Think of a slow-burn horror movie, set in a small, tight-knit community. The signs of looming danger appear early in the plot but, save for the town’s few Cassandras, everyone chooses to ignore them until the nightmarish finale comes crushing down. That’s how Georgia feels today for many in the capital Tbilisi.

The nation had been long inching toward the current juncture. Nevertheless, the violence that has engulfed the streets for the last two weeks has a surreal feel to it, not least because Georgia is a small county, where online interaction has not quite replaced real-life communion. Some of the victims, along with the sponsors of the ongoing violence, are people you know or knew socially. 

You chat with acquaintances at a demonstration in downtown Tbilisi and a few hours later see their bloodied faces on TV. You watch people in power, men you once shared a drink and a jovial conversation with, turn into glassy-eyed bullies, high on power and privilege, and numb to human suffering. 

The backdrop to all the violence is the soundtrack of Christmas jingles and holiday shopping discount announcements that play on a loop in shops. Firecrackers thrown by protesters festively erupt on the central Rustaveli Avenue as demonstrators and riot police clash. 

Over the weekend, authorities erected a massive Christmas tree in the center of the capital Tbilisi, an area saturated with tear gas and stained with blood after almost two weeks of crackdowns on demonstrations. It is some kind of massive Milgram Experiment that you cannot wake up from. 

“I can’t take it anymore. Please stop beating me,” pleaded Alekandre Keshelashvili, a reporter for the Publika newspaper, as riot police officers took turns to batter him for what felt like an eternity on the night of November 28. 

Left with a broken nose, lacerations and bruises, Keshelashvili was one of the first journalists targeted by the riot troops following the eruption of protests – first against the government’s apparent betrayal of the national goal of joining the European Union, but eventually against the state-sponsored violence and what increasingly looks like the advent of a police state. 

Over the past two weeks, riot police have chased down and brutally beat scores of protesters, reporters and just about anyone they could catch, dragging the detained people through a gauntlet of fists and kicks. Hospitals can barely keep up with broken bones, concussions and hematomas.

Yet, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze grinned calmly during a press briefing on December 4 as he praised himself for successfully restoring order through raids of opposition offices and activists’ apartments, targeted arrests, and impounding firecrackers supplies. He claimed that the violence had ended, but, in reality, it has intensified in the days since.

As the nightly crackdowns failed to dissuade the protests, gangs of masked thugs have appeared on the streets, attacking and beating activists, journalists and opposition figures. TV reporter Maka Chikhladze screamed in shock and pain as these masked men attacked her in the middle of a live broadcast and violently threw her to the ground. The attackers then kicked and stomped on the cameraman, Giorgi Shetsiruli. Earlier on, masked men invaded an office of an opposition party and bloodied one of its members.

All victims point the finger of blame at government officials, who claims that the assailants could have been anyone and then try to switch the focus to the injuries sustained by policemen. Some officials are willing to concede that “both sides” have gone too far, ignoring the fact that the government force engages in what humans rights groups describe as indiscriminate attacks and torture. The majority of over 400 people arrested throughout the protests say they suffered injuries not during clashes, but in riot police custody. 

Ultimately, the demonstrations that began as an effort to protect Georgia’s European future and prevent perceived slide into Russia’s embrace, have now turned into a battle against the advent of a police state. 

Granted Georgia was never a flourishing democracy, but for the past three decades, it had been taking two steps forward and one step back toward becoming one. The grand goal of joining the EU and, more broadly, integrating with Western political and economic institutions forced the country to borrow Western standards of human rights, fundamental freedoms and government accountability.

Georgian leaders may have never truly appreciated these norms, but at least deference to Western partners persuaded them not cross some red lines and step down when their time was up. Georgia’s current leader, oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, is different: he has been methodically undermining both democratic reform and the nation’s partnerships with the West.

In recent years, Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party publicly upbraided and ridiculed Western diplomats, harassed Western-sponsored democracy groups and dismissed international suggestions for improving the nation’s electoral and judicial systems. All of it was done in the name of sovereignty, which in Georgian Dream’s interpretation increasingly seems like a byword for Ivanishvili’s permanent stay in power.

The party has expelled from its ranks freethinkers with democratic credentials, replacing them with hardliners with demonstrable servility to Ivanishvili. The party has also embraced isolationist and ultraconservative rhetoric, styling itself as a defender of traditional values and depicting Europe as a threat to these values.

The policy tack, which materialized in homophobic rhetoric and adoption of a controversial law against “LGBT propaganda,” was best captured by a comment of the nation’s notorious riot police chief, Zviad Kharazishvili: when a reporter accused him of helping to drive the nation into the hands of enemy Russia, Kharazishvili responded; “would you rather have me hand it over to the fags?”

Today, riot police and masked gangs are vastly outnumbered by demonstrators – students, teachers, intellectuals, doctors and actors – who gather every night in Georgian cities to condemn the violence and defend the nation’s pro-Western path. But the demonstrators are facing a brutal force, which the collective West may still be in position to restrain. Concerted action by the United States and European Union can have an impact on the outcome in Tbilisi.