'The beginning of American state terror' is here: historian

A historian who has extensively studied the rise of fascism warned that president Donald Trump had crossed a dangerous line.

The president met Monday in the Oval Office with El Salvador president Niyab Bukele, and both leaders claimed to be powerless to bring back a Maryland father who had been mistakenly deported to a prison in that country, but Trump also asked him to build even more prisons to house "homegrown" American criminals, all of which alarmed historian Timothy Snyder.

"Yesterday the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps," Snyder wrote.

"This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror," he added, "and it has to be identified as such to be stopped."

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Snyder, who is leaving Yale University for the University of Toronto in the fall, said both Stalinists and Nazis both referred to their own people as "criminals" and "terrorists," as both Trump and Bukele did at the White House, to justify their authoritarian abuse and escape from the law.

"It is that anti-constitutional escapism that enables abuse," Snyder wrote. "State terror involves not just the malignant development of state organs of oppression, such as masked men in black vans, but also the withdrawal of the state from its role as a guardian of law. What aspiring tyrants present as 'strength,' the ability to terrorize innocent people, rests on what might be seen as a more fundamental weakness, which is the withdrawal of the state from the principle of the rule of law. When we have law, we are all stronger; when we lack law, everyone is weaker except for the very few who can direct the coercive power of the state against the rest of us."

"In the history of state terror, the escape from law into coercion takes three forms, all of which were on display, incipiently, in the White House yesterday: the leader principle; the state of exception; and the zone of statelessness," he added.

Trump presents himself as the direct representative of the people acting with a personal mandate, but he claims to have even powers than the Constitution allows because he insists these are extraordinary times that allow for exceptions to the law.

"If we are living in normal times, then we think we should be governed by law," Snyder wrote. "But if politicians can use words to make us think that these are exceptional times, then we might accept their lawlessness."

"A simple way to escape from law is to move people bodily into a physical zone of exception in which the law (it is claimed) does not apply," he added. "Other methods take more time. It is possible to pass laws that deprive people of their rights in their own country. It is possible to carve out spaces on one's own territory where the law does not function. These spaces are concentration camps. In the end, authorities can choose, as in Nazi Germany, to physically remove their citizens into zones beyond their own countries in which they can simply declare that the law does not matter."

The Nazis conducted their mass murder of German Jews by forcing them into concentration camps beyond prewar Germany territory where they claimed there were no laws to protect their victims, and Snyder heard echoes of that when Trump officials claimed Garcia was now beyond the reach of U.S. law.

"This is state terror: the state is presented as 'strong' in its oppression of a person, but as weak in its ability to respect or enforce law," Snyder wrote. "The idea that the United States can send you to places from which it cannot bring you back is the theoretical basis for a doctrine of statelessness."

"If citizens endorse the idea that people named by authorities as 'criminals' or 'terrorists' have no right to due process, then they are accepting that they themselves have no right to due process," Snyder wrote. "It is due process, and due process alone, that allows you to demonstrate that you are a citizen. Without it, the masked men in the black vans can simply claim that you are a foreign terrorist and disappear you."