THE shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis is a hinge moment in history, not for the killing, but for the context in which it took place. You might ask why the killing of one privileged white woman in the United States should count, in English eyes, for so much more than the slaughter of hundreds or thousands of women in Iran, and the answer, I’m afraid, is precisely because of her privilege.

Every death is the extinction of a universe. Every life is equally valuable to God. But, in this fallen world, that is not manifest. What we see here are the principalities and powers. And, by the rules of the principalities and powers, Renee Good — an unarmed white mother laughing and smiling in her car — should have been safe and protected by the law. The man who shot her three times on camera and then called her “a fucking lesbian bitch” should now be in jail. That’s how the world used to work, but now it doesn’t.

No one expects safety or protection from the law for a woman in Iran — which makes the women’s actions more heroic, but their deaths less likely to shock or change the world. But the US once was different, and millions of people believe that it still is.

They are wrong. It is not the killing itself that shows this, but the reaction to it by the Trumpists: their blatant, obvious lies in the teeth of the video evidence about what happened and how it might justify her killing. These lies work whether or not they are believed. If you believe them, they still the small voice of conscience, but, if you see them for lies, they force you to confront your own powerlessness. No one wants to do that.

And so the attempt to erect a tent of legitimacy over the crime scene, and so to obscure it, appeals even to those of us who know that there is a horror underneath. The only people who enjoy the exercise of naked power are the men with guns themselves and those who think that they are in command: look at Kristi Noem, the woman in charge of the Department of Homeland Security and its thugs, talking from a rostrum on which is written “One of ours. All of yours”: a slogan or tactic used by many occupying powers to justify collective punishment of civilians, most memorably by the Nazis to describe the extermination of whole villages such as Lidice in retaliation for acts of resistance.

THIS week, there was also an excoriating article in The Atlantic by Elizabeth Tsurkov, a woman who was imprisoned and tortured by an Iraqi militia for two years. If you want hope for the human spirit, read it. But read it also if you want to despair for the human race that is capable of her torturers’ foulness and stupidity. As she writes of one of them, “his mix of woeful ignorance and expert brutality may appear odd, but it is a hallmark of regimes that are born of marginalized, typically rural, victims of prior rulers.”

You need look only at the recruiting material used by ICE to see whom they are targeting. An ad posted on Instagram last week shows a big 1960s quintessentially “American” car parked under a palm tree on an empty golden beach. A bright blue surf plays in the background and the caption is “America after 100 million deportations”.

Ms Tsurkov continues: “The downtrodden take power and exact revenge against the previous elites, and mete out violence against every suspected opponent. Under such regimes, the state uses indiscriminate barbarity to instil constant terror in the population. The purpose is to deter resistance, but the arbitrary nature of the violence can stem from the unreliable information produced by ignorant interrogators: informers may be settling personal scores; torture victims will, like me, say anything.”

Ah, but could not the police step in to enforce the law against these thugs? One Minnesota policeman responded that, yes, the law was on his side, but “they have bigger guns.”

Senator Mitt Romney, once a Republican presidential candidate, found himself spending $150,000 a month on personal security after he voted to impeach President Trump for his orchestration of the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021.

If the price of being a non-Trump Republican can be set at $150,000 a month, that explains a lot about US politics; just remember that it’s not the anti-fascist movement Antifa that is threatening to murder anyone who stands up to them, whether housewife or senator.