Many people assume that Germany instantly transitioned from representative democracy to totalitarianism following the ascension of Adolf Hitler to chancellor on January 30, 1933. Actually, the Weimar Republic had already been reeling from the global Great Depression, unpopular austerity measures and overreliance on emergency decrees that restricted civil rights. Throughout the 1930s until the invasion of Poland formally marked the start of World War II, the Nazi leadership had to tolerate—less so as time passed and they consolidated power—the German deep state: conservative economists, a military general staff dominated by Prussian aristocrats whom the former Austrian corporal couldn’t stand yet couldn’t do without, the civil service lifers who kept the bureaucracy functioning, and the legacy German judiciary and its overlapping state and national courts presided over by judges beholden mostly to laws passed before the fascist seizure of power.

The 1934 Enabling Act turned the Reichstag into a rubber-stamp parliamentary validation for anything the Führer State proposed. Even so, during the early years of his reign, Hitler’s regime focused on big-picture policies like economics while leaving intact thousands of pre-Third Reich civil and criminal laws concerning picayune administrative matters like tax rules and traffic regulations and street crime.

The tension between a German state based on law and order, and a Nazi regime hellbent on savaging its enemies manifested itself in the SA, the Stormtroopers known as Brown Shirts, and the SS. Theoretically, both organizations were incorporated into the formal state and military apparatus. But members swore personal loyalty to Hitler. These paramilitaries were assigned to do his dirty work—and assured that they would never be held to account under those pesky old pre-Nazi laws that remained on the books.

Surprisingly, Richard J. Evans writes in The Third Reich in Power, SA goons were sometimes arrested for assaulting Jews and leftists. And not just these enemies of the state. “Gangs of stormtroopers got drunk, caused disturbances late at night, beat up innocent passersby, and attacked the police if they tried to stop them.”

As a result there were, Evans writes, “more than 4,000 prosecutions of SA and SS men for crimes of various kinds that were still before the courts in May 1934…Many others had been quashed, and more offenses still had never been prosecuted in the first place, but this was still a considerable number.” Even among upright local cops in Berlin and other cities, the authorities sussed that the fix was in, the mooks were protected, and that they—and any judge with the courage to convict one and send him to prison—imperiled their careers and their persons unless they turned a blind eye. Prosecutions ended.

ICE under Trump is rapidly becoming his SA: overwhelming, vicious, gleefully assaulting anyone and everyone, in charge of their own private network of concentration camps, personally loyal to The Leader, above the law and thus able to operate with impunity. Local police are afraid of ICE.

State violence in which the government self-servingly ignored its own laws in order to randomly attack political opponents and scapegoats was a key building block of the Nazis’ consolidation of power.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the traumatizing impact of state violence on the population of an ordered society. You can’t trust anyone or anything. You pay taxes, but the government does nothing for you. You’re on your own. I gained insight into the psychology of state violence when a high-ranked officer of the New York City police department neglected to block his caller ID before he left a death threat on my voicemail and a truckload of right-wing firefighters smashed the door of my apartment building. Who could I report him to—the NYPD? Perhaps, counting on his de facto immunity as he committed a felony and a firing offense, he didn’t bother to cover himself up. The firemen went away after my journalist buddy appeared with his camera.

I’ve experienced state violence firsthand in the U.S., where cops have roughed me up and falsely accused me of offenses, big and small, I didn’t commit, and judges have sided with them despite their brazen lies. And I’m a white guy.

I’ve witnessed state violence during my travels to places like the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Visiting a friend in Kazakhstan in the late 1990s, my traveling companion was shocked to encounter a rotting corpse of a man who’d gotten run over by a car days earlier, still lying in the street. “Aren’t you going to call the police?” my friend asked our Kazakh host. Shooting me a knowing glance and dark grin, the Kazakh laughed: “Your friend, this is his first time here, yes?” In a country with state violence, you don’t call the cops to go after criminals. Cops are the criminals.

State violence is worse than anarchy. Where there is no state, you can be robbed or raped or killed and nothing will happen to your robber or rapist or killer. It’s deeply unsettling. On the other hand, you also enjoy perfect immunity for self-defense or revenge. If you get the better of your assailant or get even with him, nothing will happen to you either. You’re on your own but, with luck and smarts and strength and charm, you may thrive. It’s Darwin’s world; we live in it until someone eats us up.

I’ve seen anarchy in places like Afghanistan, when there were no police or courts or other authorities. I often feared for my life. On a few occasions, I caused others to fear for theirs. Over time, I connected enough friends and allies to create, if not civilization, a working modus operandi. Now, under the Taliban, there is law and order. It’s the main thing that government is able to provide, but don’t shortchange it—few things are more valuable than law and order when they’re absent.

A lawless state is the worst of both worlds. You have neither the freedom to kill or be killed, nor freedom from a hypocritical state that accuses you of everything and shows no mercy while refusing to even pretend to hold itself to the same rules.

A lawless state declares that the right to carry a firearm is a sacred constitutional right unless it doesn’t care for your apparent political affiliation, in which case it can kill you. It investigates its foes with punitive legal fishing expeditions while refusing to investigate when its agents gun down peaceful unarmed citizens. It fights for the free speech rights of its allies overseas as it arrests its enemies for barely saying a word out of turn.

A government fully committed to state violence, as Nazi Germany’s government would wink at the murderers in its employ years before the first pellet of Zyklon B was used to murder a person, and as the U.S. is doing now—not even bothering to lie decently about the Venezuelan fishermen and peaceful Minnesotans it slaughters to amuse itself—makes one long for the far better non-system system of anarchy.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)