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Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
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.
Naomi Wolf
Tuesday April 24 2007
The Guardian
>
>
> 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."
And it's looking more and more like Bush and the fascists behind him were
RESPONSIBLE for 9/11 in the first place!
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> · Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young
> Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.
>
> Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited
to http://www.guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2063979,00.html
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
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.
Naomi Wolf
Tuesday April 24 2007
The Guardian
>
>
> 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."
And it's looking more and more like Bush and the fascists behind him were
RESPONSIBLE for 9/11 in the first place!
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> · Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young
> Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.
>
> Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited