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Subject: Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 06:10:31 GMT
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
George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
Naomi Wolf
London Guardian
Tuesday April 23, 2007
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps
that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And
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 Guantbnamo 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, Guantbnamo 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
Niem%ller, 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 Guantbnamo 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 Guantbnamo 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
Guantbnamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal
facility at Guantbnamo, 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.
--
Because I care,
|<+]::-{(} ("Cyberpope," the Bishop of ROM!)
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