NOVEMBER 21, 2025

HENRY GIROUX

We inhabit a historical moment that resurrects, with chilling familiarity, the state terrorism once made visible under Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Pinochet, and other dictators who transformed cruelty into a governing philosophy. Central to such regimes lies a single, devastating truth: the law collapses the moment violence becomes its substitute. In this descent, due process evaporates, political opponents are rebranded as “terrorists,” and violence becomes the organizing principle of power. Independent media are smeared or silenced, universities are targeted for their critical capacities, and the spectacle of brown-shirted, goose-stepping thugs hunting down racialized others slips back into public view as a normalized, even celebrated, form of civic life.

Policies soaked in blood are repackaged as entertainment, folded into a culture industry that echoes the aestheticized fascism of Leni Riefenstahl, spectacles designed to numb, seduce, and train the public in the pleasures of violence. The brutality unleashed by the Trump administration against critics, immigrants, cities, political enemies, and so-called terrorists is more than an echo of fascism’s mobilizing passions; it is a signal of what is to come. Its endpoint can be found in the concentration camps and gulags of the 20th century. And the road to the camps always begins the same way: with the brutalization of the innocent in modern-day torture chambers.

This is the central lesson of the illegal abduction and exile of Venezuelans to one of the most notorious prisons in El Salvador—a maximum-security torture chamber run by Nayib Bukele. It is a canary in the coal mine, a rehearsal for the next stage of violence that will be unleashed on Americans. More than 200 Venezuelan migrants were seized and sent to a notorious maximum-security torture dungeon in El Salvador run by Nayib Bukele, a ruthless dictator, punished not for crimes, but for the ink on their skin. Their tattoos were read as threats, their bodies as evidence. Later, they were deported to Venezuela as part of a large-scale prisoner exchange among the United States, Venezuela, and El Salvador, an arrangement that saw ten Americans held in Venezuela freed in return for the Venezuelan deportees.

As reported in The New York Times, many of the men testified that while imprisoned “they were shackled, beaten, shot with rubber bullets and tear gassed until they passed out. They said they were punished in a dark room called the island, where they were trampled, kicked and forced to kneel for hours. One man said officers thrust his head into a tank of water to simulate drowning. Another said he was forced to perform oral sex on guards wearing hoods.” What emerges here is not simply a catalogue of human-rights abuses, nor merely the grotesque suspension of due process; it is the language of barbarism made policy, brutality elevated to the level of governance. These acts, carried out under the pretext of fighting terrorism, reveal themselves for what they are: the state-sanctioned machinery of a racialized war, a campaign of terror unleashed by the Trump regime against immigrants. Such violence does more than break bodies, it shreds the very fabric of a democratic society–teaching a lesson no nation should ever teach: that some lives can be debased with impunity.

The dreams of annihilation extend from the genocidal slaughter of indigenous populations to its updated colonial and racialized version in American slavery, Hitler’s dreams of racial purity, and Trump and Miller’s embrace of the delusions of white nationalism and white supremacy are back. The Mein Kampf dream-world of masters and servants no longer parade as a fixed repository of history; they have become the present modeled after history.

This is the central lesson of the illegal abduction and exile of Venezuelans to one of the most notorious prisons in El Salvador—a maximum-security torture chamber run by Nayib Bukele. It is a canary in the coal mine, a rehearsal for the next stage of violence that will be unleashed on Americans. More than 200 Venezuelan migrants were seized and sent to a notorious maximum-security torture dungeon in El Salvador run by Nayib Bukele, a ruthless dictator, punished not for crimes, but for the ink on their skin. Their tattoos were read as threats, their bodies as evidence. Later, they were deported to Venezuela as part of a large-scale prisoner exchange among the United States, Venezuela, and El Salvador, an arrangement that saw ten Americans held in Venezuela freed in return for the Venezuelan deportees.

As reported in The New York Times, many of the men testified that while imprisoned “they were shackled, beaten, shot with rubber bullets and tear gassed until they passed out. They said they were punished in a dark room called the island, where they were trampled, kicked and forced to kneel for hours. One man said officers thrust his head into a tank of water to simulate drowning. Another said he was forced to perform oral sex on guards wearing hoods.” What emerges here is not simply a catalogue of human-rights abuses, nor merely the grotesque suspension of due process; it is the language of barbarism made policy, brutality elevated to the level of governance. These acts, carried out under the pretext of fighting terrorism, reveal themselves for what they are: the state-sanctioned machinery of a racialized war, a campaign of terror unleashed by the Trump regime against immigrants. Such violence does more than break bodies, it shreds the very fabric of a democratic society–teaching a lesson no nation should ever teach: that some lives can be debased with impunity.

The dreams of annihilation extend from the genocidal slaughter of indigenous populations to its updated colonial and racialized version in American slavery, Hitler’s dreams of racial purity, and Trump and Miller’s embrace of the delusions of white nationalism and white supremacy are back. The Mein Kampf dream-world of masters and servants no longer parade as a fixed repository of history; they have become the present modeled after history.

We live in a world in which stupidity and cowardice no longer hide in the shadows, it now thrives in a culture of massive inequality, precarity, racism, misogyny, and moral collapse. The vans of death are designed not just for immigrants, trans people, and Black and brown people, they are eager to come for anyone who does not surrender to fascist cult led by Trump and his barbaric ilk. The horror inflicted on more than 200 Venezuelans in Bukele’s torture chamber was not an endpoint but a prelude, an experiment in something far more expansive and deadly.

History offers echoes and warnings, and writers who lived through earlier dictatorships remind us of their enduring lessons. Ariel Dorfman, writing about the barbarous Pinochet regime, reminds us that the lessons of history matter as both a form of moral witnessing and a source of collective resistance. He makes clear with a sense of urgency that “that ordinary men and women can find at the most dire and dangerous moments in their lives, the courage and wisdom to resist injustice, so that the crimes of their day—and, alas, of ours—need not be endlessly repeated tomorrow.”  We can only hope that in such dark times his words represent more than a warning but also a call to action.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

First published on CounterPunch.org.

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