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It means that people are more willing to accept
the fascist take over....
Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 12:03 PM
*10 steps to a Fascist America*
By Naomi Wolf.
*
· *Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning
to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green
in September.
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there
are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take
to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi
Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking
them all.
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The
leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather
systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a
sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had
been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law,
sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over
radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press,
tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists
into custody.
They were not figuring these things out as they went along.
If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially
a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship.
That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less
bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always
effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and
sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down
is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10
steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you
are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already
been initiated today in the United States by the Bush
administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a
hard time even considering that it is possible for us to
become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations.
Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our
system of government - the task of being aware of the
constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership
to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and
professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances
that the founders put in place, even as they are being
systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much
about European history, the setting up of a department of
"homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the
word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might
have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush
and his administration are using time-tested tactics to
close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing
to think the unthinkable - as the author and political
journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here.
And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American
authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at
the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to
understand the potential seriousness of the events we see
unfolding in the US.
*
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy*
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a
state of national shock. Less than six weeks later,
on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by
a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many
said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were
told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a
"global war" against a "global caliphate" intending
to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other
times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on
civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when
Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world
war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens
were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of
the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented:
all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum
was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is
defined as open-ended in time and without national
boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battle-
field. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no
defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive,
evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation
of a communist threat to the nation's security, be
based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has
faced calls for his dismissal because he noted,
among other things, that the alleged communist
arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was
swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of
the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional
law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or
the terrifying threat can be based, like the
National Socialist evocation of the "global
conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a
severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather
that the language used to convey the nature of the
threat is different in a country such as Spain -
which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks -
than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that
they face a grave security threat; what we as
American citizens believe is that we are potentially
threatened with the end of civilisation as we know
it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept
restrictions on our freedoms.
*
2. Create a gulag*
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is
to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as
Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre
at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") -
where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by
citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies
of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens
tend to support the secret prison system; it makes
them feel safer and they do not identify with the
prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders -
opposition members, labour activists, clergy and
journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-
democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany
in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups
of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for
closing down an open society or crushing a pro-
democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of
course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are
abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and
without access to the due process of the law,
America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and
his allies in Congress recently announced they
would issue no information about the secret CIA
"black site" prisons throughout the world, which
are used to incarcerate people who have been
seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming
ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly
and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts,
photographs, videos and government documents that
people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured
in the US-run prisons we are aware of and
those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee
abuses involve only scary brown people with whom
they don't generally identify. It was brave of
the conservative pundit William Safire to quote
the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had
been seized as a political prisoner: "First they
came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand
yet that the destruction of the rule of law at
Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals
that deny prisoners due process tends to come early
on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set
up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too,
set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the
judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely,
often in isolation, and tortured, without being
charged with offences, and were subjected to show
trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a
parallel system that put pressure on the regular
courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi
ideology when making decisions.
*
3. Develop a thug caste
*
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift"
want to close down an open society, they send para-
military groups of scary young men out to terrorise
citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian country-
side beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged
violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary
force is especially important in a democracy: you need
citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs
who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for
America's security contractors, with the Bush admin-
istration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally
fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth
hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for
security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq,
some of these contract operatives have been accused of
involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists
and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to
regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US adminis-
trator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are
immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after
Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security
hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security
guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy
Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having
fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural
disaster that underlay that episode - but the adminis-
tration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for
what are in effect privately contracted armies to take
on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men,
dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll
workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are
reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need
for "public order" on the next election day. Say there
are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election;
history would not rule out the presence of a private
security firm at a polling station "to restore public
order".
*
4. Set up an internal surveillance system*
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist
East Germany, in communist China - in every closed
society - secret police spy on ordinary people and
encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi
needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under
surveillance to convince a majority that they
themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau
wrote in the New York Times about a secret state
programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their
emails and follow international financial trans-
actions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that
they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as
being about "national security"; the true function
is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their
activism and dissent.
*
5. Harass citizens' groups*
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you
infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be
trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister
preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found
itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue
Service, while churches that got Republicans out to
vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law,
have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil
Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary
American anti-war, environmental and other groups
have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon
database includes more than four dozen peaceful
anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American
citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious
incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence
Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of
Defense has been gathering information about
domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political
activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential
terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen
activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined
activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism".
So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to
include the opposition.
*
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release*
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse
game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the
investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the
Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe
pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei
Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times.
In a closing or closed society there is a "list"
of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are
targeted in this way once you are on the list,
and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security
Administration confirmed that it had a list of
passengers who were targeted for security searches
or worse if they tried to fly. People who have
found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged
women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal
Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's
government - after Venezuela's president had
criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US
citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton
University; he is one of the foremost constitutional
scholars in the nation and author of the classic
Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated
former marine, and he is not even especially
politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he
was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I
was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of
people from flying because of that," asked the
airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so
marched but had, in September 2006, given a
lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the
web, highly critical of George Bush for his
many violations of the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support
the constitution? Potential terrorist. History
shows that the categories of "enemy of the people"
tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain
at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling
classified documents. He was harassed by the US
military before the charges against him were
dropped. Yee has been detained and released
several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon,
was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist.
His house was secretly broken into and his computer
seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation
against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that
once you are on the list, you can't get off.
