From KGB Cells to Alligator Alcatraz: How Authoritarians Normalize the Grotesque

Visit of Tallinn, in Estonia, last week, I saw old KGB interrogation cells, now converted into a basement museum in the medieval core of the city. They were thin, humid, dark cells. In the corners of the basement were units of isolation, mainly small wooden closets in which the prisoners found themselves for days, unable to go to bed, even unable to get up completely.

Dissidents, free thinkers, political leaders, academics and other people considered to be a danger to the Soviet state were placed in these cells in 1940, in the days following Estonian Germany, and once again, by the infamous pact between the Soviets and the Nazis, and, again from 1944, when the occupation of the Soviets recovered the occupation Nazis after a germ of the napt. Many have been tortured in the KGB basement, some were executed, others were expelled to the most distant corners of the Soviet Union, in places where they did not speak of language or did not know culture.

Tallinn’s KGB cells are rightly considered to be horrible manifestations of an unprecedented totalitarian diet. More broadly, the decades of Soviet domination over Estonia – a reign which ended in 1991, as imploded by the USSR – is considered by the State, now a precious member of NATO and the European Union, as a period during which fear dominated, dissent was poorly punished and the rituals of humiliation and the rituals of humiliation have been standardized.

There is, on the outskirts of the city, a commemorative wall to many victims of Soviet domination: police officers killed in the purges of Stalin and ordinary citizens expelled towards work camps in the sprawling gulag system. Peepholes drilled in the wall contain photographs of individual victims whose stories have been truncated, the people who were judged by the powers – who were to be enemies against which the full power of the security state should be directed, simply to be at the end of the brutal, sometimes irrational historical forces.

In the evening, after walking Tallinn, I returned to my hotel room in an elegant and old building a few doors from the Russian Embassy. The outside of the embassy is now bordered by banners and posters describing Putin’s war against Ukraine, with plush bears and strips of linen that seem soaked in blood.

I read the news of the rapid expansion of the Alligator Alcatraz, a concentration camp in everything except in the south of Florida, built at high speed in the swamps Everglade Mousquito, paid by the taxpayers of Florida, led by the state of Florida, and now housing somewhere in the region of 1,000 immigrant detainees. These detainees are described several times by the people of Trump as the worst of the worst, as degenerate criminals, like savages. In fact, the analyzes of the prisoners’ lists indicate that two thirds have absolutely no criminal record, and many of those who have a criminal record are simply low -end offenders. Children as young as 15 were included among the occupants of the establishment.

Prisoners are housed in stacked cells, the walls of which are reinforced chain link fences. Dozens of people share each of these cages boxes. Persons detained use the toilets in front of all their prisoners’ colleagues. Drinking water taps are attached to the toilet. Those who host there receive inadequate supplies of food, are muffled by mosquitoes and oppressive warmth, and have almost no possibility of going out or taking a shower. Everything in their incarceration is designed to dehumanize, terrorize and humiliate – and to provide visual accessories to a white house determined to prevent America on an extremely authoritarian road.

Such treatment of immigrant detainees is not limited to the Alligator Alcatraz. Last week, the Tutor Reported to another installation in Florida, this managed ice in Miami, where the detainees were handcuffed with their hands behind their backs, then kneeling and eat their food as dogs. It is the kind of sadism exposed by the guards of the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq over 20 years ago; They are not too different from the torments of storm soldiers at the start of Nazi Germany and Austria – years before the start of the holocaust – when the Jews were forced to rub the sidewalks on their hands and their knees in front of the crowds. 26 Federal Plaza, in New York, also accumulates allegations of abuse and the deliberate neglect of the basic needs of prisoners. The same goes for other detention facilities strewn throughout the country and housing, cumulatively, more than 57,000 prisoners of immigrants.

The list of what can only be called atrocities in the United States continues.

There is the 82 -year -old Guatemalan man who had obtained political asylum almost forty years ago, and who went to his local immigration offices to try to obtain a replacement for the green card he had lost. Instead of obtaining this card, he was secretly expelled to Guatemala, without his family even said what had happened to him.

A month ago, the Supreme Court enlightened the expulsion of immigrants to third countries, even if it is third countries which have a appalling dossier of human rights. Shortly after, eight detainees were thrown into South Sudan. More recently, five immigrants have been animated in prisons in the absolute African little monarchy without coast of Eswatini.

This week, the administration confirmed that it exceeded 2,000 troops of the National Guard of a series of states to help ice to treat the ever larger number of immigrant detainees. In the quasi-future, the Ministry of Defense is also likely to approve the demand that DHS expressed in May more than 20,000 troops of the National Guard to use in their anti-immigrant hunts. Thanks to Congress, Ice received additional funding of $ 75 billion to continue to remove people and commit the worst types of human rights violations in broad daylight.

KGB cells and Tallinn’s commemorative wall have a brutal system that rested on mass deportations, humiliation rituals and wholesale dehumanization of whole groups to achieve its objectives. Today, in Trump America, a similar show of the grotesque takes place. The government has not yet reached a point of mass murder – and I hope it will never do it. But has adopted many other techniques which would have been too familiar to political leaders and their executors of the state of bureaucratic security in the Soviet Union and in fascist Europe.

One day, there will be museums and commemorative monuments to the victims of this degraded moment. There will be, I hope, lists of shame, in which the designers and staff members are appointed like Alligator Alcatraz, the agents who masked each morning and then kidnapped immigrants and deported them to expulsion flights, and political architects and executors of immigration wars.

The managers who led the KGB cells to Pagari 1, in Tallinn, thought that their day would never end. In addition, I suspect that Stephen Miller, Tom Homan and Kristi Noem cannot imagine a moment when their names are held in infamy. But ultimately they will be; I have no doubt.

One day, tourists will wonder through the cellular blocks built under this administration and marvel at the creativity of the sadism of Trump and the moral myopia of those who have rallied to its movement.