America’s terror comes home

By Editor-in-Chief on October 29, 2025

Evan R. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Oregon–

The Trump regime has dramatically escalated its repression of the most vulnerable among us with the recent occupations of cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC. In the name of “fighting crime,” these military occupations set the stage for the brutal repression of the people.

Now, the White House has ordered the occupation of Portland, OR, with the aptly named Secretary of War Pete Hegseth federalizing the National Guard to deploy armed troops authorized to use “full force” in response to peaceful protests. These troops are trained to kill and terrorize entire nations and have done so through the history of the United States. From the indigenous nations of America, the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam, to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, the story remains the same: American imperialism is the greatest force for terror and repression on earth. Everywhere the US military travels, death follows in its wake, and this death begets endless profits for the arms dealers and finance capitalists seeking to expand their markets.

Hegseth’s own history is telling. A former unit commander at America’s illegal black site and torture center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Hegseth later volunteered for a combat deployment with the 3 Brigade of the 187th Infantry Division. This unit has been proven in court to have committed routine and severe war crimes in Iraq, including several known massacres of villages. They operated under a culture of complete impunity and a commander who urged his soldiers to kill or detain all “military aged males,” a term so broad it can be applied to nearly anyone.

Hegseth’s commander with the 187th, a man by the name of Col. Michael D. Steele, kept a running tally of the people the unit had killed and kidnapped, using it as a competition to keep morale high among the men. The unit photographed every person they murdered or kidnapped, posting their photos in the unit’s ready room corkboard. The victims ranged from 13-year-old children to a 75-year-old man named Jasim Hassan Komar-Abdullah whose dentures fell out as the soldiers posed for photos with his lifeless body. Every kill was meticulously tracked and the soldiers who killed the most innocent people were given engraved knives as prizes. Night after night, the 187^th hunted down so-called “High Value Targets”, people targeted for death or torture based off evidence so flimsy that even the Army itself has admitted that 90% of them were innocent.

After he retired, Hegseth made a fortune performing apologia for the Iraq war both as an author and a Fox News commentator, arguing America was defeated not because their brutality turned the Iraqi people against them in droves, but rather because America was “stabbed in the back” by the anti-war left and constrained from fighting a “real war” by nanny state politicians. Given the crimes Hegseth proveably committed, we can only imagine what he meant by “real war.”

Although it has been largely suppressed by the complicit and cowed bourgeois press such as Hegseth himself, in the 25 years since 9/11, American imperialism has directly and indirectly killed over 4.5 million in the Middle East alone, occupying and shattering nation after nation with the same weapons and tactics now used in LA, Chicago, DC and Portland.

This is not just history, but an ongoing process. While the so-called “Global War on Terror” was a slaughter on a colossal scale, it represents only the tip of the iceberg of American militarism. Today, America maintains over 750 military bases in 80 separate nations and carries out operations, both covert and overt, all around the world. Foreign nationals are routinely murdered by American aircraft and drones in extrajudicial strikes all around the world, and American special forces operate with impunity anywhere they desire.

This does not even consider America’s many proxies, who are reliant on the country for their weapons and ammunition. As we speak, American bombs rain down on Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and more. Thousands still die each week due to the instability and chaos created by America’s unilateral overthrow of sovereign nations in the name of “counterterrorism.”

This slaughter has led to record profits for an entire universe of companies like Lockheed, Raytheon and Boeing, to name a few. America’s wars are not fought for any humanitarian purpose, but to continue the war economy and expand imperialist control of foreign markets.

However, the system is faltering. As the rate of profit continues to decline, the ruling class is growing desperate. The capitalists have subjected every inch of the Earth to imperialist exploitation and have nowhere left to go but their own nations, which are being increasingly squeezed by austerity, inflation, and financialization. As the standard of living in the imperial core continues to decline, the people are increasingly becoming restive and agitated. New uprisings emerge every few years in America, and with them the bourgeois state fears that its control is slipping.

Therefore, it should be no shock to students of history that America’s “imperial boomerang” has returned home with full force as the country slips farther into the abyss of outright fascism. This can most clearly be seen in the new executive order declaring that ideas such as anti-capitalism and anti-fascism are now considered domestic terrorism. America is gearing up for the same sort of “counterterrorist” war that it has spent decades waging overseas, but this time against its own population. Any resistance to the rising tide of fascism has been criminalized, and under sweeping anti-terror laws passed during the Bush administration, anyone suspected of “terrorism” can be disappeared into the same black sites that Pete Hegseth once guarded, held without trial and tortured.

Fascism represents capitalism in a terminal state of decline, finally reaching such a point where the system is forced to resort to outright terror against the metropole, using the same tactics here that it has long used to control its neocolonies overseas. This is the essence of fascism, the colonial and imperial violence long practiced by the bourgeois state abroad turned inwards out of desperation.

However, this machine of bourgeois terror and repression is not invincible. Wherever it manifests, it creates a growing resistance among the people. One lesson of America’s disastrous “Global War on Terror” is clear. When the people resist, we win. Resistance takes a wide variety of forms, all of them are legitimate and justified. We call on the people to resist the regime’s terror, to organize to prevent the growth of fascism in our nation and build a popular front against this repression.