Bush mob has taken the first steps toward destroying democracy and establishing tyranny -- right here

Here's the first step toward destroying democracy and establishing a
dictatorship -- sound familiar?

" Here's one. Categorically, in every closing society, someone who
wants to crush democracy will establish a military tribunal system
which parallels or is outside of the established judiciary. Once you
create a prison system outside of the rule of law -- I call it a
secret prison system, unaccountable, not transparent, where people get
disappeared, where people get tortured -- can you name a society that
did that that did not eventually have fascist rule? "

--------------------------------------------



Democracies take nurturing. They're easy to pull down. The Founders
understood that. It's a very dangerous time.

-- Naomi Wolf, Author, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a
Young Patriot

* * *

We owe a great debt to Naomi Wolf, who cut her teeth in writing about
a new generation of Feminist thinking, for writing this wake up call
to America.

In interviewing Wolf, we could hear one of her children in the
background. And in many ways, young people were on her mind when she
penned "The End of America," because she is profoundly concerned that
they may lose the gift of democracy and live under a dictatorship.

After conversing with Wolf, we saw her on "The Colbert Report" and
marveled at how she shifted so effortlessly into expertly handling the
ironic parries of Colbert. But her message was the same as it was with
us, in a dialogue that proceeded in a much more somber tone: we are on
the verge of crossing the threshold into tyranny.

Wolf structures her book into identifying 10 usurpations of democracy
that are underway. When combined with the other assaults on our
Constitutional checks and balances, we agree with Wolf that we are on
the precipice of seeing this great experiment in Constitutional
democracy disappear as our Bill of Rights is steadily eroded.

Careful to document her thesis with parallels to the rise of fascism
in other times, Wolf speaks with a sincere and highly credible sense
of urgency. She lays out the roadmap to authoritarian rule -- and we
are being driven down that road without most Americans even realizing
it.

What she asks of us is simple: to awaken to the danger before it is
too late, if it isn't already.

* * *

BuzzFlash: Naomi, you've written The End of America: Letter of Warning
to a Young Patriot and A Citizen's Call to Action. Why did you
specifically address this to young people?


Naomi Wolf: I know an actual, real young patriot named Chris Le. He is
a 28-year-old activist. As I describe in the Introduction to the book,
two things were happening at once in my life. A mentor of mine, who is
the daughter of Holocaust survivors, kept saying to me: You've got to
read the histories, you've got to read the histories, you've got to
read the histories. There are echoes. I kept thinking, that's crazy,
but she was so adamant that she basically sat me down and made me read
the histories of her parents' experience, basically. I then went on
and read about six other classic cases of societies closing down
democracies or democratic uprisings being crushed. Then I understood
why she was so insistent that I study and write about this.


At about the same time, I went to the wedding of this young patriot,
Chris Le, who is typical of the best of his generation in that he's
idealistic, he's committed, he wants a better America. He's extremely
worried about the themes I write about in the book.

But like most young people, he wasn't given a tutorial in what
democracy is in a very clear way. He was certainly not given a
tutorial in mid-twentieth century history of the closing down of
democracies. When I was at their wedding, and I realized these
horrible scary storm clouds were brewing, and these signs were so
clear, that there were threats from the past that we need to remind
people of in the future in a very clear, accessible way, I decided the
best thing that I could do for him and his wife and other people who
may not be scholars was to write this kind of primer in a super-clear
accessible way that reminds us all about how democracies are crushed.
It basically shows that there's a blueprint for doing it, and the
blueprint was developed early in the last century, but the tyrants all
over the world replicate it.

The Founders totally believed and foresaw that an American despot or
tyrant could oppress the American people, and that the greatest threat
was not a foreign power. The book is meant as a very immediate
reminder and guide to what freedom is, and how our system was set up
to protect us in a very personal way. We've become so accustomed to
our democracy that we really don't understand how easy it is to close
down a democracy, once certain checks and balances are dismantled, and
certain pieces are set in motion.


BuzzFlash: You have outlined ten steps to dismantling a democracy,
which the Founders of our country also recognized as threats. How did
you come to pick those ten?


Naomi Wolf: Basically they leapt out as a pattern in the reading I was
doing. I read about these different times of crisis, specifically the
Twenties in Italy, the Thirties in Germany, the Fifties in East
Germany, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, 1973 in the coup in Chile, and the
late Eighties/early Nineties which saw the crushing in China of the
pro-democracy movement.

What jumps up when you read those histories is that essentially, the
practice of crushing an open society was essentially invented by
Mussolini. It was then developed and elaborated on by the other great
tyrants of the twentieth century, and then they studied each other.
Hitler studied Stalin. Both of them studied Mussolini. Subsequently,
the other dictators all over the world go back and look at what
works.

The School for the Americas, basically teach it -- this blueprint was
passed on to any number of would-be Latin American dictators and
military leaders. Tyrants all over the world take the same ten steps.
And it really is like a blueprint.

