When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, the Department of Justice had exactly one job: investigate whether a federal officer violated someone's constitutional rights. They chose silence instead. Not confusion. Not delay. Silence. That silence isn't bureaucratic incompetence—it's institutional abandonment of the one mechanism designed to prevent state violence from becoming state policy. History has seen this movie before, and it doesn't end with apologies.

En este articulo

• Why did the DOJ go silent after a federal agent killed an unarmed woman in Minneapolis?
• What Reinhard Heydrich's assassination teaches us about retaliation spirals
• How concentration camps actually begin—and what that means today
• The specific accountability failure that enables state violence to escalate
• Five modern countries where this exact pattern played out
• Where political leaders must draw the line before it's too late
• Why Nuremberg's lesson was about prevention, not punishment

Renee Nicole Good was in her car when an ICE agent shot her. Department of Homeland Security officials immediately called it "domestic terrorism," claiming she "weaponized her vehicle" to run over officers. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey watched different footage and called it "an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying." Governor Tim Walz said it was "totally avoidable." The FBI and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension announced a joint investigation. Then the U.S. Attorney's Office reversed course within hours, stripped state investigators of access, and took exclusive control.

Here's what didn't happen: the DOJ didn't announce a civil rights investigation, which is crucial because it underscores the lack of institutional accountability and signals a broader systemic failure.

Military-style nighttime raids on sleeping families, tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper balls fired at non-violent protesters evoke feelings of injustice and concern, urging the audience to empathize with victims and recognize the urgency of accountability.

Why a Film About Nuremberg Matters Right Now

La película Nuremberg just left theaters. Most people think those trials were about punishing monsters who ran death camps. That's the Hollywood version. The actual Nuremberg trials established something more fundamental: legality does not absolve responsibility. German officials followed the laws. They had paperwork. They worked within bureaucratic structures. The tribunals said none of that mattered when the system itself violated human dignity.

The Nuremberg principles weren't just about punishing atrocity perpetrators; they established that officials are responsible even when following laws, which is vital for understanding accountability today.

That's the lesson Americans need to remember in January 2026. We are at a critical point where leadership must impose limits to prevent irreversible violence, inspiring a sense of responsibility and hope for change.

Reinhard Heydrich and the Bureaucracy of Violence

Reinhard Heydrich never personally killed six million people. He was an administrator. He attended meetings. He drafted memos. He coordinated logistics. He made mass murder efficient and impersonal, which is how you scale cruelty beyond what individual sadists could manage. Bureaucratic systems don't just enable violence—they make it systematic, sustainable, and defensible within organizational culture.

Czech resistance fighters assassinated Heydrich in Prague in 1942. Hitler's regime responded by massacring entire villages. Lidice was erased—all men over sixteen shot, all women sent to concentration camps, all children either killed or "Germanized" through forced adoption. The Nazis killed over thirteen hundred people in retaliation for one assassination. When violence becomes a tool of governance, it doesn't respond to resistance with restraint. It escalates beyond any rational calculation.

When violence becomes a tool of governance, it escalates beyond any rational control, provoking moral outrage and emphasizing the need for accountability to protect innocent lives.

How Concentration Camps Actually Begin

Ask most Americans what a concentration camp is, and they'll describe Auschwitz. Gas chambers. Mass extermination. Industrial-scale death. That's accurate for 1944. It's entirely wrong for 1933. Concentration camps don't start as death camps. They begin as "temporary detention facilities" for people the government considers threats, even though it hasn't actually charged them with crimes. They're framed as legal, necessary, and temporary. Always temporary.

The defining characteristics have nothing to do with killing: indefinite detention, suspension of due process, isolation from oversight, and total control by the state. Early Nazi camps held political prisoners, communists, and "asocials"—people who hadn't committed crimes but who the regime wanted removed from society. The camps were public knowledge. The government defended them as lawful responses to emergency conditions. Critics were told to stop being hysterical about detention that was clearly temporary and obviously legal.

