Has America Become Fascist?
- From: "Noah's Dove" <noahdove7@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 18:30:33 -0700 (PDT)
Has America Become Fascist?
By Sherwood Ross
GlobalResearch.ca
8-1-8
If it hasn't gone the way of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany,
it sure is teetering on the brink. America is a nation in deepening
crisis, a nation whose leaders repeatedly plunge their citizens into,
and make them pay for, serial wars abroad, while stealing their
liberties at home. USA has become a country that trashes its citizens
(New Orleans), tortures its enemies(Abu Ghraib), threatens other
nations with nuclear fire (Iran), flouts international treaties (UN
Charter re Iraq), and spies on (FISA), and intimidates, its critics(No
Fly). Americans that can clearly see the totalitarian machinations of
Vladimir Putin in Russia and Hu Jintao in China are blind to the
fascism threatening to envelop them as well.
Webster's defines fascism as "a totalitarian governmental system led
by a dictator and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism, militarism,
and often racism." A comparison of 20th century fascist and communist
regimes with President Bush's USA indicates the machinery for a full-
blown totalitarian takeover is now in place, even if no coup has
occurred. As Naomi Wolf writes in "The End of America"(Chelsea Green)
the 2007 Defense Authorization Bill's Section 333 allows the president
"to declare martial law and take charge of the National Guard troops
without the permission of a governor when 'public order' has been
lost" and to "send the guard into our streets during a public health
emergency, terrorist attack or 'other condition.'"
The enabling crowbar was the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It
gives the president authority to set up his own system for bringing
alien combatants to trial while denying them protection of the Geneva
Conventions. "The president and his lawyers now claim the authority to
designate any American citizen he chooses as being an 'enemy
combatant,'" Wolf writes of power usurpation that characterized the
post-World War One epoch in Europe and Asia.
Thus, Congress has empowered Bush just as Germany's Reichstag
empowered Hitler, Wolf writes, recalling Hitler's boast, "Democracy
will be overthrown with the tools of democracy." Hitler's Interior
Minister issued Clause 2 that gave police the power to hold people in
custody indefinitely and without a court order, powers the U.S.
Congress today has conferred upon "The Decider" in the White House.
Mussolini's used the less grandiose "Il Duce" or "The Leader."
According to Michael Ratner, director of the Center For Constitutional
Rights, New York, "the president candesignate people enemy combatants
and detain them for whatever reason he wantsthere are no charges and
prisoners have no lawyers, no family visits, no court reviews, no
rights to anything, and no right to release until the mythical end to
the 'war on terror.'"
Wolf writes that dictators justify their usurpation of domestic
liberties by raising the alarm of "terrorist" threats. Stalin, for
example, used this very term in 1934 when he warned his public of a
world-wide conspiracy by capitalists to overthrow the Soviet state. If
there have been no mass arrests of native-born Americans it is only
because the president has not chosen to exercise this authority. If
you think it can't happen to you, recall that in September of 2003 the
Army arrested 36-year-old American-born Muslim chaplain James Yee, a
West Point graduate, allegedly for "espionage and possibly treason"---
but more likely for calling for better conditions for Gitmo inmates.
Wolf wrote:
"He was blindfolded; his ears were blocked; he was manacled and then
put into solitary confinement for 76 days; forbidden mail, television,
or anything to read except the Koran. His family was not allowed to
visit him. His lawyers were told he would face execution. (But)Within
six months, the U.S. government had dropped all criminal charges
against Yee." Yes, just as it has dropped charges against hundreds of
Guantanamo prisoners earlier, men labeled by former Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld as "the worst of the worst" but against the overwhelming
majority of whom the Bush regime apparently had no case whatever!
The treatment Yee got is typical of those who run afoul of the Bush
regime: torture first, trial afterif there is a trial. And since his
release, Yee has been denied his free speech right to discuss his
ordeal---gagged by the Pentagon. Perhaps most incredible, even if a
Guantanamo prisoner should be found innocent, the Pentagon says he
might not be released anyway. This echoes Stalin's practice of re-
arresting Gulag prisoners after they had done their time. At one
point, Stalin had eight million souls behind bars, even exceeding
President Bush, currently the world's Incarcerator-In-Chief.
Author Wolf says another danger flag is the creation of paramilitary
groups, "aggressive men who have no clear, accountable relationship to
the government or the party seeking power" Mussolini had the
blackshirts; Hitler the brownshirts; but whatever their dress, they
were thugs. Wolf says that Moycock, N.C.-based Blackwater Worldwide
stands ready "to deploy its unaccountable private army (35,000 men) in
the U.S.---in the aftermath of natural disasters, and also in cases of
'national emergency.'" With at least a half billion dollars in
government contracts, "Blackwater is the world's largest private
security force, works closely with Halliburton, and is available for
action outside the scrutiny of Congress," Wolf writes. The outfit
raked in $73 million for patrolling the streets of New Orleans after
Hurricane Katrina. And Blackwater subcontractor Red Tactica, recruits
former Chilean commandos," men described by one Chilean sociologist
that are "valued for their expertise in kidnapping, torturing and
killing defenseless civilians," Wolf wrote.
