Timothy Snyder: Land War or Self-Terrorism?

[muriel_volestrangler]

In certain ways, the autumn of 2025 in the United States has recalled the autumn of 1938 in Nazi Germany.
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In one way, mass deportations and a national pogrom advanced the Nazi regime change. But this kind of instability was unpopular inside Germany -- much as ICE raids are unpopular in US cities. The radical next steps were only possible under cover of war. That would be the classic next step in the regime change, the easy way to eliminate the internal enemy by identifying him with an external enemy. For Trump, a war with Venezuela (or someone) would be the next logical move in domestic politics.
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To have a chance of making a political difference, the US war would have to be a land invasion. And the CIA director’s statement has made that prospect more remote. It is very hard to occupy land without local collaborators, and people will not collaborate with you if they are certain, in advance, that you will later leave and let them be killed. And that CIA has delivered that certainty. But the assassin was in the United States because he was a multiply-vetted US collaborator during the Afghan wars. If locals who cooperate with American military interventions will never be admitted to the United States, then the American armed and intelligence services can expect very little collaboration in Venezuela or anywhere else. It almost seems that Ratcliffe was trying to make an invasion impossible.
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Self-terrorism means dropping one’s guard, provoking others inside and outside one’s own country, waiting for the act of terror, and then exploiting it. The Trump administration has indeed removed barriers to terrorism, thereby creating the conditions for attacks on and within the United States. The resulting violence against one’s own people, can then be used as a pretext to further oppress them. The FBI is gutted and demoralised, its agents away on irrelevant border missions, its counterterrorism capacity diminished. Homeland Security no longer keeps up its database on domestic terrorism. The Department of Defense has disbanded its relevant digital service. Cyber defense as such has essentially been abandoned. The US has been made vulnerable.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/self-terrorism

[Pinback]

1. Very interesting analysis

This reminds me of the LIHOP theory of 9/11. (Let It Happen On Purpose.)