Decaying empires turn to savage control previously used abroad at home: Journalist
Renowned American journalist Chris Hedges has linked the US government’s terror tactics in clamping down on opposition to the United States decline and decaying status as a modern-day empire.
“Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland,” the Pulitzer-winning veteran journalist wrote on X on Sunday.
It came hours after US federal agents shot and killed another citizen in Minneapolis, amid a massive crackdown on protests in the city.
Minneapolis Police Department Chief Brian O’Hara said that a 37-year-old man died in hospital on Saturday after being shot multiple times.
The man’s parents identified him as Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse who was a Minneapolis resident and a US citizen.
Hedges compared the recent “murders” committed by US federal government forces in the US homeland to those carried out by the “American execution squads” killing of Afghans and Iraqis abroad.
“The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province,” he wrote. “They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades.”
“It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability,” he added.
The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution… pic.twitter.com/NEw3gd85DT
— Chris Hedges (@ChrisLynnHedges) January 25, 2026
Hedges cited Aimé Césaire, a Latin American anti-colonial political author, who described the phenomena we are facing today as “imperial boomerang.”
He also cited Athenian historian Thucydides, who explains a situation when an ascending power threatens to displace an established one.
He said it was alright for Americans to use “the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color.”
The top journalist noted that the tyranny and terror the US has been imposing on world nations, especially on Muslim countries in West Asia, for decades, is now turning around as the chickens are finally coming home to roost.
“We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.”
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