Since at least classical antiquity, the differences between dictatorship and democracy have been clear, unequivocal, and as evident as the difference between water and oil. In theory. In practice, the differences, especially today, are much more complex. Take the example of the persecution of forbidden/illegal ideas by those in power. In theory, in a democracy, there are no forbidden/illegal ideas, except those that constitute crimes of defamation. In practice, things are more complex. Dictatorships are transparent in their persecution of those who profess forbidden/illegal ideas by those in power. Democracy is opaque.

Transparent persecution consists, among other things, of the prohibition of political parties, the absence of fundamental rights and procedural guarantees, political dependence of the courts, an official list of prohibited/illegal ideas, and the punishment of those who profess them (censorship, crimes of opinion, political prisoners). Opaque persecution does not use—officially, at least—any of these instruments, which are constitutionally prohibited in a democratic state. The opacity lies in the fact that similar objectives can be achieved by means that appear to be completely different (and even contrary) to those used in transparent persecution.

The danger of opaque persecution is that it goes unnoticed by the majority of the population. If it is not democratically combated, it can easily turn into quasi-transparent persecution, i.e., tolerated or even promoted by the constitutionally democratic state itself, and accepted with indifference by the majority of the population. Beyond a certain level of tolerance or promotion of opaque persecution, it is legitimate to admit that, even without constitutional changes, the democratic political regime has changed and become a hybrid regime between democracy and dictatorship, a democracy with smatterings of dictatorship, or a dictatorship with smatterings of democracy. Let's take a look at the conditions for opaque persecution and some of the privileged mechanisms for carrying it out, some of immemorial origin, others very recent.

The conditions

The creation of an external threat. The modern idea of the nation-state is based on two fundamental pillars: sovereignty and citizenship. Both are principles of inclusion and exclusion. The principle of sovereignty validates the concept of external threat. Today, the external threat of choice in the European Union is Russia, while in the US, it is China, Iran, and North Korea. As in all pre-war periods, the idea of the external threat intensifies and becomes the central axis of the country's policy.

From this moment of polarization, questioning the policy of threat becomes an act of betrayal. Questioning becomes a dangerous act, by definition, and the one who formulates it is, by definition, dangerous. Dangerousness can justify the neutralization of those who question by informal, legal, a-legal, or even illegal means, which basically means the violation of constitutional guarantees.

The creation of the common internal enemy. The other pillar of the modern idea of the nation-state is citizenship. The idea of the nation-state contains a little-noticed trick: contrary to common belief, it wasn't nations that built states; it was states that built nations. And nation-building has always depended on the interests of those who dominate the state. For this reason, many social groups who lived in the geopolitical space of the state were excluded from the nation: ethnic or religious minorities (sometimes majorities), slaves, women, and immigrants. Citizenship has always been a principle of both inclusion and exclusion.

The excluded have always been potentially internal enemies, and their effective conversion has depended on the opportunism of whoever holds state power at the time. At the moment, in Europe and the US, the common internal enemy of choice is the immigrant, especially if they are Muslim. The common internal enemy is monitored, controlled, and expelled according to the convenience of the moment. The legality or illegality with which all this is done depends on a multitude of factors.

The creation of the internal political enemy. These are individuals or groups/parties whose ideas are considered by the political powers to be so dangerous that they do not deserve to be protected by the guarantees of citizenship and the Constitution. After the Second World War, the US and its allies were very active in characterizing communist parties as internal political enemies, especially in the Americas and Western Europe. The cases of Greece, Germany (the Berufsverbot, professional ban for “extremists, 1972), and Italy are particularly significant. We are currently witnessing an extremely worrying expansion of the concept of internal political enemy.

The global far right, today led by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, is beginning to extend the concept of internal political enemy to all critical-thinking intellectuals and all left-wing parties. The internal political enemy either jeopardizes the interests (mainly economic) of the classes that dominate the state or is suspected of being in the service of an external enemy and thereby aggravating the external threat. Unlike what happens with political opponents, with internal political enemies, there is no debate; they are rather silenced, summarily condemned, and declared dead.

The instruments of opaque persecution

The conditions mentioned above are some of the symptoms of broader changes in the global capitalist and colonialist (dis)order that I cannot analyze here. In general, they aggravate the incompatibility between liberal democracy and capitalist accumulation. In previous works, I have argued that in capitalist societies, liberal democracy is always an island of democracy in an archipelago of despotism. I have characterized these despotisms as forms of societal fascism and concluded that contemporary societies are politically democratic and socially fascist. I think we are entering a different period in which societal fascism is transforming into a new kind of political fascism. Opaque persecution is one of the signs of this transformation. Let's look at its main instruments.

