It’s all much too familiar, and not in a good way.

The scenes have been disturbingly familiar to CIA analysts accustomed to monitoring scenes of societal unraveling abroad — the massing of protesters, the ensuing crackdowns and the awkwardly staged displays of strength by a leader determined to project authority.

In interviews and posts on social media in recent days, current and former U.S. intelligence officials have expressed dismay at the similarity between events at home and the signs of decline or democratic regression they were trained to detect in other nations.

“I’ve seen this kind of violence,” said Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst responsible for tracking developments in China and Southeast Asia. “This is what autocrats do. This is what happens in countries before a collapse. It really does unnerve me.”

And others too.

Marc Polymeropoulos, who formerly ran CIA operations in Europe and Asia, was among several former agency officials who recoiled at images of Trump hoisting a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington after authorities fired rubber bullets and tear gas to clear the president’s path of protesters.

“It reminded me of what I reported on for years in the third world,” Polymeropoulos said on Twitter. Referring to the despotic leaders of Iraq, Syria and Libya, he said: “Saddam. Bashar. Qaddafi. They all did this.”

The impression Trump created was only reinforced by others in the administration. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper urged governors to “dominate the battlespace” surrounding protesters, as if describing U.S. cities as a foreign war zone. Later, as military helicopters hovered menacingly over protesters, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, toured the streets of the nation’s capital in his battle fatigue uniform.

So I’m not the only one who found the image of Milley in battle fatigues sinister.

Former intelligence officials said the unrest and the administration’s militaristic response are among many measures of decay they would flag if writing assessments about the United States for another country’s intelligence service.

But but but we’re special.

About that unrest…the thing is, the problem has always been there. Racism, white supremacy, generation after generation of suppression and oppression and neglect and ferocious separation and revenge have always been there. We never made any reparations for two centuries of slavery. We never made any serious effort to compensate for two centuries of slavery. Instead we blamed the descendants of slaves for the poverty that the slave-owning race had imposed on them, and we used that blame as justification for continuing the oppression and neglect and ferocious revenge. That monstrous deformation has always been there, all this time, so we’ve never actually been the city on the hill we like to boast of being. We talked a good game and it worked out well for a lot of people but there was always this huge festering wrong that we just fucking ignored.

So, yeah, it’s not actually all that surprising that now at last the curtain is pulled back and we see how rotten the whole thing has been all along.

Even this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lectured China about its efforts to prevent citizens of Hong Kong from holding a vigil to mark the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.

“If there is any doubt about Beijing’s intent, it is to deny Hong Kongers a voice and a choice,” Pompeo said in a statement that was met with derision on Twitter because it coincided with crackdowns urged by Trump in the United States.

I wonder how much attention Pompeo has paid to the effects of generations of state-enforced segregation over his career. I’m guessing zero.