Reprise: Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:12:27 -0800, cor
<corDEL@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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

The article: "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps" is about
authoritarianism first and fascism second. Authoritarianism
is of two opposed kinds, fascism and communism. The article
applies to both.

More important than the mechanics of authoritarian
subjugation is the mechanics of authoritarian economics.
There is little of the latter in the article. Is it a
purpose of the article to obfuscate authoritarian economics
by leaving it out of consideration?

An essential element of economics is accumulation and
allocation of capital to production. Probably the most
important, overlooked (ignored?) element of the
authoritarian economics of fascism and communism is the
different methods of accumulation and allocation of capital
to production. What are they?

Bernard Curry

Authoritarians teach what is written.
When they have taught they can teach no more.

Libertarians teach what is unwritten.
When they have taught they have just begun.

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Tuesday April 24, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html

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 Guantanamo 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, Guantanamo 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 Niemvller, 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 Guantanamo
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 Guantanamo 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 Guantanamo's, in every
satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at
Guantanamo, 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.

7 Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young
Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.
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Authoritarians teach what is written
When they have taught they can teach no more

Libertarians teach what is unwritten
When they have taught they have just begun

Bernard Curry
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Email : bccom@xxxxxxxxxxx

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