The persecution is not explicitly political

Except in extreme cases, such as those currently taking place in Donald Trump's USA, prohibited or illegal ideas never appear as an explicit reason for persecution. The persecution of the defenders of such ideas takes place for non-political reasons, for acts that gather great consensus in society in terms of ethical or legal condemnation. The acts currently favored are sexual abuse, corruption, and state security. The most sadly famous case of the last decades was that of Julian Assange, in which the accusations of sexual abuse (the invention of a sexual assault on two Swedish women) and an attack on state security (WikiLeaks) were combined.

State security has always been the preferred reason for dictatorships to persecute their opponents. Its increasing use by democratic states is one of the clear signs of the degradation of democratic coexistence. The construction of the external threat and the internal political enemy is particularly used in periods of preparation for war. As for sexual abuse and corruption, they have always been condemnable in democratic societies and punishable under the law. Opaque persecution uses this to maximize the social stigmatization of the perpetrators of forbidden/illegal ideas. It uses two main mechanisms: invention, decontextualization, or disproportionate dramatization of the “facts,” and selective repression. The universe of sex offenders and the corrupt has a certain political color that is rarely noticed and, when it is, is treated as pure coincidence.

The two offenses of choice have historical and political economic reasons. The fight against sexual abuse has always been on the agenda of Democrats, who consider patriarchy to be one of the main modern dominations, alongside capitalism and colonialism. The feminist movements have given a new visibility to sexual abuse and a new intensity to its condemnation. However, neoliberalism has infiltrated these movements with a neo-Puritan ideology and used them to make the class struggle invisible and to divide the groups fighting against social injustice.

Capitalism was no longer the main enemy, but heterosexual men were. Obviously, this infiltration has been partial and only affects part of the great movement for the liberation of women and sexual orientations. This is what is now known as neoliberal feminism, generally made up of phenotypically white, middle-class people.

As for corruption, its relationship with the political economy of neoliberalism is intimate because it was with neoliberalism that the promiscuity between the political and economic worlds intensified. Corruption is now normalized in all political activity, and acts that are still considered corruption in some countries are legal in others. This is the case with the hidden and unlimited private financing of political parties, which is banned in European countries and permitted in the USA. Corruption is thus an activity that neoliberalism knows well and uses to keep those who are loyal to its interests in political power and to remove from power or prevent those who are hostile or less loyal to those interests from coming to power.

The persecution is conducted by “civil society” or by the “non-political” organs of the state—the courts.

Civil society is mobilized in multiple ways. The media and social networks are the privileged amplifiers of the “seriousness” of the acts and the persecution of their perpetrators. In their midst, persecuted entrepreneurs emerge, often unaware of the service they are providing to the real mobilizers and their interests. They see themselves as heralds of a noble cause, and this is a fundamental component of the opacity of persecution. The aim of the media war is to turn accusations into condemnations so that the objectives of neutralizing those who are opaquely persecuted are achieved before any initiative to defend themselves. The professional and personal damage becomes definitive and irreparable, even if the accusations are later proven to be false.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a key role in opaque prosecution precisely because any superficial reading of their mission identifies the nobility, disinterest, and universalism of their objectives. The defense of democracy and human rights serves as a veneer to legitimize their true aims. The NGOs most committed to opaque persecution are often financed internationally by interest centers linked to the defense of neoliberalism and the neutralization of its enemies.

The courts are the sovereign body considered non-political and defenders of constitutional guarantees, the rule of law, the regularity of the judicial procedures, and the presumption of innocence. All this means that only real cases of sexual abuse, corruption, or attacks on state security are punished, and that everyone is punished, not just a few. This is the theory, but the practice is quite different. We have been witnessing two worrying phenomena.

The first is the growing realization that the courts are much more dependent on public opinion than one might think. And they are especially so in cases where this opinion creates a consensus that goes beyond the usual political divisions. This dependence, as well as contradicting the independence of the courts, undermines the effectiveness of procedural guarantees and, above all, the presumption of innocence. Under these conditions, the (sometimes anonymous) denunciation in the media and on social networks constitutes the conviction, and the action of the courts is no more than ratifying the conviction. This is only not the case when public opinion is divided before or during the intervention of the courts. Hence, the interest of the vigilantes of opaque persecution is in ensuring that such a split does not occur.

