Living on a thin line
By 
Confronted with a list like this — a deluge like this — we look for details that might explain why these people were subjected to this treatment, details that might reassure us that we, by contrast, are not in danger. Good was in a relationship with a woman, and her partner, who is butch, spoke impertinently to an ICE officer, so there, Good wasn’t your average white mother after all. ChongLy Thao, the man who was dragged out of his house in his underwear, is an immigrant from Laos; he is not white, and presumably he speaks with an accent. The woman on her way to the medical appointment and the family with six kids drove through areas where anti-ICE protests were taking place. The 5-year-old child’s family doesn’t have permanent status. Little is known about Pretti at this writing, but his father said he did participate in protests and he might have been carrying a gun (legally).
We don’t focus on these details in order to justify the federal agents’ actions, which are plainly brutal and unjustifiable; we do it to force the world to make sense, and to calm our nerves. If we don’t talk back, if we alter our routes to avoid protests, if we are lucky enough to be white, straight, natural-born Americans — or, if we are not, but we lie low, stay quiet — we will be safe. Conversely, we can choose to speak up, to go to protests, to take a risk. Either way, we tell ourselves, if we can predict the consequences, we have agency.
Gessen is speaking rhetorically here: the whole point of the rest of the piece is that, in the terror state, these beliefs are wrong. In the Stalinist regime, for example, people were murdered or sent to the Gulag very often simply to fill the local secret police’s monthly quota, and for quite literally no other reason. Here Gessen makes a distinction between terror states and simply repressive regimes. In the latter, there are lines, people know what they are, and it’s more or less true that staying on one side of them will keep you from becoming a political prisoner, or a victim of state murder.
Defenders of the Trump regime, such as for example Rich Lowry of National Review, are now explicitly taking the position that people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti deserved what they got, because after all they chose to put themselves in harm’s way by protesting or perhaps merely documenting the presence of ICE in Minneapolis:
The Left is in a cycle of constant self-radicalization—the resistance to ICE creates the predicate for tragedies that are used to justify ever-more resistance and the demand for the de-facto nullification* of federal immigration law in Minneapolis
*Brandunaware summarizes why this is false:
The “immigration law” stuff is pretty much all made up. Yes there are some people who are completely undocumented and yes there are people with final removal orders, and if they went after those people in the “normal” targeted ways (i.e. getting warrants and detaining them by methods permitted by law) only activists would complain and the crackdown would be quite popular.
Instead they’ve frequently ignored their own laws and guidance. They’ve wiped out status for a whole bunch of people arbitrarily. They’ve ground the legal process to a halt and pretty much nullified the asylum process, which is codified in law and supported by a long body of case law.
Lowry does not mean law. He means order. And the kind of order he wants is white nationalistic order. Pretending that’s “law” is a popular rhetorical move among right wing thugs. But law is the opposite of that kind of order. It’s a totally different kind of order. Law in its best form (Which was never the form it took for immigration) is about predictable and non-arbitrary outcomes according to principles of fairness, justice, and morality.
For Lowry, Gessen’s description of repressive regimes explains why it’s those who protest the regime who are in the wrong, rather the ICE/DHS agents who killed Good and Pretti. If you wouldn’t protest, or film agents of federal law enforcement, they won’t kill you. How difficult of a rule is that to follow anyway?
But Gessen’s other point, about the nature of state terror, shows that even this throughly fascistic and disgusting rationalization for the Trump regime’s murders of protesters/observers is not really correct. The Trump regime is both too chaotic bureaucratically and too totalitarian ideologically to stick to the “law and order” violence of well-run repressive regimes. ICE is a roided up goon squad, not an efficient weapon of a rational police state. It has in this regard much more in common with the SA than with the East German police.
In a totalitarian regime, comply or die eventually morphs into comply and die.
It is my sincerest hope that Lowry and the rest of the right wing intellectuals who are even now so assiduously licking the fascist boot come to learn this through practice, rather than theory.