I start the book saying, in Thailand this coup took a week. This is
what they did -- boom, boom, boom. It's like they had a shopping list,
and, really, they did, because, by now, people who want to crush a
democracy know what to do. The people who live in a democracy don't
know what these ten steps are. Otherwise, we would absolutely be
thronging the streets right now. We might realize that we're in a
state of crisis rather than just shopping online and watching
"America's Top Model."


But how did those ten steps arrive on my list? Various writers on
fascism try to identify what the key steps are. Hannah Arendt, Umberto
Eco, and Robert O. Paxton have all written about the elements of the
totalitarian or fascist mind. All the writers look at different
things, and they don't all correspond to my list, although Eco's list
had some of the same elements. It just seemed very clear to me from my
reading that you see these ten things again and again and again, such
that you know what's going to happen. It's so predictable; it's so
well-established.

Here's one. Categorically, in every closing society, someone who wants
to crush democracy will establish a military tribunal system which
parallels or is outside of the established judiciary. Once you create
a prison system outside of the rule of law -- I call it a secret
prison system, unaccountable, not transparent, where people get
disappeared, where people get tortured -- can you name a society that
did that that did not eventually have fascist rule?


As I was writing the book, someone sent me documentation of the
expansion of the definition of terrorists to apply to activists. It
was so clear that the definition of terrorist in every fascist shift
expands to include more and more, to reach closer to the heart of
civil society. You start to see the expansion of the term traitor,
treason, espionage. Look at the censure by the Senate of an ad -- the
notion that criticism is unpatriotic and bordering on treason. Stalin
and Goebbels both developed that tactic. You start to see the broader
and broader use of accusations of treason and espionage, like the
calls we heard after the SWIFT banking story broke to try citizens
under the 1917 Espionage Act -- an Act which, most Americans do not
realize, was used at the end of the teens in this country to round up
and arrest thousands of people like you and me; some were beaten in
prison. Eugene Debs got a ten-year sentence under the Espionage Act
for a speech about the First Amendment. The White House led a drumbeat
of voices calling for the trial of New York Times executive editor
Bill Keller for "treason" when he published the SWIFT banking stories.
The penalty for treason in this country can be execution.

Sure enough, if you go back to history, you find that Nikolai
Bukharin, the publisher of Izvestia, was tried in the third Moscow
show trial and was in fact executed for treason. So these things are
like part of a game plan, part of a blueprint. And there are so many
parallels I found, which I point out in the book, that it is very hard
to avoid the hypothesis that someone brilliant in this administration
studied history and is replaying elements, language, and tactics from
violently closing societies that worked in the past.

I really saw the same tendencies happening again and again in the
reading I did about how open societies dismantled parliamentary
democracies and constitutions, and how they were crushing pro-
democracy uprisings.


BuzzFlash: Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil," and the
reality is that sometimes we find ourselves in a situation where we
simply can't see what is happening to us. One analogy to what is
happening to our Constitution being dismantled and the encroachment
upon our civil liberties is the idea of a frog being boiled in water.
The frog doesn't realize, until it's too late, that the temperature
just keeps rising.

To the average person, is it just too much to comprehend, too much to
think about, it's not what we're concentrating on, so in the end we're
the frogs being boiled? We're busy entertaining ourselves, or working,
or being with our families, or going out and having a drink. It's only
people like yourself, or people who really follow this, who are aware
that we're being boiled.


Naomi Wolf: This is the desperately urgent question, and you're right
to ask it. Let me address it on three levels.


First, I deliberately wrote the book in the most accessible possible
way, really based on Tom Paine's prose style. The pamphleteers of the
Revolution were really deliberately trying to write in a way that
ordinary people -- farmers, small shopkeepers, people without an
elaborate higher education, people who are not aristocrats -- could
understand. It was urgent that the ordinary colonist or the ordinary
American got it -- the kind of threat that was posed by George III --
what it meant to have blanket warrants, what liberty meant, what the
arguments for liberty were. You know, before Common Sense, most people
in the Colonies were not persuaded that they needed a revolution. The
American experiment at the time pushed human beings further out into a
completely untested model of government. So his very transparent,
accessible prose style let people realize for themselves, or think
through for themselves, that they deserved liberty and that they
needed to act on behalf of liberty.

You and I are in the same position -- and everyone on the Internet. We
have to switch our model of leadership and return it to the
Revolutionary American model of citizen leaders. The Congress is not
going to save us. The mainstream media is not going to save us. The
pundits are not going to save us. The U.N. is not going to save us.
The European Union is not going to save us. There is not a force on
earth that can save us, except for our own talking to each other,
clearly and urgently, to explain and convey the nature of this threat,
and then for us to take radical action NOW. So that's why I wrote it
this way.

Our strategy has to be that thousands, and we hope soon millions, of
other citizens who are persuaded by the argument will speak to each
other and then mobilize in a hurry to confront these abuses. It
depends on citizens acting as journalists, citizens acting as
advocates, citizens acting as leaders and revolutionaries to mobilize
one another. So that's A.


