Making Fear the Law: How Regimes Use Terror to Enforce Control

October 12, 2025

Throughout history, rulers have learned a simple, brutal truth: fear keeps people quiet. From the guillotine squares of revolutionary France to modern streets patrolled by militarised police, terror has often been the preferred tool of governments seeking obedience rather than consent. When authority can make people afraid, not just for their safety, but for their rights and dignity, it gains a power far stronger than law: submission through dread.

This article looks at how terror has been used as an instrument of rule across the centuries and considers the troubling echoes of such tactics in the United States today.

What is state terror?
While the word terrorism is usually reserved for non-state actors, state terror describes a government’s use of fear and violence against its own population. It can take many forms:

Public executions and mass arrests
Forced disappearances and torture
Militarisation of civilian life
Intimidation through surveillance and propaganda
Targeted persecution of minorities or dissidents

Whatever the form, the goal is the same: to control through fear rather than persuasion.

The Reign of Terror, France, 1793–1794
The French Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety, led by Robespierre, turned revolutionary zeal into a weapon of terror. Tens of thousands were imprisoned or executed by guillotine in the name of defending liberty. Neighbours informed on neighbours, accusations spread like plague, and Paris learned to whisper. The lesson was clear: when ideology and power fuse, mercy is the first casualty.

Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina, Russia, 1565–1572
Centuries earlier, Tsar Ivan IV created the Oprichnina, a personal state within the state, ruled by his own private army. The Oprichniki terrorised nobles and commoners alike, carrying out public executions and confiscations. Entire cities such as Novgorod were sacked to remind the people that loyalty was not optional. Ivan’s reign set a grim precedent: autocracy secured by calculated horror.

Stalin’s Great Purge, 1936–1938
Under Joseph Stalin, terror became bureaucratic routine. The secret police (NKVD) arrested millions on fabricated charges. Confessions were extracted through torture, trials were staged for show, and the condemned were executed or sent to the Gulag. In those years, a whispered word could mean death. Stalin’s terror created not just obedience but silence, an entire society afraid of its own shadow.

Mao’s Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries, 1950–1953
After China’s revolution, Mao Zedong launched a campaign to eliminate “counter-revolutionaries.” Hundreds of thousands were executed, millions imprisoned or placed under surveillance. The public executions were not secret acts of punishment but deliberate theatre: fear as civic instruction. Every citizen understood what defiance meant.

The Nazi State and the Night of the Long Knives
Hitler’s Germany institutionalised terror through the Gestapo and the SS. In 1934, the Night of the Long Knives purged internal rivals, and soon concentration camps became the machinery of terror. Surveillance, denunciations and propaganda ensured that even private thought became dangerous. Germany’s descent shows how swiftly a modern state can turn its instruments of order into tools of tyranny.

East Germany and Psychological Terror
In the Cold War years, East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, perfected Zersetzung, psychological decomposition. Rather than openly arrest opponents, they destroyed them quietly through rumours, isolation, job loss and endless surveillance. It was a terror of whispers rather than bullets, proving that oppression need not be bloody to be effective.

Modern echoes of terror
The pattern repeated itself through the twentieth century: Pinochet’s Chile, Argentina’s Dirty War, Indonesia’s massacres of 1965, Assad’s Syria, Myanmar’s Rohingya campaign, North Korea’s totalitarian state. Each used terror, physical or psychological, to destroy opposition and mould obedience. The faces change, the flags differ, but the logic of terror remains constant.

America’s uneasy reflection
The United States has long prided itself on being the antithesis of tyranny, yet recent events have unsettled that image. The Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions have, in the eyes of many observers, blurred the line between security and suppression.

Militarisation of civilian life
Deploying National Guard and federal agents into American cities, sometimes against the wishes of local authorities, has created scenes disturbingly reminiscent of military occupation. Protesters have faced tear gas and rubber bullets, while journalists have been assaulted or detained. The threat to invoke the Insurrection Act, allowing the army to police civilians, marked an alarming willingness to use military power for domestic political ends.

ICE raids and the politics of fear
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has carried out aggressive raids on homes, workplaces and even schools, targeting communities largely composed of ethnic minorities. Children have seen parents taken away in handcuffs; families have vanished into detention centres with little legal recourse. Whether or not one supports stricter immigration control, the deliberate spectacle of fear, the visible show of force, echoes the oldest form of state terror: punishment made public to discourage dissent.

Enemies lists and selective justice
Trump’s public attacks on perceived enemies, former FBI director James Comey, political rivals, journalists, fit another historical pattern. Authoritarian leaders often begin by labelling opponents as traitors or criminals. The language of justice becomes the language of vengeance. Once the machinery of the state is directed by personal grievance, the boundary between law enforcement and political purge begins to erode.

Where does it lead?
History offers a bleak warning. Regimes that rely on fear eventually consume themselves. Terror breeds loyalty only until the next purge. In every age, from Robespierre to Stalin, from Mao to Pinochet, the instruments of repression have turned inward, devouring their makers.

America is not yet such a regime, but the direction of travel matters. When migrants are hunted for political theatre, when courts and journalists are labelled enemies, and when the state’s power is wielded to silence rather than protect, democracy weakens.

The lesson of history is not simply that terror is wrong; it is that terror is contagious. Once a government learns to rule by fear, it forgets how to rule by trust. The question facing America now is not whether it can defeat its enemies, real or imagined, but whether it can resist becoming the kind of state it was founded to oppose.