At the end of May, the White House released the new United States Counterterrorism Strategy 2026, the document in which the US administration defines the priorities, objectives, and tools of its counterterrorism policy. This isn't a technical memo for insiders. It's the document in which Washington declares which threats it considers priority and what concept of security it intends to assert within and beyond its borders.
It's sixteen pages packed with operational guidelines and political vision. It discusses drug cartels, international jihadism, border control, cyber operations, the Middle East, and Latin America. But this document also contains something that deserves special attention, as it directly concerns the field of political and social conflict."Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists," are also listed among the main terrorist threats against the United States. The document explicitly addresses the issue, indicating, among its strategic priorities, the identification and neutralization of political groups defined as anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.
It's worth reflecting on these lines. This isn't an off-the-cuff statement or a rally slogan. It's an official national security document. And that's precisely what makes it politically relevant.
Because when a power like the United States explicitly includes anarchists and anti-fascists within the scope of the fight against terrorism, we're not just dealing with a lexical choice. We're dealing with a precise political signal, one that speaks to intelligence agencies, police forces, international allies, and Western governments. It's a signal that fits within a broader climate, in which social and political dissent is increasingly treated as a matter of public order and security.
When the political enemy becomes a matter of security
The history of the modern state is also the history of the construction of the "enemy within." Times, governments, and names change. But the mechanism returns. At times it has been the subversive, the Bolshevik, the undesirable foreigner, the anarchist, the terrorist. Different figures, but brought together by the same political function: to identify those perceived as outsiders and present them as a collective threat.
Over the past twenty-five years, this process has focused primarily on the word "terrorism." After September 11th, that category assumed enormous weight in Western political and legal lexicon. In its name, special laws were passed, surveillance powers were expanded, intelligence apparatuses were strengthened. Measures that began as exceptional have become routine.
Today, that paradigm seems to be expanding even further.
The White House document doesn't just mention jihadist networks or transnational armed organizations. Something else emerges: social conflict explicitly enters the language of national security. Anarchism, militant anti-fascism, and political radicalism more generally are named as elements of a threat to be monitored and neutralized.
It's not just a lexical shift. It's a political shift.
When dissent is interpreted through the category of security, it ceases to be perceived as an expression of social conflict or political opposition and is relocated within the realm of emergency. No longer a political adversary, but a potential factor of destabilization.
And it is precisely here that the line becomes blurred. Where does the repression of violent behavior end and the security management of dissent begin? This is a question that concerns the United States, but it also speaks very closely to today's Europe.
From America to Europe: Different lexicons, same direction
It would be too simple to imagine a direct transition from the United States to Europe. The political contexts are different, as are the legal and institutional traditions. Yet, looking at the overall picture, a common trend clearly emerges.
In the United States, the language is that of counterterrorism strategy. In Europe, the vocabulary is changing: public safety, border control, urban order, countering extremism. The words are different, but the political direction often appears the same.
Social and political dissent is increasingly treated less as a natural part of democratic conflict and more as a security issue. Mobilizations, pickets, occupations, and protests are removed from the realm of political debate and relegated to the realm of public order or emergency.
Conflict thus ceases to be interpreted for what it expresses-a social fracture, a claim, a need-and is translated into the language of risk to be contained.
It is in this shift that conflict is progressively depoliticized. It is no longer addressed on social or political grounds, but through criminal law, police apparatuses, and preventive surveillance.
The result is that what should open a space for discussion is increasingly treated as a security issue. And dissent, from an expression of conflict, becomes a factor of disorder and an object of control.
The Italian Case
In Italy, this process is not a new one. It has deep roots, but in recent years it has gained new momentum and political legitimacy.
The lexicon of the so-called "security decrees" has progressively shifted the center of gravity of public discourse: what was once interpreted on social or political grounds is increasingly translated into terms of security, public order, and emergency. The conflict thus ends up being narrated not for what it expresses-demand, opposition, resistance-but for the disruption it causes to the existing order.
It doesn't concern a single movement. The phenomenon is broader and involves very diverse realities: migration, housing occupations, territorial conflicts, workers' pickets, environmental mobilizations, solidarity networks.
The point isn't just the tightening of sanctions or the repression of individual behaviors. There's something deeper: the construction of a political culture of order in which anyone who disrupts social normality is easily transformed into a security problem.
Thus, dissent ceases to appear as an expression of real conflict and is narrated as a collective threat. No longer an inconvenient voice in the public sphere, but an element to be contained, isolated, prevented. And it is in this shift-often gradual, almost imperceptible-that one of the most evident political changes of recent years can be measured.
A political convergence that comes from afar
It would be excessive to speak of a single director. But it's hard not to see an increasingly evident political and cultural convergence between the United States and Europe.
Governments, institutional systems, and vocabulary are changing. But the overall picture presents common features. Security becomes the privileged terrain for building consensus. Order is pitted against conflict, stability against dissent, control against freedom of movement and organization. Everything that exceeds the perimeter of governable normality tends to be reduced to the language of threat.
On this terrain, the contemporary right has built a significant part of its hegemony. It promises protection, but often produces control. It invokes security, but ends up narrowing the space for legitimate conflict and expanding that of surveillance. It doesn't just repress behavior: it redefines what can be perceived as dangerous.
For the anarchist movement, all of this has something profoundly familiar.
In the United States, the criminalization of anarchism is nothing new. American history has already experienced it: after Haymarket, during the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920, in the political and judicial climate surrounding the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Each time, the mechanism recurs in different forms but according to a recognizable dynamic: an emergency is constructed, repressive measures are strengthened, the target perimeter is expanded.
And that perimeter rarely remains confined to those first struck.
This is the lesson that history continues to teach us. When dissent is transformed into a question of security, it's not just the fate of a political minority that's at stake. The space for freedom for all is gradually shrinking.
This is why carefully reading a document like the United States Counterterrorism Strategy 2026 today doesn't mean dwelling on a detail of American policy. It means observing a broader trend of our present. Because what is identified as a threat today can become the limit of everyone's freedom tomorrow.
Totò Caggese
https://umanitanova.org/ossessioni-securitarie-e-repressione-il-nuovo-documento-antiterrorismo-della-casa-bianca/
_________________________________________
Source - A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten