaos around the world as he possibly can, with no check, filter, or temperance.
Nuke Iran? If that’s what it takes!
“If you are ever going to lie, you go to jail for the lie rather than the crime. So believe me, don’t ever lie. —
Richard M. Nixon
“Stand back and Stand By!!”
Donald J. Trump , 2020 Debate, after Charlottesville protest and murder by car
The offer to pull back in exchange for Minnesotas voter rolls shows pretty clearly that the idea is to use ICE to control election results, presumably by arresting and threatening to arrest voters. And I think the threat is the main factor, if they can get voters of colour and voters in the “domestic terrorist” database they claim to be manufacturing to stay home, it might get close enough to steal.
A brief video of ICE using military gear for raiding a home in Minneapolis. Special Forces grade kit:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000010669560/how-battlefield-tech-was-used-in-minneapolis.html?smid=url-share
I feel an urge to quote Scott Ritter – once the camel’s nose is under the tent, its coming in.
All the hullaballoo and Trump still deported less than Obama with less fanfare about constitutional shredding. So it seems the means are the ends.
OTH, the self-deportations have been quite significant, as the message is clear and racial. Would half the US population leave if they had somewhere to go? Climate change does promise a green siberia in a few decades. Who would pick the food? Or do all the other jobs?
The militarization of the state and federal agencies has often been noted. Between 2006 and 2016 the federal governmnet provided $2.2 B to local PDs with equipment intended for the military. Applications for equipment are made to the DOD’s Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO) under the 1033 Program.
Federal agencies not primarily tasked with law enforcement are well armed. Based in part on an Open the Books report, a Reason magazine 2023 article asked, “Why Do Federal Bureaucrats Need So Much Firepower?” Since 2016, 103 federal agencies not connected with the DOD spent $3.6 B adjusted for inflation, on guns, ammo and military style equipment. Of these 27 were traditional law enforcement agencies under the DOJ and DHS. 76 agencies including the EPA, IRS and DHS not thought of as having a direct law enforcement function received material. A related article in the New American pointed out that there are more federal agents with arrest and firearm authority (200,000) than the Marine Corp (186,000). HHS since 2020 acquired, $427,000 on “tactical combat gear,” $247,000 on ammunition, $100,000 on “law enforcement weapons,” and $99,450 on a “virtual reality weapons simulator,” and $685,000 on not otherwise specified “law enforcement equipment.”
Reason and New American are libertarian and I believe this influences their perspectives. But still?
https://reason.com/2023/05/02/why-do-federal-bureaucrats-need-so-much-firepower/
https://the newamerican.com/us/politics/why-are-federal-agencies-being-armed-with-military-grade-weapons-and-gear/
I spent most of my life in the law enforcement field and agree that “paramilitary” is the correct framing for the direction that Trump, Miller, Noem, and Lewandowski have turned ICE through massive expansion and laughably skeletal training. ICE are not “police” and as such are immune to reform and ought to be disbanded. They are acting more like Haitian Tonton Macoutes than the highly-disciplined French CRS or Gendarmerie nationale. CBP might be reformable but only if the recent hires can be weeded-out.
I think that the author overstates their impunity here, taking at face-value the assertions of the regime without careful review of historic congressional and judicial limitations on their activities. No government agency is exempt from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the regime has been recklessly over-stating the narrowly-drawn “Borders Exception” in order to encourage their masked goons to terrorize the populous. They have been acting well outside the scope of their civil limited immunity and their crimes are not protected from state prosecution.
Minneapolis has severely weakened government and law enforcement institutions in the wake of the George Floyd fiasco and makes a perfect target for this paramilitary exercise in terrorism. In many if not most other American cities the local police wouldn’t have shrugged their shoulders and allowed themselves to be kicked out of crime scenes. I’m apalled by the passivity of Walz and Ellison. That’s why you don’t see ICE and CBP paramilitaries playing their games on the same scale elsewhere.
CBP can also be problematic for another reason. They control who and what comes into and out of the country.
For example, during the 60’s through early 2000’s Canada Customs would confiscate and seize LGBTQ themed literature, books, magazines, in direct contravention of multiple court decisions (including a supreme court decision) saying it was discriminatory. They were ordered very many times to stop doing it, they simply ignored the courts. Unsure when they stopped but it was done quietly, and probably because of the rise of the internet.