B is, you're absolutely right about the incremental nature of this
kind of shift. That's why I spend so much time looking at the early
years of earlier such shifts. Americans tend to think that the closing
down of a modern parliamentary society happens in some giant, dramatic
explosion. But it doesn't. In a democracy as sophisticated or
resilient as ours had been, it's going to be closed down
incrementally.

If you go back to Berlin in 1931, it wouldn't have looked so
unrecognizable to us. There was a Parliament that was meeting there.
There was a constitution. There were abortion rights organizations,
human rights lawyers and activists. There were gay rights
organizations. There was modern art. People were doing what we're
doing. People were going to the movies. They kept living -- and that's
why I draw on diaries and memoirs and personal accounts. People were
doing what we're doing. They were shopping. They were leading their
lives, even as the catastrophe was tightening and tightening around
them.

There are scenes in the books I cite that are exactly the same as the
scene that played out in the University of Florida last week when the
kid was tasered for asking a question and everyone sat still as he was
dragged out. That scene was described by Count Kessler, by Victor
Klemperer, in memoirs of Germany form 1931-1933. And people then were
saying what we are saying: surely this can't get worse; people will
come to their senses.

Historians such as Richard Evans point out that, at that point, if the
people of Germany had arisen and confronted the abusers of
parliamentary process and of the Constitution, the horrors could have
been averted. By the way, I am not looking at Germany to make an
analogy of any kind about outcomes. I am Jewish and do not take that
issue lightly. What I am doing, and I think we honor the victims of
the Holocaust by doing so, is looking at how there are threads that
recur in the early years of a fascist shift, and lessons we have to
learn in time. What we really have to realize is that in a modern
democracy, the shift to a closed society doesn't happen overnight.

And it doesn't happen even in a clear line on a graph that's left to
right diagonally. It happens in what Malcolm Gladwell would call
tipping points. You can chart it, and there may be pressure, pressure,
multiple assaults, and, then, a key event that would be like a
vertical line on that chart. And then you're looking at another
reality.

The really important thing to understand, which is why I walk the
reader so carefully through the way democracies really curve down, is
democracies can reach a point of no return. And it's sudden when that
happens. And it's disorienting. There's a point at which democracy can
no longer heal democracy. People have got to understand that. People
need to realize that the day we made it legal, essentially, for the
state to torture people, that was one of those vertical lines on the
chart. We're now in a place where it is legal, the White House has
claimed, to knock on your door or my door, and say: You are an enemy
combatant. Come with us. Then there is what Jose Padilla went through,
in three years of solitary confinement -- making it difficult to see a
lawyer, making it difficult to see his family.

I'm not saying he's a good guy. But I'm saying the White House is
taking the position that the President -- and any future president --
can say: You, Naomi, you, peruser of BuzzFlash -- you're an enemy
combatant. And the President gets to decide what that means. The
President gets to decide to hold you. The first time that someone is
called an enemy combatant that you and I identify with -- that's going
to be another one of these vertical lines, after which you are not
going to be having this conversation, because I'm not that brave. The
tasering of this student was another vertical line, because, believe
me, if they are tasering voting groups in Florida in a disputed 2008
election, dissent will close down pretty quickly. People are just not
that brave when they start to get physically hurt.

And that's how society is closed down. Suddenly, there's news of
someone getting arrested. Or someone being taken. Someone getting a
ten-year sentence under the Espionage Act for publishing something in
the Wall Street Journal.

And the next day, there are still newspapers. There's still online
shopping. There are still so many aspects of normal society. But what
there isn't is freedom, because people are scared. And that's why we
need to wake up now, because, believe it or not, the President has the
power to do that. The President -- any president, President Thompson,
President Giuliani, President Obama -- any president now has the power
to make it easier to declare martial law and to declare a state of
emergency. The president gets to decide what that is. That is not what
the Founders envisioned.

People who are fighting overseas for democracy understand better than
we do that we are witnessing the clasic danger signs. They know how
dangerous it is to have a leader relegate for himself or herself the
power to do that -- to seize people and to militarize civil society.
Or to declare a state of public emergency or to make it easier to
define a threat to public order. Those are classic signposts that
other democracy activists around the world recognize as flashing
warning lights.

The third point is simply that you're absolutely right about our
psychology. We've been so blessed and so spoiled, in a way, by over
200 years of strong democracy, even taking into account the serious
moments like the McCarthy era, that we expect the pendulum will always
swing back, because the checks and balances have always been in place.
I've explained in the book why this is different now -- why the
pendulum isn't as free as it used to be, why we can't rely on it, a
point Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda made first.

The trouble is that we're so used to a democratic mindset and we're so
reliant on freedom, that we, A, don't recognize the dangers, and B, we
don't realize what it takes to resist them. When I talk about these
threats, people tend to answer before they've thought it through, or
before they've read the book, with the correctives of democracy. Well,
the ACLU will sue them. Or we'll just vote the guys out. "Vote the
bums out." After you've read the book, you'll realize that you cannot
rely on democracy to heal democracy, as you could if our democracy was
strong, and checks and balances were in place.


So it is a radical shift in consciousness that we need right now, and
we don't have time. We need to understand right now that this is a
crisis. It's not business as usual. We can't leave it to other people,
to Congress, to activists, or until the next election, because we are
much further along than people realize.


