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Date: September 16, 2008 5:30:14 PM PDT
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Subject: Naomi Wolf: It's Time for a Revolution
The Battle Plan
Naomi Wolf
Posted September 16, 2008 | 02:13 PM (EST)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/the-battle-plan_b_126856.html
The following is the introduction to Naomi Wolf's new book, Give Me
Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
The summer before last, I traveled across the country talking about
threats to our liberty. I spoke and listened to groups of Americans
from all walks of life. They told me new and always harsher stories of
state coercion.
What I had called a "fascist shift" in the United States, projections
I had warned about as worst-case scenarios, was now surpassing my
imagination: in 2008, thousands of terrified, shackled illegal
immigrants were rounded up in the mass arrests which always
characterize a closing society; news emerged that the 9/11 report had
been based on evidence derived from the testimonies of prisoners who
had been tortured -- and the tapes that documented their torture were
missing -- leading the commissioners of the report publicly to disavow
their own findings; the Associated Press reported that the torture of
prisoners in U.S.-held facilities had not been the work of "a few bad
apples" but had been directed out of the White House; the TSA "watch
list," which had contained 45,000 names when I wrote my last book,
ballooned to 755,000 names and 20,000 were being added every month;
Scott McClellan confirmed that the drive to war in Iraq had been based
on administration lies; HR 1955, legislation that would criminalize
certain kinds of political thought and speech, passed the House and
made it to the Senate; Blackwater, a violent paramilitary force not
answerable to the people, established presences in Illinois and North
Carolina and sought to get into border patrol activity in San Diego.
The White House has established, no matter who leads the nation in the
future, U.S. government spying on the emails and phone calls of
Americans -- a permanent violation of the Constitution's Fourth
Amendment. The last step of the ten steps to a closed society is the
subversion of the rule of law. That is happening now. What critics
have called a "paper coup" has already taken place.
Yes, the situation is dire. But history shows that when an army of
citizens, supported by even a vestige of civil society, believes in
liberty -- in the psychological space that is "America" -- no power on
earth can ultimately suppress them.
Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states --
"fear societies" and "free societies." Understood in this light,
"America" -- the state of freedom that is under attack -- is first of
all a place in the mind. That is what we must regain now to fight back.
The two societies make up two kinds of consciousness. The
consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and
fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust
external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is
cramped. People around the world understand that this kind of inner
experience is as toxic an environment as is a polluted waterway they
are forced to drink from; it is as insufficient a space as being
compelled to sleep in a one-room hut with seven other bodies on the
floor.
In contrast, the consciousness of freedom -- the psychology of freedom
that is "America" -- is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and
hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry. "Everything," wrote
Denis Diderot, who influenced, via Thomas Jefferson, the Revolutionary
generation, "must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without
exception and without circumspection." Jefferson wrote that American
universities are "based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind.
For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor
to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."
Since this state of mind is self-trusting, it builds up in a citizen a
wealth of self-respect. "Your own reason," wrote Jefferson to his
nephew, "is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are
answerable not for the rightness but the uprightness of the decision."
After my cross-country journey, I realized that I needed to go back
and read about the original Revolutionaries of our nation. I realized
in a new way from them that liberty is not a set of laws or a system
of government; it is not a nation or a species of patriotism. Liberty
is a state of mind before it is anything else. You can have a nation
of wealth and power, but without this state of mind -- this
psychological "America" -- you are living in a deadening
consciousness; with this state of mind, you can be in a darkened cell
waiting for your torturer to arrive and yet inhabit a chainless space
as wide as the sky.
"America," too, is a state of mind. "Being an American" is a set of
attitudes and actions, not a nationality or a posture of reflexive
loyalty. This tribe of true "Americans" consists of people who have
crossed a personal Rubicon of a specific kind and can no longer be
satisfied with anything less than absolute liberty.
This state of mind, I learned, has no national boundaries. The
Tibetans, who, as I write this, are marching in the face of Chinese
soldiers, are acting like members of this tribe; so did the Pakistani
lawyers who recently faced down house arrest and tear gas in their
suits and judicial robes. Nathan Hale, Patrick Henry, and Ida B.
Wells, who risked their lives for liberty, acted like "Americans."