*
7. Target key individuals
*
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with
job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went
after the rectors of state universities who did
not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph
Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi;
so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese
communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy
students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking
a fascist shift punish academics and students with
professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in
Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants
are the sector of society most vulnerable to being
fired by a given regime, they are also a group that
fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich
Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil
Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several
states put pressure on regents at state universities
to penalise or fire academics who have been critical
of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush
administration has derailed the career of one military
lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees,
while an administration official publicly intimidated
the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by
threatening to call for their major corporate clients
to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a
closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was
stripped of the security clearance she needed
in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US
attorneys for what looks like insufficient political
loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service
in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too,
a step that eased the way of the increasingly
brutal laws to follow.
*
8. Control the press*
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East
Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s,
the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s,
China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships
and would-be dictators target newspapers and
journalists. They threaten and harass them in
more open societies that they are seeking to
close, and they arrest them and worse in
societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests
of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf
(no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has
been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn
over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland
Security brought a criminal complaint against
reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened
"critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer
were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana.
Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush
administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished
in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in
a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to
war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam
Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger.
His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy
- a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though,
compared with how the US is treating journalists
seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased
way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has
documented multiple accounts of the US military
in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon
unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and
camera operators from organisations ranging from
al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may
question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should
pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as
the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have
been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry
Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press
in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military
and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations
were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted
by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed
Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his
claim that terrorists had been about to attack the
nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on
forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America -
it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich
and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady
stream of lies polluting the news well. What you
already have is a White House directing a stream
of false information that is so relentless that it
is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth.
In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count
but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real
news from fake, they give up their demands for
accountability bit by bit.
*
9. Dissent equals treason*
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'.
Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates
laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of
speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor".
When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times,
ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times'
leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while
Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged
with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets
kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as
Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty
for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat
that attack represented. It is also important
to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused
the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of
treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it
is important to remind Americans that when the
1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked,
during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist
activists were arrested without warrants in
sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five
months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured
and threatened with death", according to the
historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent
was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies
of the people". National Socialists called those
who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans
do not realise that since September of last year -
when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the
Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president
has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy
combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy
combatant" means. The president can also delegate
to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the
right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she
wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we
turn out to be completely innocent of what he has
accused us of doing, he has the power to have us
seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow,
or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you
or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation,
possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged
isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis
in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why
Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's,
in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most
brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for
now. But legal rights activists at the Center for
Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration
is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get
around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy
combatant" is a status offence - it is not even
something you have to have done. "We have absolutely
moved over into a preventive detention model - you
look like you could do something bad, you might do
something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a
spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder:
it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every
closing society, at a certain point there are some
high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders,
clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet.
After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts,
TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There
just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If
you look at history, just before those arrests is where
we are now.
*
10. Suspend the rule of law*
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007
gave the president new powers over the national
guard. This means that in a national emergency -
which the president now has enhanced powers to
declare - he can send Michigan's militia to
enforce a state of emergency that he has declared
in Oregon, over the objections of the state's
governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's
meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna
Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised
about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon
in Washington is that laws that strike to the
heart of American democracy have been passed in
the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection,
the president may now use military troops as a
domestic police force in response to a natural
disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack
or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse
Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the
federal government from using the military for
domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator
Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president
to declare federal martial law. It also violates
the very reason the founders set up our system of
government as they did: having seen citizens
bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were
terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of
militias' power over American people in the hands
of an oppressive executive or faction.
*
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable* to
the violent, total closing-down of the system that
followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's
roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic
habits are too resilient, and our military and
judiciary too independent, for any kind of
scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment
in democracy could be closed down by a process of
erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist
shift you see the profile of barbed wire against
the sky. In the early days, things look normal on
the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest
festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping
and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on,
as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere -
while someone is being tortured, children are
skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their
doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite
leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping
tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the
foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded.
Something has changed profoundly that weakens us
unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions,
independent judiciary and free press do their work
today in a context in which we are "at war" in a
"long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield
described as the globe, in a context that gives the
president - without US citizens realising it yet -
the power over US citizens of freedom or long
solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under
the foundation of all these still- free-looking
institutions - and this foundation can give way
under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such
an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there is another
attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The
executive can declare a state of emergency.
History shows that any leader, of any party, will
be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the
crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional
checks and balances, we are no less endangered by
a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani -
because any executive will be tempted to enforce
his or her will through edict rather than the
arduous, uncertain process of democratic
negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were
charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing
effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year?
What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would
the newspapers look like the next day? Judging
from history, they would not cease publishing; but
they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to
hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us -
staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights,
who faced death threats for representing the
detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme
Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties
Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll
back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of
a new group called the American Freedom Agenda.
This small, disparate collection of people needs
everybody's help, including that of Europeans and
others internationally who are willing to put
pressure on the administration because they can
see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at
home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs".
For if we keep going down this road, the "end of
America" could come for each of us in a different
way, at a different moment; each of us might have
a different moment when we feel forced to look back
and think: that is how it was before - and this is
the way it is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative,
executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is
the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We
still have the choice to stop going down this road;
we can stand our ground and fight for our nation,
and take up the banner the founders asked us to
carry.
The Guardian
Tuesday April 24, 2007
--
Ends