BuzzFlash: Your book does a tremendous job of putting together the ten
different threats running in parallel and intertwined courses. The
power of the ten together leads to a tipping point, as you've called
it, which, at some point becomes the point of no return. That type of
concurrence is described in the book They Thought They Were Free by an
American Jew who, after World War II, went back to Nazi Germany to
find out how it happened. The Germans thought they were free until
they weren't any longer.


In the mainstream news, and certainly in a lot of the political
discourse, the Republicans in general, and Bush, are portrayed as the
patriots, the champions of freedom, the ones who are the "strict
constructionists" in terms of the Constitution, and so forth. You and
I would argue that, in reality, what is happening under the current
administration is a radical assault on our Constitution, on our
freedoms, on the vision of Founding Fathers. The radicals are the
people in the government who are trying to change the very foundation
of the country. But they wrap themselves in the wrapping paper --
disguise themselves as the champions of the Constitution.

How do you break through to the American public? The mainstream press
doesn't seem to be able to even begin to penetrate the dissonance and
the contradiction in the narrative as the administration presents it.


Naomi Wolf: I try to avoid theorizing in the book, and instead just
let the reader decide for him or herself what inferences may be drawn
about this White House. But it's very hard to avoid a hypothesis that
the White House has studied twentieth century history in some detail.
When despots are trying to close down an open society, and Orwell
pointed this out, they call something the opposite of what it is.
Goebbels, for one, was a master of saying something the opposite of
what it was. If you read Mein Kampf, and look at Hitler's speeches, he
is continually invoking democracy and freedom, democracy and freedom,
the rule of law. I'm upholding the rule of law; he actually said he
was simplifying democracy. Indeed, it was the prior administration
that had opened the door to him, and they weren't even national
socialists, but they weakened the constitution so badly that it left
the field wide open for him to do what he wanted to do.

I have a section in the book about how lies in a fascist shift serve a
different purpose than they do in a democracy. In a democracy, people
lie to deceive. In a fascist shift, lies serve to disorient. Lies in
the service of a fascist shift make it hard for citizens to trust
their own judgment about what's real and what's not. Once citizens
don't know what's real and what's not real, they are profoundly
disempowered. The Bush administration seems to have learned that
lesson, and they regularly name things the opposite. And there's a
long historical precedent for making people feel that there is no such
thing as truth.

There's another tipping point in closing down a democracy when the
leaders no longer are accountable for disclosing the truth. Why is the
mainstream media not more rigorous?

I think has to do with, first, corporate ownership. There are just
some issues you really can't pursue. Recently someone pitched a
renewal of a famous program that taught children about democracy, and
checks and balances, to a major network. They basically said we don't
want to do anything to rock the boat. Even librarians are affected.
I've been offering to give librarians copies of the Constitution to
distribute, and they say, we can't do that because that'll be too
controversial. I'm not kidding. The Constitution's become too
controversial.

So the networks have some profound vested interests, which I track in
the book, that would be served by a dismantling of the Constitution in
this country, and by an ongoing war on terror that never ends. These
are powerful industries, and millions of dollars are at stake. And
they have lobbyists. They contribute to political campaigns, and it's
not negligible.

The second reason, I think, is, it's hard for the mainstream media,
even when they're privately owned, to say certain things for
psychological reasons. There's a mindset that it's taboo to say in
America that an American president might try to bring down democracy.
There are a lot of taboos. You're not allowed to look at the history
of Germany. That's a social taboo. You're not allowed to suggest in a
mainstream context that an American president might have radically
oppressive motives, just like dictators all over the world. It's like
this collective wish to believe our leaders are always benign, our
system will always endure, even if we don't do anything to protect it.
We are always safe. We are always the exception. There's a kind of
regressive, almost infantile fantasizing that Daddy could never
actually be abusive-- it is this magical thinking -- and there's a lot
of it.

BuzzFlash: One thing we've talked about a lot on BuzzFlash, is that
the Bush administration, and in particular, Cheney, lie with such
abandon and brazenness. But you're absolutely right that a key feature
of seizing power is to put so much lying out there you kind of just
give up trying to figure out what the truth is. But also, the
brazenness is a factor. Americans are largely still a common-sense
sort of culture. Just put your cards down on the table. Cheney is
still saying that Saddam was connected to 9/11 in some way. The lies
are so big that they defy common sense. So you're thinking, no one
would lie that openly and brazenly. That just doesn't make any sense.


Naomi Wolf: Yes.


BuzzFlash: You may even start to think there's something there,
because no one would be so audacious, having been disproven on so many
occasions, as to continue to say the same thing. So you question your
own sense of truth. And you don't want to accuse your leaders, in a
democracy. You would almost be reflecting upon yourself if you're
accusing your leaders of intentionally and chronically and daily
misleading you. It's almost like accepting that democracy is so flawed
that we have to do something about it. And who wants to take that on?


Naomi Wolf: You're right that all these threads are well-documented.
In the book you see how they fit together. That's exactly what I try
to do.