However, if CBP and ICE are going all in on the paramilitary aspect Americans should expect this sort of thing.
“The contest as ‘progressives’ conceive it is fundamentally a moral one, they believe that they are right and want the opposition to see the light and reform and conform. Thus, they don’t want to engage in a fight but rather a debate…”
Is it fair to argue then that the left largely agrees with Carl Schmitt, the brilliant Nazi opportunist, who has argued that, since the mid-seventeenth century, there has been an impulse towards a striving for a neutral sphere, a sphere without conflict where common agreement would be reached through the exchange of opinions.
Schmitt added that such a trajectory could be traced within a liberal narrative of transition from the conflictual state of nature to the supposed neutral sphere of the political state and thus could be interpreted as a deliberate depoliticization of reality–the repression of the conflictual essence of the political.
Schmitt’s perspective embraced a Hobbesian view of human nature that humans are fundamentally selfish, greedy, distrustful of others, and prone to violence. Out of this anthropologically pessimistic ontology (a violent state of nature) emerges an artificially created order which presupposes that both domestic politics and international relations are characterized by an original state of anarchy which then becomes regulated by a social contract and a system of sovereign states.
Are the Hobbesian assumptions about human nature accurate?
Could they be a lie?
Hobbes’s assumptions were much influenced by his perception of the anarchy which existed in many parts of England during the English Civil War. I would argue therefore that his assumptions are not false in themselves but coloured by a particular, and one hopes atypical, set of circumstances. So only partly true.
Only if you conflate progressives with the left. But usually it refers to a hodgepodge of liberals who present as more militant than the conventional variety and cultural activists of a missionary bent.
Speaking to Yves’ intro about calling things by their proper names, I’ve long disliked comparing current events to Hitler and Nazis, as if that were the sole touchstone available. Taibbi mentioned this too, how for every political discussion on TV, we must determine first who’s Hitler, who’s Churchill and who’s Neville Chamberlain.
On that note, a friend mentioned yesterday that we have plenty of home grown USian history we can use for comparison purposes, and equating ICE with the KKK is far more apt. Comparing them to Nazis is taking the easy way out, and whitewashing the US’ own history.
Well, however much the KKK (which had several varying incarnations) may have benefited from official intimidation, complacency, or even collaboration, it was never a government agency acting under color of law. Like it or not, ICE is, which makes it an entirely different issue.
Good point. My friend had other US comparisons too which I don’t remember off the top of my head. Pinkertons may have been one too – also not officially a government agency but pretty close.
Anyway, the point being there are a lot of bad actors other than Nazis throughout history, many originating in the US.
Also, I do think it’s important to concentrate on what any given institution actually does, rather than how they are officially designated – public vs. private, religious vs.secular, etc. Other friends defend censorship on the grounds that technically private organizations are making the decisions to censor, whereas I would ask where ‘private’ begins and ends when it’s the government making the ask, and given the revolving door for the flexians to move freely from one designation to the other.
Maybe we could do it all in terms of Dreyfusards and antiDreyfusards
> Speaking to Yves’ intro about calling things by their proper names …
heh heh
From the article:
‘Some other federal forces, such as Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP, also fit this definition [of a paramilitary police force].’
When I see a glaring mistake such as this, I have to wonder if the author — in this case a self-described ‘government professor who studies policing and state security forces’ — is ignorant or simply careless. In either case, it makes me think twice about whether or not to take his or her argument seriously.
In every historical situation I’ve studied private militias have evolved into pro-government forces and are used where deniable violence is required by the regime.
This is no surprise. Everyone saw it coming. Everyone warned about it.
re: “don´t tell me this is not fascism”
not argueing one can´t or shouldn´t – after all it has a long tradition – but that tradition is rooted in times when the “fascist forces” didn´t threaten you verbally but instead would kill you.
It is an issue with the shift in political “culture” of overemphasizing speech in relation to actual deeds.
In a hyperanalyzed society of affluence the true understanding for how actual violence truly looks like has got lost (by and large) – which re: domestic politics is the major progress of the 20th century – but the old terminology established to describe it are still in place. That´s why there is this ongoing minor debate over what terms to use…
re: sci-fi movies where people dont know violence any more