The second phenomenon is what is known as the judicialization of politics, the reverse of which is the politicization of justice. This involves the political class (or their political clients) using the courts to obtain political results. For example, the removal of an influential politician or the electoral defeat of a party considered to be the favorite, but hostile to the interests of those who have the power to mobilize the courts. Again, one of the characteristics of judicialization is its selectivity.

It tends to operate most effectively when it comes to promoting politically conservative objectives. It should be noted that neoliberalism has invested heavily in the “training of magistrates” in many countries, notably with “specialization courses” or “study trips” at American universities and other US institutions. My research from the 1990s onwards indicated that public prosecutors were the prime target of this “training” policy. It was later extended to all magistrates.

Opaque persecution requires a complex equation between the dangerousness and illegality of ideas

Opaque persecution is based on the idea that certain ideas are dangerous because they significantly contradict the interests of those in political power and their allies and, for this reason, should be treated as illegal, even though in a democracy the concept of prohibited or illegal ideas has very precise limits, and, in principle, there are no dangerous ideas. Opaque persecution requires that these boundaries be crossed by indirect means of repression, liminal or a-legal, between legality and illegality, and by massive indoctrination and disinformation campaigns.

An example of this is the concept of anti-Semitism, which today in the US (and to some extent in Europe) has been reframed to cover any criticism of the State of Israel, no matter how heinous the crimes against humanity committed by Israel against the martyred people of Palestine. The aim of disinformation is to legitimize repression by inverting the equation between the dangerousness and the illegality of ideas: while for those in power, ideas are dangerous and should therefore be outlawed, public opinion is led to believe that ideas are illegal because they are dangerous.

The persecution is global

The opaque persecution is part of a global project to degrade coexistence and democratic institutions. The crisis of globalized neoliberal capitalist accumulation is evident today and manifests itself at various levels, far beyond protectionism, tariffs, and the division into rival blocs. It manifests itself in political polarization, in the growth of the extreme right among the frustrated, resentful, and hopeless working classes, in the politics of hatred, in the spectacle of the violation of the red lines of democratic coexistence in the public sphere, and in the gradual replacement of secularism by politicized religion.

The internationalization of hate and conservative polarization uses the means that the US high-tech information and communication giants have at their disposal to silence or eliminate critical thinking, monitoring the communications and movements of social activists and critical thinkers, checking the alternative media, rummaging through the privacy of the targets in order to trigger at the right moment the process of cancellation, silencing, in short, the civil death of the defenders of ideas considered prohibited or illegal, and even of the media outlets they used.

The “blacklists” of ideas, authors, and media outlets to be canceled are distributed internationally to the hegemonic media in different countries, to investigative police, and even to NGOs that are willing to collaborate because they believe that such cancellation could further their supposedly progressive goals.

This is the most opaque dimension of the persecution, because it is difficult to know who the agents of a persecution are that, although national, is quickly internationalized, who are its internal collaborators, and how the disinformation is spread so quickly. Above all, it is difficult to know how people of good faith are mobilized for causes they think are noble without being aware of the real objectives behind them. As for the centers of international hatred and polarization, there is reason to believe that they are Donald Trump's USA and Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel.

From opaque persecution to transparent persecution

The distinction between opaque persecution and transparent persecution is not always as clear-cut as described here. There are liminal situations that create hybrid phenomena of opaque persecution and transparent persecution. This is the case, for example, when the defenders of illegal ideas are foreigners. Illegal ideas are then easily considered doubly illegal: illegal ideas from illegal people. Another mechanism of liminality is the declaration of states of emergency that suspend the constitutional guarantees of the persecuted. A third mechanism is the creation of allegal, gray zones, where the discretion of the agents is constitutive of the application of the law. Such zones are, for example, airports and immigration services.

Conclusion

Producing the civil death of the targets of opaque persecution and discrediting their ideas are the two mechanisms of cancellation. The ideas may continue to be published, but they no longer have any political influence, either by discrediting the authors or by marginalizing the media outlets in which they are published, if they are published at all.

The fundamental danger of opaque persecution lies in the fact that its opacity prevents it from being combated as political persecution and therefore with recourse to democratic means of political confrontation. It is a perverse form of politicization that acts as depoliticization, subjecting its targets to the deepest isolation. Any public solidarity with this target can lead to the cancellation of the one who is a sympathizer. Loneliness in a democracy has a much deeper stigma than loneliness in a dictatorship. But it is precisely this loneliness and the consequent impossibility of creating democratic opposition that favors the slide from democracy to dictatorship that characterizes our time.