My readers say that basically the book acts as kind of a key, so that
now, when they see the aspects of each of these threads, whether it's
a new development in detainee abuse, or whether it's a new development
of surveillance, the FISA story, or you hear that assets of critics of
the war are going to be seized, it makes a different kind of sense to
them than it did before. That's good, even if it is very scary at
first, because people really do need to listen differently and watch
differently now.

We have a mindset, which is that democracy is the resilient rule.
Historically it is fragile exception. Democracies take nurturing.
They're easy to pull down. The Founders understood that. It's a very
dangerous time.

In Italy, in the early 1920s, people just couldn't believe it. And in
Germany, from 1931-1933, they just couldn't believe it. You read the
memoirs, and people were saying, surely, no one's going to go for
this. Surely, this can't last. Surely, no one will put up with these
thugs marching in the streets like this. Surely, we will all come to
our senses.
The trouble is, this mindset is very, very dangerous when it's a
different game being played. There is this scene in which Mussolini is
marching on Rome, and the members of Parliament are still trying to
negotiate with him -- offering him various cabinet positions. They
think it's still a democracy, and he just waits for them to get it.
As I say at the end of the book, I feel like there's very little time
left for us to act. I'm very worried about the upcoming elections, and
here's why. One of the things very few people followed up on is that
there's a strong indication that when they fired the US attorneys,
they were considering purging all of the US Attorneys -- all of them,
all at once. That's essentially what Goebbels did in 1933 with the
civil service. The White House has fought any disclosure of the e-
mails about the US Attorneys purge, or would-be purge. It's a classic
move in a takeover to purge the civil service, and especially the
lawyers and the judges, and replace them with your own cronies --
that's a standard, recognized tactic.


BuzzFlash: TPM Café and Josh Marshall were in the lead on "Prosecutor-
gate," as it's called.


Naomi Wolf: Right. So had the U.S. attorneys all been purged,
basically, the game would be over right now. The U.S. attorneys have
the power to harass opposition groups, to bring charges against people
who are organizing voters. At the end of the book, I ask readers to
look at the record of what the administration's been willing to do vis-
a-vis abuse after abuse after abuse, the systematic dismantling of our
democracy and our checks and balances, and ask if it is reasonable to
assume we will have fair, transparent elections. Given all these
violations of these sacred tenets of democracy, do you really think
that George Bush is going to say, fourteen months from now, that the
great pageant of democracy -- a fair election -- must proceed without
intervention or corruption? That the people have spoken, the people's
will be done? Is that really common sense?
BuzzFlash: We at BuzzFlash have editorialized and pointed out that
it's naïve, at this late date in their eight-year administration, to
still allow them to take advantage of every possibility to seize more
power. Why would they want that if they assume there's a possibility
that a Democrat will come in on January 20, 2009? They're seizing the
power for a Democrat? That doesn't make any sense.


Naomi Wolf: I'm really glad that you're raising that and
editorializing on it. So many decisions of this administration are
strategic and not tactical. That's why I worry about people like Mitt
Romney saying that he wants to expand Guantanamo and sort of
eternalize Guantanamo to make it a permanent part of the landscape, or
Giuliani -- who seems clearly to have been anointed to carry this
process forward -- to say he wants to strip prisoners of even more
rights. The building of Guantanamo does not look like a short-term
decision. It seems that many of the absolutely systematic changes that
this administration is intent on, are strategic rather than tactical
decisions. They seem like long-term rather than short-term decisions.

BuzzFlash: They don't make sense to fight terror. But they do make
sense if they're for the purpose of seizing power.


Naomi Wolf: That's exactly right. This is another important thing to
put across in terms of getting people out of this bubble of innocence,
and into fighting anger, and sort of revolutionary ardor. I really
believe this issue is a conservative issue, and it's a liberal issue.
It transcends party politics. You know, there are as many patriots on
the right as on the left. Many are appalled at what's been done in the
name of conservatism. Why would they be aggregating power?

BuzzFlash: Right. At this late date.


Naomi Wolf: There's a kind of hypnosis that invoking the war on
terror, invoking 9/11 in the mass media, creates. That's why Congress
has been so cowed. Off the record, they say to us that they can't be
more aggressive because they're afraid of being seen as soft on
terror. They can't be more aggressive about liberty, and protecting
liberty, and preventing these power grabs, because they don't want to
be seen as soft on terror. That's why it's so important for people to
understand that, historically, it is an absolute constant for a would-
be tyrant to invoke a terrorist threat -- often, a real terrorist
threat.

The national socialists continually invoked Bolshevik terrorism and
violence. And there was Bolshevik terrorism and Bolshevik violence.
There were communist terrorists. By the same token, Pinochet eased his
way in by telling Chilean citizens about insurgents who were going to
engage in this spectacular act of terrorism, a mass assassination, and
he showed citizens the purported weapons caches on television. He used
fake documents to hype a real threat, which again is quite common in
history -- like the fake documents the White House relied on to lie to
us about the yellowcake threat.

