Putin, Trump, ICE - Looking At The Wrong Despotic Tradition?

 The words authoritarian and fascist get thrown a lot nowadays. Their use direct our minds to Hitler and Mussolini and Franco.

ICE has been referred to as our new Proud Boys.

 Federal Agents Are the New Proud Boys (New Republic)

A Former ICE Official Is Worried the Agency Is About to Go on a Spree of Hiring Proud Boys (Slate)

 The Proud Boys make me think of the Brownshirts. Or Italian Blackshirts.

All analogies fail and this one fails at the point Brownshirts and Blackshirts were tools of the parties to gain power, while ICE was established prior to the rise of Trumpist authoritarianism and then repurposed to a street -level force for political intimidation.

Reading Gordon Corera's Putin, the once and future Chekist (Englesberg Ideas) may prove a better analogy to ICE.

Six weeks after the Bolsheviks took power, on 20 December 1917, Lenin created the ‘All-Russian Extraordinary Committee to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage’, known by its initials as the Cheka. Its extraordinary nature lay in the belief that the threats to the revolution required a body which, for a limited period, would lie beyond the restraints of traditional morality or the law. The Cheka was more than a secret police force. It was, in the words of those who founded it, a revolutionary terrorist organisation. Lenin was open in using the word terror to describe what was needed. How can you have a revolution without firing squads, he asked. Repression and violence were required to preserve the revolution. The Cheka was his sword and shield. Its job was not to collect intelligence but to find and destroy enemies. ‘We stand for organised terror – this must be said very clearly.’ These were the words of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the man whom Lenin entrusted to be the Cheka’s first head.

In an insurance building in the centre of Moscow known as the Lubyanka, Dzerzhinsky made his new headquarters. A mythology sprang up around the man. He became known as ‘Iron Feliks’, a knight of the revolution who slept under his desk.

Out of the mix of myth and reality, fear and violence, a powerful force would emerge which would outlast not just Feliks himself but even the Soviet Union which he served. This was Chekism. What did it mean to be a Chekist? It meant understanding you were the last line of defence, privileged with the special task of doing whatever was necessary to defeat the many enemies that conspired to destroy the party or the motherland. From Tsarism to Bolshevism and beyond, this world view remained constant.

The Chekists’ belief that they were servants of a higher historical purpose meant traditional notions of justice could be set aside. ‘The Cheka must defend the Revolution and conquer the enemy even if its sword falls occasionally on the heads of the innocent,’ said Dzerzhinsky. 

US citizens, legal resident detained during SoCal immigration raids filing claims against government 

US citizen arrested during Ice raid in what family describes as ‘kidnapping" 

For first time in recent memory, ICE officers detained U.S. citizens in S.F. 

Community Organizer Slams “Fascist ICE Agents” After Arrest of U.S. Citizen Documenting Raids 

 

Remember, Steve Bannon proudly showed off his Leninism.

 "Deconstruction of the administrative state" - the Vladimir Lenin & Steve Bannon connection 

Bannon says he’s a Leninist: that could explain the White House’s new tactics 

Trump's Leninist Playbook 

 

And, as of this morning, it may be the FBI as well as ICE that is becoming Chekist: FBI conducts search at John Bolton’s home.

 Trump and his government have carried out a campaign of retribution in recent months against a wide swath of the president’s perceived political enemies, ranging from former Trump officials to members of Congress to the prosecutors who brought cases against Trump while he was out of office.

 

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