"Fascism depends on our compliance. Authoritarians know they cannot sustain rule by individually repressing each person in the country. They use threats and violence to inflict fear - a primary weapon to force compliance. If fear is their strategy for compliance, then we need a strategy for sustaining dissent."
"Fear is the intended effect of the Trump regime's paramilitary killings of Ruben Ray Martinez, Keith Porter Jr., and Julian Marquette Bailey. It's why Border Patrol agents abandoned Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind legal refugee from genocide in Myanmar, to die. And inside deportation facilities, deaths like those of Geraldo Lunas Campos and Wael Tarabishi grow out of the government's deliberate neglect and deliberate indifference, the kind of cruelty that sends a message to everyone watching: This could be you."
"Our neighbors who confronted the ongoing ICE siege in Minnesota with tenacity have taught us how grieving helps us cultivate the courage to continue our dissent. This lesson is evident in the way community members and organizers held Renee Good's memorial ceremony in public while placing her killing within a broader political and historical context."
Authoritarian rule depends on widespread compliance enforced through fear and violence rather than individual repression. Strategic dissent requires countering this fear-based control. Communities grieving victims of state violence—including those killed by U.S. military actions, ICE enforcement, and paramilitary forces—demonstrate how collective mourning cultivates courage for continued resistance. Deaths of individuals like Renee Good and Alex Pretti represent deliberate government cruelty designed to intimidate populations into submission. However, public memorials that contextualize these killings within broader patterns of imperialism and state violence reject the intended message of fear, showing that communities can maintain dissent despite authoritarian intimidation tactics.
#state-violence-and-resistance #authoritarian-control-and-dissent #immigration-enforcement-and-ice #collective-grieving-and-activism #political-repression
Read at Truthout
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]