It's absolutely standard for would-be dictators to invoke a terrorist
threat, and it can be a real terrorist threat. What they'll do is
they'll hype it, or manipulate the information. Or heighten the fear
level. The reason is it enables them to subdue people.

I feel like it's actually liberating for readers to read about how
this has been used in other countries. First, it lets them snap out of
that kind of frightened feeling of, oh, my God, the terrorists have
struck from al Qaeda. The terrorist threat from al Qaeda changes
everything. We must give up our liberties in order to be safe. It's
just not true. There are historical precedents for it not being true.


I also note that Spain and England, which are countries that suffered
very serious terrorist attacks, by the same terrorists that threaten
us, responded very differently. They responded with transparent
trials. Their trials of the accused terrorists are on the Internet.
They responded by upholding their values of democracy and openness and
freedom. And in England, Gordon Brown says terrorism is a crime, not a
cause. Israel has nothing like the red, yellow, orange alert that we
do, and they fight terrorists every day.

BuzzFlash: Some conservatives have gotten away with a tremendous
framing success in using the word conservative. But as you pointed
out, if you're really a conservative about the Constitution, you
support civil liberties. You support the checks and balances in our
government. You support an independent judiciary. That's a true
conservative position.


What we have from the Bush administration is a radical position that's
an assault on the conservative position. And for the Bush
administration, and Cheney and his aides like Addington, to be called
conservative, is an insult to conservatism. That's number one.


Number two, in relation to your point that they initially floated the
idea about firing all the U.S. prosecutors, there was a precedent in
the German Nazi judicial system. Basically, in addition to the
parallel military system, the Third Reich instituted a civil judicial
system. If someone was charged with a violation against the state, and
they were a German citizen, they went through this judicial system. It
was all rigged in the sense that you only served on the judicial
courts, just as the Bush administration was trying to do, if you had
been vetted, and you were a follower of the right, and you would
basically go along with the recommendations of the prosecutors
installed by the state. But they gave the appearance to the citizens
that would say: Well, this person has been executed because the court
found them guilty.


Naomi Wolf: Exactly.


BuzzFlash: So it wasn't just that the military coopted the judicial
system. They had a parallel judicial system. But they did have a civil
judicial system too which the Third Reich was able to say, well,
justice has been accomplished. This person has been tried and they had
been determined to have violated laws of the state and that execution
is warranted. So it wasn't just that the army took and executed the
German citizens. They went through a rigged judicial system, just as
the Bush administration was trying to do with the U.S. prosecutors,
and which they try to do by appointing judges who are not qualified to
be judges. Their only qualification is loyalty to the party.


Naomi Wolf: Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Michael Ratner,
who represented Guantanamo detainees before the Supreme Court, is
really eloquent about the legal analogies between what happened in
Germany and what's happening now. And Harper's recently made some of
the same points. What you're talking about is a process that the
National Socialists perfected, called coordination. That's why looking
at Germany is so necessary now -- because they coordinated every
aspect of civil society. And when you've got people who understand
that their tenure depends on following the party line, you do get a
rigged system.

What's happening with the military -- JAG -- lawyers is also
important. These are lawyers, so their job is to uphold the rule of
law and do good jobs representing their clients. And again and again,
these brave, decent, honorable men and women, probably many of them
Republicans, have suffered career setbacks or worse simply trying to
do their jobs as lawyers, and not sell out their clients, and not hand
over their clients to a rigged system.

And you're right to point out people really don't understand what
fascism looks like. They think it looks kind of like goose-stepping
military and barbed wire everywhere. It doesn't look like that. I give
examples of closed societies in the book, and after a society is
closed, there will often still be a judiciary. There will be
journalism. There will be radio. There will even be television. There
will be universities and students. Many aspects of the institutions of
civil society continue. What happens, though, is everybody knows how
far you can go before you lose your job, or how far you can go before
getting arrested. And it's actually very important for some dictators
to maintain a facade of the rule of law, to maintain a facade of
elections, and to maintain a facade of a working civil society system,
because it gives the regime legitimacy. You saw that in Italy and in
Germany. You see it throughout Latin America.
Our system is so fragile. If we woke up to learn that all of the U.S.
attorneys had indeed been fired and replaced with lawyers loyal to the
machine, it would still be America. We'd still have a lot of the stuff
that we have now. It would look familiar. But it would be a different
reality. The election campaign would be like election campaigns in
weak or struggling democracies where a lot of it is sham. A lot of it
is wishful thinking. People who go ahead and register voters or fight
for candidates who are not in the party line, who are not
'coordinated,' face investigations, face harassment, face warrants for
arrest on various minor violations. Would that be America in more than
name? Or would that be the end of America?

We'd still have the Internet. We'd still have a judiciary. But it
wouldn't be freedom. And it is really important for your community,
for all of us, to understand that it's going to take a citizen
uprising right now -- I mean a civil uprising -- to hold accountable
people who would dismantle our democracy in this way, and to use
democracy to heal democracy while we still can, because we still can.