When the crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya insisted on reporting
on war crimes in Chechnya, even though her informing her fellow
citizens led -- as she knew it well could -- to her being gunned down
on her doorstep as she went home to her fourteen-year-old daughter,
she was acting like an American. When three JAG lawyers refused to
sell out their detainee clients, they were being "Americans." When
Vietnam vet David Antoon risked his career to speak out in favor of
the Constitution's separation of church and state, he was being an
"American." When journalist Josh Wolf went to jail rather than reveal
a source, he was being an "American" too. Always, everywhere, the
members of this tribe are fundamentally the same, in spite of the
great deal that may divide them in terms of clothing and religion,
language and culture. But when we quietly go about our business as our
rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the Wii
and hand over our power to a leadership class that has no interest in
our voice, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those
moments we are essentially giving up our citizenship.
The notion that "American-ness" is a state of mind -- a rigorous
psychodynamic process or a continued personal challenge, rather than a
static point on a map or an impressive display in a Fourth of July
parade -- is not new. But we are so used to being raised on a rhetoric
of cheap patriotism -- the kind that you get to tune in to in a feel-
good way just because you were lucky enough to have been born here and
can then pretty much forget about -- that this definition seems
positively exotic. The founders understood "American-ness" in this
way, though, not at all in our way.
And today, I learned as I traveled, we are very far from experiencing
this connection to our source. Many of us feel ourselves clouded
within, cramped, baffled obscurely from without, not in alignment with
the electric source that is liberty. So it is easy for us to
rationalize always further and more aggressive cramping and clouding;
is the government spying on us? Well...Okay...So now the
telecommunications companies are asking for retroactive immunity for
their spying on us? Well...Okay...Once a certain threshold of
passivity has been crossed, it becomes easier and easier, as Benjamin
Franklin warned, to trade liberty for a false security -- and deserve
neither.
What struck me on my journey was how powerless so many Americans felt
to make change. Many citizens I heard from felt more hopeless than did
citizens of some of the poorest and youngest democracies on the
planet. Others were angrier than ever and were speaking up and acting
up with fervor. I felt that all of us -- the hopeless and the hopeful
-- needed to reconnect to our mentors, the founders, and to remind
ourselves of the blueprint for freedom they meant us to inherit. I
wrote this handbook with the faith that if Americans take personal
ownership of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they can push
back any darkness. The first two sections of this refresher guide to
our liberties recall what America is supposed to be; the last third is
a practical how-to for citizen leadership for a new American Revolution.
There are concrete laws we must pass to restore liberty and actions we
must take to safeguard it. You will find them in the last third of
this handbook. But more crucial than any list of laws or actions is
our own need to rediscover our role as American revolutionaries and to
reclaim the "America" in ourselves -- in our consciousness as free men
and women.
Do we have the right to see ourselves this way? Absolutely. Many
histories of our nation's founding focus on a small group, "a band of
brothers" or "the Founding Fathers" -- the handful of illustrious men
whose names we all know. This tight focus tends to reinforce the idea
that we are the lucky recipients of the American gift of liberty and
of the republic, not ourselves its stewards, crafters, and defenders.
It prepares us to think of ourselves as the led, not as the leaders.
But historians are also now documenting the stories of how in the pre-
Revolutionary years, ordinary people -- farmers, free and enslaved
Africans, washer-women, butchers, printers, apprentices, carpenters,
penniless soldiers, artisans, wheelwrights, teachers, indentured
servants -- were rising up against the king's representatives,
debating the nature of liberty, fighting the war and following the
warriors to support them, insisting on expanding the franchise,
demanding the right to vote, compelling the more aristocratic leaders
of the community to include them in deliberations about the nature of
the state constitutions, and requiring transparency and accountability
in the legislative process. Even enslaved Africans, those Americans
most silenced by history, were not only debating in their own
communities the implications or the ideas of God-given liberty that
the white colonists were debating; they were also taking up arms
against George III's men in hopes that the new republic would
emancipate them. Some were petitioning state legislatures for their
freedom; and others were even successfully bringing lawsuits against
their owners, arguing in court for their inalienable rights as human
beings. This is the revolutionary spirit that we must claim again for
ourselves -- fast -- if we are to save the country.
When Abraham Lincoln said that our nation was "conceived in Liberty"
he was not simply phrasemaking; our nation was literally "conceived"
by Enlightenment ideas that were becoming more and more current,
waking up greater and greater numbers of ordinary people, and finally
bearing on our own founders, known and unknown, with ever-stronger
pressure.
Key Enlightenment beliefs of the colonial era are these: human beings
are perfectible; the right structures of society, at the heart of
which is a representational government whose power derives from the
consent of the governed, facilitate this continual evolution; reason
is the means by which ordinary people can successfully rule themselves
and attain liberty; the right to liberty is universal, God given, and
part of a natural cosmic order, or "natural law"; as more and more
people around the world claim their God-given right to liberty,
tyranny and oppression will be pushed aside. It is worth reminding
ourselves of these founding ideas at a time when they are under
sustained attack.