Normalization happens gradually. First, it's just detention. Then it's detention plus harsh conditions. Then, harsh conditions become standard procedure. The standard procedure includes things that would have been unthinkable at the beginning. The infrastructure gets built step by step, and each step is defended as modest, legal, and necessary. By the time the camps evolve into killing centers, the pipeline that feeds them has been operating for years. The moral failure occurred long before the first gas chamber was built.

Americans in 2026 need to understand this: the warning isn't that we have death camps. The warning is that we're building detention infrastructure while suspending due process and isolating it from oversight. That's the beginning of the pattern, not the end. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes—and right now it's rhyming in German.

The DOJ's Accountability Failure Explained

The Department of Justice has a specific tool for prosecuting law enforcement officers who violate constitutional rights: Section 242 of Title 18. It makes it a federal crime for anyone acting "under color of law" to willfully deprive someone of constitutional rights. This statute has been used for decades to hold state and local police accountable. It applies equally to federal agents. The standard is high—prosecutors must prove willful intent, not mere negligence—but the statute exists specifically to address situations like those in Minneapolis.

Here's what makes the current silence unusual: historically, DOJ recognized that prosecuting law enforcement for excessive force was essential to maintaining public trust in the rule of law. Juries are typically sympathetic to officers who face dangerous situations. DOJ pursued these cases anyway because the principle mattered: no one is above the law. That phrase only means something if it applies to people with badges and guns.

The Minneapolis shooting has ample evidence already in the public domain. Video footage. Conflicting official accounts. State officials are disputing the federal narrative. This is precisely the kind of case that would traditionally trigger a civil rights investigation. The DOJ's silence isn't procedural caution—it's abdication. When the primary institutional mechanism for holding federal agents accountable simply stops functioning, state violence doesn't face consequences. It faces encouragement.

Alternative paths for accountability are limited. Local prosecutors face legal hurdles in charging federal officials under state law, especially when agents claim their actions were authorized by federal policy. State charges might stick for criminal negligence, but federal immunity doctrines often block prosecution. That's why DOJ's role was always critical—it's the only institution positioned to enforce constitutional limits on federal power. When DOJ abandons that role, the brake disappears. What comes next isn't a mystery. It's momentum.

Five Modern Countries Where This Pattern Played Out

This isn't ancient history. This isn't theoretical. Five countries in the last thirty years followed the exact same pattern: state violence normalized, accountability abandoned, escalation enabled. Each thought it was different. Each was wrong.

Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte: State-sanctioned killing became official policy during the drug war. Police shot suspected dealers in the streets. Duterte publicly encouraged the killings. No investigations. No prosecutions. Impunity signaled from the top. Thousands died in extrajudicial executions. The International Criminal Court issued warrants. Duterte's response was to withdraw from the court's jurisdiction. When leaders promise violence and deliver it, they rarely stop at the first target.

Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Emergency powers declared after the 2016 coup attempt became permanent features of governance. Mass arrests of journalists, academics, and opposition figures. Courts dismantled or packed with loyalists. Constitutional protections suspended indefinitely. The emergency was always temporary—until it wasn't. Once you normalize rule by decree, returning to rule by law requires voluntarily giving up power. That rarely happens.

Hungary under Viktor Orbán: This is the quiet version. No mass killings. No death camps. Just steady erosion of independent institutions, media captured or intimidated, elections still held, but opposition systematically disadvantaged. Fear and selective enforcement replace overt brutality. The result is still authoritarian control—just achieved through institutional capture rather than violence. Repression doesn't require bodies in the street if it controls the courts, the media, and the electoral system.

Chile under Augusto Pinochet: "Order" justified disappearances and torture. Political opponents were arrested, never seen again. No trials. No accountability. Families spent decades searching for bodies. Pinochet defended it all as necessary to prevent communist chaos. The regime eventually ended, but thousands died first, and Chile still grapples with the trauma. Order maintained through terror isn't order—it's occupation.