That's why we started the American Freedom Campaign to parallel the
American Freedom Agenda. Millions of Americans can compel Congress to
pass the legislative agenda that would rewrite these horrific laws,
and would restore checks and balances, and, I think, compel Congress
to confront the people who have committed crimes against the
Constitution. We're still in the state where democracy can heal
democracy. That's why we have to act.


BuzzFlash: In a recent editorial we commented on some of the strategic
efforts by the Bush administration. Firing the U.S. prosecutors was an
effort to control the prosecution system, and one of the chief
objectives in controlling it was to be able to indict Democrats, and
so help decimate the Democratic Party as an effective opposition
party. Let's remember that most of those attorneys who were put in
after the purge are still in place. So, it's not like this has been
rectified.

A key thing in controlling the government and moving it toward a one-
party, despotic state, was to indict Democrats. That was one of the
major issues in evaluating who was going to be replaced. If you had
indicted Democrats, many of those people kept their jobs. If you
didn't indict Democrats and you had been asked to, those were some of
the people lost.


The second idea was to use the U.S. attorneys to, in essence, concoct
prosecutions accusing the organizations that supported Democrats, or
were affiliated with Democrats, or the Democratic Party itself, of
"voter fraud."


Naomi Wolf: Exactly.


BuzzFlash: And they make those anti-Democratic cases high profile
before elections, to influence the elections. Then, since most of the
cases have no justification, they drop them after the elections. And,
again, this is not stopping. As you indicated, this is why it's so
much of a threat.

Another priority for them is to have, at the state level, laws passed
in as many states as possible where Republicans are governors and
control the legislature, and to suppress the vote by requiring more
identification, more ability to challenge voters when they show up,
more claims that they don't live at that address and so forth. In
essence, they use state laws to suppress the Democratic vote by
picking criteria that will suppress the demographics that would go for
Democrats.


Another part of the strategy is the spying issue. The reason that
bypassing FISA is so important is that a despotic power wants the
ability to be able to spy at will. This is an issue we have pointed
out, which went virtually completely unnoticed by the traditional
press. When Alberto Gonzales was testifying about the FISA issue when
it first came out -- and this we just happened to catch this by
watching his testimony on the C-SPAN tape -- but he was asked if the
illegal spying powers that had not been authorized by FISA, had ever
been used for political purposes. And he said he couldn't answer that
question.


Naomi Wolf: Yes.


BuzzFlash: That was astonishing, and the mainstream press didn't pick
that up at all. The ability to spy at will on American citizens,
without any oversight, is just too great a temptation, even if you had
a benign view of the Bush administration.


Naomi Wolf: The surveillance of ordinary citizens is an absolute
cornerstone of a closed society. It's an absolute cornerstone to
control the population.


BuzzFlash: The third issue is one-party control of the judiciary.
Well, if you control the referees, you control the game. You're
constantly giving calls that the favor the team you're supporting. So
they have judges who are either Federalist Society members with
pedigree, or people who don't have pedigrees who are lousy judges,
perhaps racist, misogynist, who knows? They've certainly got a lot of
them, like David Sentelle and many of these people that they've put in
who are just wretched lawyers. You have partisan people on the courts
who are not chosen for their ability to adjudicate cases, but are
chosen to make the right referee's calls on crucial cases that have to
do with the balances of power within the United States between
Congress and the Executive Branch.


Naomi Wolf: Right. May I add one thing? It's that Americans, even in
this worst-case scenario of all these threads continuing to tighten --
"Oh, my God, they've coordinated the U.S. attorneys, they're using the
Watch List to keep critics of the administration from flying, they are
tasering professors now for asking questions in a lecture hall, or
people registering voters, or they have sent NSA letters to the heads
of environmental groups, antiwar groups," -- Americans still imagine
that, well, we'll organize. We'll march.

BuzzFlash: Yes.


Naomi Wolf: Americans imagine that there is still recourse.
Ordinarily, there is recourse, with checks and balances in place. What
we need Americans to think about is how the ability to physically
threaten Americans on a most personal level will change that.

None of us knows in our bones what it's like to live in a police
state. My warning is that, when you get a state using violence against
the individual in the act of suppression of democracy, you change your
whole reality. Most Americans have a sense of physical invincibility.
If we sign a petition somewhere, if we register as a Democrat, someone
might know about it, but we still can't believe that anyone would ever
hurt us in our democracy.

But people should be aware of how aggressively this administration has
sought to assert the right that it has to call any American an enemy
combatant and to mistreat them on a physical level. They've been very
clear. Think of the abuses against Jose Padilla. And *** Cheney has
said he's outside the system, right?

But what happens after you are arrested, or I am arrested, or someone
we identified with is called an 'enemy combatant', or after the first
journalist or an editor is charged under the Espionage Act, or after
more people like Brandon Mayfield experience break-ins in your home?
And their computer's taken. Their kids come home to find that their
house has been broken into by the state. As that begins to become not
a bizarre exception but part of the landscape, I promise you, based on
the historical record, the kind of recourses we assume we have as free
people protected by the Constitution will vanish, because people just
aren't willing to take physicals risks -- understandably.
I, personally, as a mother, am willing to risk arrest in a strong
democracy, because I assume that my innocence will protect me, or the
First Amendment will protect me, that the courts are fair, that I'll
get good representation and I will not get hurt in prison. But would I
be willing to risk three years in a Navy brig? In solitary
confinement? No.


