Many people rightly outraged, angry, and frightened by the outrageous, infuriating, and frightening use of federal military force in Portland understandably want to associate it with Nazi takeover atrocities and not with US incidents, starting day one.

I bring this up because I suspect dissociating such sickening deployments from our own history has some weirdly contradictory purposes that suppress our ability to respond.

When we map this stuff to Nazi history, we're puttung it in a pattern that's both overly recognizable, with seemingly inevitable results, and foreign, unfamiliar, an invasion by the other.

I think that tends to hogtie us. This stuff has happened here before. It may all look sort of TV-like and more or less harmless in fuzzy historical retrospect, but it didn't then. Making Portland a shocking dystopia denies that, and there's a practical problem with the denial.

We have powers, supposedly accountable to the people, that can oppose this crap. We don't expect them to because we've decided some predictably patterned takeover by alien forces is underway.

I think--certainly can't prove!--that if we were to accept the grim fact that this kind of abuse has been perennial here, and might be a built-in risk of our national and executive structures, we'd know better how to check it, in practical terms.

That's the purpose of facing grim facts.

It's better to face facts *before* the crisis, have systems in place for check, because it all comes down to using institutionalized political power to defeat the tyrrany: real congressional oversight, for one thing. We could have that.

DHS didn't *have to* come into existence at all, for example!

Nothing's inevitable. It's all about how and for what ends political power is used. That's what facing the realities--not of some "pattern" by which fascism has come elsewhere--but of how we've fought and failed to fight tyranny here, is good for.

A horrible irony in how I tend to think about these things: by associating the immediate Portland situation with a Nazi "other," instead of with incidents in our own history, we potentially enable rather than check the actual, historical Nazi outcome.