Here's a different Wolf report:
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:57:56 -0400
From: jim leftwich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Naomi Wolf
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Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
By Naomi Wolf
Global Research, April 25, 2007
The Guardian - 2007-04-24
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
battlefield. "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 paramilitary groups of scary young men out
to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed
the Italian countryside 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 administration 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
administrator 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 administration'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 transactions, 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.
_to be cont.