Russia under Vladimir Putin: Localized brutality in Chechnya became national doctrine. Journalists murdered. Dissidents poisoned. Opposition candidates imprisoned or killed. The state doesn't acknowledge responsibility, but everyone knows. That's the point—plausible deniability combined with obvious guilt creates maximum fear. When the state can kill you, and everyone knows it but can't prove it, silence becomes a survival strategy. Truth becomes dangerous.

These five examples span continents, ideologies, and decades. The common thread: state violence without accountability escalates. Always. The mechanism is identical: remove consequences, normalize force, expand targets. What starts as "necessary security measures" ends as systematic repression. The innocent suffer first, most, and longest.

America Under Donald Trump: The United States is not immune to this pattern, and the Trump era makes that unmistakably clear. Under Donald Trump, the language and machinery of the security state were openly normalized: migrants framed as invaders, dissent labeled subversion, and federal force portrayed as the final arbiter of order. Family separation, mass detention, indefinite confinement, and aggressive federal deployments were not presented as moral dilemmas, but as necessary tools of governance. Oversight was treated as obstruction. Courts were attacked when they interfered. Loyalty was valued over restraint. This is not conjecture; it is documented in real time in the PBS FRONTLINE un documental Trump’s Power & the Rule of Law, which lays bare how executive authority was stretched, tested, and repeatedly pushed against legal limits. What matters is not partisan affiliation, but precedent: once a democracy accepts that fear justifies suspension of norms, the slide toward authoritarian enforcement is no longer theoretical. It is procedural.

Why Escalation Is the Real Danger

State violence paired with accountability failure creates a predictable cycle. First, officials use force with impunity. That signals to other officials that force is acceptable. Force becomes routine. Routine force creates opposition. Opposition gets labeled as a threat. The threat justifies expanded force. Expanded force creates more opposition. The cycle accelerates.

At each stage, officials defend their actions as responses to escalating danger—danger they created by refusing accountability at the previous stage. Minneapolis didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened after months of immigration raids using tactics that shocked local communities. Those raids happened after federal policy normalized aggressive enforcement. That policy followed political leaders' promises of a crackdown. Each step enabled the next. Remove the brake, and momentum takes over.

Here's what Americans need to understand: once retaliation occurs, it gets weaponized to justify everything that comes after. If someone responds to state violence with violence, officials point to that response as proof that harsh measures were necessary all along. The Heydrich assassination justified Lidice. Palestinian attacks justify Israeli occupation. Drug cartel violence justified Duterte's killings. The logic is circular, but it works politically because it converts fear into permission. Scared populations grant authority they'd never give in calm times.

The real danger isn't that the current situation is the worst it can get. The real danger is that this is the beginning of a trajectory, and we're at the point where institutional accountability could still interrupt it. Once escalation reaches certain thresholds, interruption becomes exponentially harder. The innocent suffer most because they're easiest targets—they can't fight back effectively, so punishing them carries less risk than confronting actual threats. That's not a strategy. That's cruelty disguised as security.

Where Political Leaders Must Draw the Line

The burden isn't on communities to prevent state violence. The burden is on elected officials to impose institutional limits before violence becomes normalized. That's what leadership means in a system that claims to operate under the rule of law. When officials refuse that responsibility, they're not being neutral. They're enabling escalation through deliberate inaction.

Early intervention has specific components: clear limits on use of force, independent investigations of every incident involving injury or death, transparency about tactics and outcomes, and de-escalation as the primary strategy. None of this is radical. It's standard practice in functional democracies that maintain public trust in law enforcement. The United States used to do this. We had institutional mechanisms specifically designed to prevent state violence from becoming policy.

What changed wasn't capacity. What changed was will. DOJ still has Section 242. Courts still have jurisdiction. Congress still has oversight authority. The tools exist. What's missing is political leadership willing to use them against federal agents conducting operations that leadership ordered. That's not a gap in law—it's a gap in courage. Delay isn't pragmatism. It's a choice. Silence isn't caution. It's complicity.