The core ideals, the essence, of what the founders imperfectly
glimpsed, are perfect. I am often asked how I can so champion the
writing and accomplishments of the better-known founders. Most of them
were, of course, propertied, white, and male. Critics on the left
often point out their flaws in relation to the very ideals they put
forward. John Adams was never comfortable with true citizen democracy.
"Jefferson's writings about race reveal that he saw Africans as
innately deficient in humanity and culture." When a male slave escaped
from Benjamin Franklin in England, Franklin sold him back into slavery.
But the essence of the idea of liberty and equality that they codified
-- an idea that was being debated and developed by men and women,
black and white, of all classes in the pre-Revolutionary generation --
went further than such an idea had ever gone before. It is humanity's
most radical blueprint for transformation.
More important, the idea itself carries within it the moral power to
correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the
very birth of the new nation. An enslaved woman, Mum Bett, who became
a housekeeper for the Sedgwick family of Massachussetts, successfully
sued for her own emancipation using the language of the Declaration of
Independence; decades later a slave, Dred Scott, argued that he was
"entitled to his freedom" as a citizen and a resident of a free state.
The first suffragists at the Seneca Falls Convention, intent on
securing equal rights for women, used the framework of the Declaration
of Independence to advance their cause. New democracies in developing
nations around the world draw on our founding documents and government
structure to ground their own hopes for freedom. The human beings at
the helm of the new nation, whatever their limitations, were truly
revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the
idea, was, as I say, perfect. We should not look to other revolutions
to inspire us; nothing is more transformative than our own revolution.
We must neither oversentimentalize it, as the right tends to do, nor
disdain it, as the left tends to do; rather we must reclaim it.
The stories I read and reread of the "spirit of 1776" led me with new
faith to these conclusions: We are not to wait for others to lead. You
and I are meant to take back the founders' mandate, and you and I are
meant to lead. You and I must protest, you and I must confront our
representatives, you and I must run for office, you and I must write
the opeds, you and I must take over the battle. The founders -- the
unknown as well as the well-known Americans who "conceived" the nation
in liberty -- did not intend for us to delegate worrying about the
Constitution to a cadre of constitutional scholars, or to leave debate
to a class of professional pundits, or to leave the job of fighting
for liberty to a caste of politicians. They meant for us to defend the
Constitution, for us to debate the issues of the day, and for us to
rise up against tyranny: the American who delivers the mail; the
American who teaches our children; ordinary people.
In my reading, I went back as if to contact our mentors. I looked for
practical advice and moral support from those who had stood up for the
ideal.We need a strategy for a new American uprising against those who
would suppress our rights; we need what Lincoln would have called "a
new birth of freedom." As readers of Tom Paine's Common Sense had to
realize, we are not declaring war on an oppressor -- rather, we have
to realize that the war has already, quietly, systemically, been
declared against us.
Today we have most of our rights still codified on paper -- but these
documents are indeed "only paper" if we no longer experience them
viscerally, if their violation no longer infuriates us. We can be
citizens of a republic; we can have a Constitution and a Congress; but
if we, the people, have fallen asleep to the meaning of the
Constitution and to the radical implications of representative and
direct democracy, then we aren't really Americans anymore.
So we must listen to the original revolutionaries and to current ones
as well, and explain their ideas clearly to new generations. To hear
the voices of the original vision and the voices of those modern
heroes, here in the U.S. and around the world, who are true heirs to
the American Revolution is to feel your wishes change. "[Freedom]
liberated us the day we stopped living in a world where 'truth' and
'falsehood' were, like everything else, the property of the State. And
for the most part, this liberation did not stop when we were sentenced
to prison," wrote Sharansky. "I was not born to be forced," wrote
Henry David Thoreau. "I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see
who is the strongest...they only can force me to obey a higher law
than I." You want to stay in that room where these revolutionaries are
conversing in this electrifying way among themselves. It feels painful
but ultimately cleansing and energizing. You want to be more like
them; then you realize that maybe you can be -- then finally you
realize that you already are.
Our "America," our Constitution, our dream, when properly felt within
us, does more than "defend freedom." It clears space to build the
society that allows for the highest possible development of who we
ourselves personally were meant to be.
We have to rise up in self-defense and legitimate rebellion. We need
more drastic action than e-mails to Congress.
We need the next revolution.
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