“Be Wary of Paramilitaries”

After Trump’s election in 2016, my late husband and I talked about possibly leaving the country. Neither of us wanted to, even though at the time we spent a month or two each year in Portugal where he taught a class at a graduate institute of the University of Lisbon. He had dual citizenship, having had his German citizenship restored as the child of Jews who fled the Hitler regime. Our two children, who also have dual citizenship, already lived near us in New York City. We talked about the “red line” — what would push us to emigrate. The answer was paramilitaries.

Paramilitaries are defined as unofficial forces organized like military forces, with weapons, uniforms, and orders to intimidate, destroy, and kill. I hope you’ve read beyond the first chapter of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, warning of obeying in advance. Chapter 6 is titled “Be Wary of Paramilitaries,” and Snyder writes:

When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

In his book and this video, Snyder uses the example of the SS in Nazi Germany, which was not a government force but a paramilitary organization that originated with the street-fighting SA during the Weimar era. Yet there are  more recent examples — Latin American death squads under various dictatorships, the Serbian paramilitaries that carried out genocides in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Wagner Group and its spinoffs in Russia.

A good book to read for learning how Hitler replaced ordinary police forces with his paramilitary SS.

The United States has not been immune to the predations of paramilitary groups. The elimination of multiracial democracy and the imposition of Jim Crow in the decades following the Civil War — what was known as the Redemption — was carried out by paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan, who were allied with reactionary political leaders in the former Confederacy. Actions like the destruction of the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood, part of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were originally attributed to a disorganized mob, but historians have uncovered, and the US Department of Justice recently reported, that the neighborhood’s destruction was a “coordinated, military-style attack” that included aerial bombing by irregular forces acting in concert with the local police and National Guard. The multi-decade campaign of terror against southern Black Americans, combined with a tightening net of legal restrictions, prompted the Great Migration out of the South and into northern cities.

With yesterday’s inauguration of a president who has promised to be “dictator on day one,” the peril of paramilitaries returns. The reason is his pardon of more than 1,500 extremists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to overturn the election that he lost. While he promised to pardon only the ones who didn’t commit acts of violence, he has now pardoned and released from prison the people who attacked police and attempted to kill legislators and the former vice-president. It also included the leaders of three paramilitary organizations that brought a climate of havoc, intimidation, and violence to Trump’s first term — the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters. Remember the relative lack of strife and organized violence in cities large and small during the last four years? It’s because all those leaders and their troops were in prison or on parole. The pardon allows those newly freed and unencumbered extremists to purchase guns legally, among other benefits. And they are now an irregular army beholden to the president who turned them loose.

So what do we do, as ordinary citizens pledged to democracy and the rule of law? Sadly, Snyder doesn’t offer any solutions once a paramilitary force is emboldened in this way. He says “the end has come.”

Does this mean it’s time to leave, as Richard and I discussed eight years ago? I don’t think so, not yet. For the time being, we still have state and local elections. But we need to make the right choices in those. For a very long time, the Republican Party has been portrayed as the law and order party while Democrats are seen as soft on crime. To some extent the tables have turned, although many Republicans are not supporters of the kind of chaos and street violence that preceded and culminated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection. This fall, and in fall 2026, when your local governors, legislators, district attorneys, and judges are on the ballot, ask them about extremist militias, paramilitary forces, and other organized purveyors of violence in the service of a political cause. Will they stand firm against armed marchers attacking mosques and synagogues? Will they fire police officers who are members of violent far-right organizations? Will they pursue all armed gangs regardless of their members’ background and aims? Will they uphold the Constitution and the rule of law despite the possible dangers to them? Will they make sure people know — with the help of the media — as soon as one of the pardoned January 6 criminals commits another violent crime, the way Republicans did so effectively in 1988 in the case of Willie Horton?

We now see with the 1,500 pardons who is the real soft on crime leader — as long as he is perpetrator and beneficiary of the crime, and his enemies are the victims.

Update 1/28/25: Well, that didn’t take long. Matthew Huttle, one of the January 6 convicts pardoned last week, was killed by police in Indiana after resisting arrest for a traffic violation with a gun in his possession.