Here's the test: when state violence occurs, do institutions investigate and impose consequences, or do they defend and enable? The answer determines whether you have rule of law or rule by force. Right now, America is choosing force. That choice is reversible, but the window closes every day officials wait. History doesn't judge leaders for ignorance of consequences when those consequences are documented across centuries and continents. History judges them for ignoring what they already knew.

The Line Nuremberg Drew

The Nuremberg tribunals weren't revenge. They were preventive architecture. The prosecutors understood that the worst atrocities don't start with death camps—they begin with officials who normalize cruelty while hiding behind legality. The trials established that following orders doesn't absolve responsibility, that legal authority doesn't justify moral abdication, and that individuals remain accountable for systematic violence even when institutions authorize it.

That framework was supposed to prevent early-stage normalization of state violence. It was supposed to create accountability before escalation became irreversible. It was supposed to force officials to consider consequences before implementing policies that would lead to catastrophe. The entire point was to interrupt the trajectory while interruption was still possible. Nuremberg's lesson wasn't about punishing the past. It was about preventing the future.

America in January 2026 faces exactly the test Nuremberg was designed to prevent. State violence is occurring. Accountability mechanisms are failing. Officials are defending tactics that violate constitutional principles. Opposition is growing. The escalation cycle is visible to anyone who takes the time to look at history. The tools to interrupt this trajectory exist. They're not being used. That's not an accident. That's a choice.

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Right now, it's rhyming in ways that should terrify anyone who knows what comes after accountability fails. The Minneapolis shooting wasn't an endpoint—it was an inflection point. What happens next depends entirely on whether American institutions remember why Nuremberg mattered. If the lesson was that legality doesn't absolve responsibility, then officials choosing silence over accountability are choosing the wrong side of history. The consequences of that choice are documented. They're predictable. They're preventable. Whether we prevent them is the only question that matters now.

Sobre el autor

Robert Jennings es coeditor de InnerSelf.com, una plataforma dedicada a empoderar a las personas y promover un mundo más conectado y equitativo. Robert, veterano del Cuerpo de Marines y del Ejército de los EE. UU., aprovecha sus diversas experiencias de vida, desde trabajar en el sector inmobiliario y la construcción hasta crear InnerSelf.com con su esposa, Marie T. Russell, para aportar una perspectiva práctica y fundamentada a los desafíos de la vida. InnerSelf.com, fundada en 1996, comparte conocimientos para ayudar a las personas a tomar decisiones informadas y significativas para sí mismas y para el planeta. Más de 30 años después, InnerSelf continúa inspirando claridad y empoderamiento.

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Este artículo está licenciado bajo una licencia Creative Commons Reconocimiento-Compartir Igual 4.0. Atribuir al autor Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com. Enlace de regreso al artículo Este artículo apareció originalmente en InnerSelf.com

Resumen del artículo

The January 2026 Minneapolis shooting exposed a dangerous pattern: state violence paired with accountability failure. When the DOJ abandoned its traditional role prosecuting civil rights violations by federal agents, it removed the primary institutional brake on escalation. History—from Heydrich's bureaucratic cruelty to the evolution of concentration camps—shows that normalized violence doesn't stay contained. Five modern countries (Philippines, Turkey, Hungary, Chile, Russia) followed identical trajectories when accountability collapsed. Nuremberg established that early-stage accountability prevents late-stage atrocities. The test isn't whether violence has reached maximum horror. The test is whether institutions act when the pattern first becomes visible. America is failing that test. The tools to reverse this trajectory exist—Section 242, independent investigations, transparent oversight, de-escalation protocols. What's missing is political will to use them. Delay isn't pragmatism; it's complicity. The line Nuremberg drew was designed to prevent exactly this moment. Whether we recognize it determines everything that comes next.

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