“Lock your doors”: American State Violence is a Forecast of the Future
Image Credit: usicegov via Wikimedia
Growing up in Berlin and attending a German-American School, the history of the Nazi regime was a fundamental part of our history curriculum from an early age. We discussed the harrowing events leading up to and resulting from Nazi Germany, repeating the timeline year after year.
US history classes do not operate on the same trajectory. When we spoke of the genocide of the Native Americans, as well as the systematic slave trade that persisted for centuries, it was never with the same attention to detail as our German lessons. In a modern context, it is crucial to explore this lack of historical urgency in the US. This uneven reckoning with the past is not confined to the classroom - it is a political tool that has helped Donald Trump encourage the polarisation of the USA.
In August of 2025, Trump accused the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum and research complex, of fixating on “how bad slavery was” - arguing that one should instead reflect on the “brightness” of America. Trump feeds off the division that exists among Americans when it comes to their history, attempting to distort the nation’s past to advance his own agenda. Without a unified commitment to remember history, violence and all, it can easily be repeated on a systemic scale - what purpose does history serve if we cannot agree on the ethical and moral failures it reveals?
Recently, videos have circulated online of a Minnesota neighbourhood at night, with loud whistles ringing and voices screaming to “stay inside” and “lock your doors”. “They’re here”. The harrowing footage, as well as the fear in these communities, is striking to witness, not only as an ‘outsider’, but also as a German who grew up learning about the steady and rampant ascendency of the Nazis, as well as their persecution of Jewish people years before war was declared.
Though these people’s calls and struggles are an ocean away, reaching us only through our phones, Trump’s treatment of US history, as well as the country’s future, is a transatlantic warning. Reform UK’s Operation Restoring Justice, a legislative agenda released in August 2025, proposes a “five-year emergency programme” intended to detain and deport illegal migrants from the United Kingdom en masse. The “Operational Plan” would create an enforcement unit called the UK Deportation Command, which sounds strikingly familiar to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) currently terrorising citizens across the US.
Reform UK refers to the deportation process as a “swift removal”, petitioning for the creation of detention centres with capacity to hold up to 24,000 people, with “robust perimeters” to “prevent escapes”. Those 24,000 people deported monthly, as Reform hopes, would then have a lifelong ban from re-entering the country, and could face up to five years in prison if they attempt to return. Sound familiar? The parallels are striking - central to Trump’s 2024 campaign was a promise to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”. This rhetoric is echoed in Reform UK’s call for “swiftly removing” illegal immigrants from the country.
Reform UK’s manifesto explicitly plans for a future with Reform in charge - while the Labour party won the July 2024 general election in a landslide, Reform UK topped a Sky News/ YouGov poll, commanding a shocking 25% of voters in 2025, topping both Labour and Conservatives. This right-wing shift is felt across the globe, reframing the cries of Americans not as a unique moment of unrest but as a warning of the loss of liberty and safety in an age of right-wing radicalisation.