And history shows that it doesn't take many such cases to close down
an open society. Author Greg Palast was investigated by Homeland
Security, and it's kind of a joke. But when fifty critics of the
administration are investigated, it is a tipping point. And history
shows things get quiet after that very very fast.
Everyone has to draw the line somewhere -- and this is also a lesson
we need to learn from Germany. How can so many good people have done
nothing? Because once you introduce state terror against the
individual, you completely change the landscape of what we're willing
to risk, understandably. And I just want to kind of conclude by saying
we need to reverse these laws, because all of the actions that we can
still take in a democracy to restore democracy, we will be scared to
take after that next tipping point. Let's conclude on a happier note
though.


BuzzFlash: Maybe not, because the reality is what needs to penetrate
people. What you have indicated, and what we are constantly pointing
out on BuzzFlash, is there's an urgency here. If the Bush
administration had started backing off this effort to seize power,
perhaps one could have felt they realize they aren't going to achieve
their goal. But instead of backing off, they are actually redoubling
their efforts. That seems to indicate they have confidence in
maintaining one-party control. And it seems to indicate that they must
have reasons to maintain that confidence, and we aren't aware of what
that basis is. But it is there, and therefore we need to forge
forward.

You have a call to action at the end of your book. And you mentioned a
couple times you are associated with the American Freedom Campaign.
There's a great deal of frustration. Your book is very cogent, and we
highly recommend people read it, even if they are regular BuzzFlash
readers and exposed to a lot of this information. You give a
tremendous historical context, and I think people need to see it, and
in one document, in order to understand the gravity of the threat to
this great democracy we have. But the concluding question, which you
address in your book, is what can American patriots who support our
constitutional guarantees do at this critical juncture?


Naomi Wolf: Really, this is where we choose. History will look back
and say, either we saved the country or we didn't. Either we stopped
it at a point where we could restore democracy, or we didn't, and
someone else will be writing the histories.

This is what you need to do. First, educate yourself. It is so
important, as you say, to get the historical perspective.

The second thing is we urgently need to drive Congress. Congress can
still confront these abusers and dismantle their power. The same could
have been true in Germany or Italy, early on, had people driven their
representatives to act. So I would say, all of your community and
their friends need to immediately sign up with the American Freedom
Agenda on the right, or the American Freedom Campaign on the left. We
represent a number of cardinal organizations. Total membership now is
almost five million in the AFC. We're growing all the time.

BuzzFlash: Just for clarification purposes, the American Freedom
Agenda, on the right, I assume is a civil libertarian group working
for the Constitution? It's not the traditional concept of the Bush
right, but it's the libertarian right.


BuzzFlash: Yes.


Naomi Wolf: We're organizing, hopefully, millions and millions of
Americans to compel, demand, force Congress to restore balance. We've
got a ten-point legislative agenda, which if we forced Congress to
pass it, would do a lot to get us breathing room. It includes
restoring habeas corpus, and protecting journalists from prosecution.
That would do a lot to give us some time. If we don't restore these
laws we have almost no time, according to the blueprint. And we know
there is a strong impeachment movement.

Nancy Pelosi has said that impeachment is not on the table. I am not
taking a position on impeachment, and the American Freedom Campaign
hasn't taken a position, but what I am saying is that in a true
democracy movement, which is what I'm calling for, it is the people
that decide. And that is a debate that hasn't happened yet -- not a
rigorous, principled, Constitutional debate, which was what the
Founders envisioned in the event of a dramatic crisis such as this
one.

What did the Founders intend to have happen when there was a leader
that systematically dismantled their checks and balances, and
systematically dismantled our system of government? That debate hasn't
happened in a principled, educated, patriotic way, and that debate has
to happen. What do you do when there are assaults like this? I don't
think it's Nancy Pelosi who decides preemptively. I think in a
democracy, it's the people who decide.

And the abuses are escalating every day. The Senate just censured
MoveOn for speech -- and argues that criticizing anyone in the armed
forces is a sign of treason. This is exactly what the National
Socialists did. They created these third rail subjects and created
strictures that expanded all the time, criminalizing or punishing
speech as unpatriotic and eventually criminalizing opposition itself.
This is a horrific development, no matter what you thought of the
wording of the ad, and Congressional democrats who do not stand up to
it -- indeed Republicans as well -- should know they are playing into
a very dark development historically.

Most urgently, we need to drive Congress to confront these abuses and
restore the rule of law now, long before the election. And we need to
take seriously what the founders intended; they did not mean for a
professional class to enact democracy for us or to defend it for us or
to rise up when a despot threatened to destroy it. They intended for
us, on the left and the right, to be the revolutionaries in defense of
liberty.

BuzzFlash: This has been wonderful. You did a great job in the book.

Naomi Wolf: Thank you.

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/077

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