Besides creating such "security" forces, dictators create secret
prisons, as Bush has done, ranging from prison ships in the Indian
Ocean to dungeons in Poland, where they can hide them from Red Cross
scrutiny, as the CIA has done. "We should worry about the men held at
Guantanamo because history shows that stripping prisoners of their
rights is intoxicating not only to leaders but to functionaries at
every level of society," Wolf writes. "Gitmo" is also an interrogation
camp, an operation "that is completely and flatly illegal" and
outlawed by the Geneva Conventions in 1949, she points out. Stalin
also employed torture and in 1937 actually legalized its use in Soviet
prisons. When he received his infamous "albums" with the names of
those to be executed and imprisoned, next to some names he often
wrote: "Beat! Beat! Beat!" And only months after taking power, Hitler
"established a network of illegitimate prisons where torture took
place" and where guards could murder inmates with "no chance of being
punished," Wolf said. And like Stalin, The Decider has signaled his
henchmen beatings are now the American Way.
Dictators hold power by instilling fear in their citizens. Since 2000,
Wolf writes there has been "a sharp increase in U.S. citizen groups
that are being harassed and infiltrated by police and federal agents,
often in illegal ways." She pointed to a 2006 ACLU report that
California police had infiltrated antiwar protests, political rallies,
and other constitutionally protected gatherings and were secretly
investigating them, even though the California state constitution
forbids this. And prior to the 2004 Republican convention in New York,
police department detectives infiltrated groups planning peaceful
demonstrations. At the Federal level, Bush's apparatchiks are
compiling dossiers on law-abiding citizens. The Defense Department's
Talon program has created a database about peaceful antiwar and other
groups and activists. As Jen Nessel of the Center for Constitutional
Rights says, "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."
Bush regime actions' today recall how the Gestapo, NKVD, Stasi (East
German secret police) and Red China's Politburo "all requisitioned
private data such as medical, banking, and library records," Wolf
writes, because access to such private data "breaks down citizens'
sense of being able to act freely against those in power." And
although the Department of Homeland Security's TIPS scheme to get
letter carriers and meter readers, etc., to report suspicious
activities was met with derision and never funded, the ACLU noted it
was merely absorbed in the Pentagon's "black budget."
Privacy in America today as guaranteed by the Constitution is fast
becoming a memory. The New York Times reported the government in 2005
was monitoring your e-mail and telephone talk without legal warrants
and the following year the newspaper disclosed U.S. treasury
officials, with CIA help, "were reviewing millions of private bank
transactions without individual court-ordered warrants or subpoenas,"
Wolf pointed out.
One method of intimidation is to limit a citizen's right to travel
freely. The Bush regime has created "watch"(75,000 names) and "no
fly"(45,000 names) lists that restrict individuals' air travel--and
those searched and/or stopped from flying can complain all they like
because it won't do them any good. Robert Johnson, an American
citizen, Wolf reports, described the humiliation factor of being strip
searched when he attempted to board an airplane: "I had to take off my
pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks.
I was treated like a criminal." This has now become a commonplace
ordeal for thousands of Americans. Even at the height of World War
Two, such invasions of personal rights would have been unthinkable.
Going back to Webster's definition of fascism, USA today is the
world's runaway leader in "militarism." Forty-three percent of all
U.S. tax dollars in 2007 went to feed the war machine, as the Pentagon
believes security depends on operating more than 700 military bases in
130 countries overseas in addition to 1,000 at home. Bush has
escalated its budget so that USA now spends nearly as much on arms as
all the rest of the world combined. Uncle Sam is also the No. 1
private arms peddler to the world. By contrast, Iran, portrayed by the
White House as a menace to the Middle East, has an annual military
budget that is 1/100th of the Pentagon's outlay.
Perhaps it would be a good exercise for Americans to read how Hitler
emphasized nationalism and militarism. As he wrote in "Mein Kampf":
"Instead of everlasting struggle the world preaches cowardly pacifism,
and everlasting peaceThere is only one right in this world and this
right is one's own strength." As for "reconciliation, understanding,
world peace, the League of Nations, and international solidarity---we
destroy these ideas." Hitler called for delivering Germans "from the
hopeless confusion of international convictions" and educating them
"consciously and systematically to fanatical nationalism." Armed with
such views the fascist state thinks nothing of starting an aggressive
war based on lies. In 1939, Hitler claimed he was attacked by Poland,
igniting World War Two. Bush claimed that Iraq had nuclear and
biological weapons to destroy America when, in fact, it was the United
States that possessed those very weapons and it was Iraq that had
none.
Bush nonetheless started a seemingly endless war that has by some
estimates to date killed more than 1 million Iraqis, wounded perhaps 2
million more, forced a like number from their homes, ravished their
country and its economy, touched off a civil war, forced 1 million
Iraqis into foreign exile, and killed and wounded 35,000 American
troops. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the Iraq war
"illegal" but Bush, like Hitler, cares nothing for international
treaties, even if those the U.S. has signed under our Constitution are
the supreme law of the land. He has made a mockery to the anti-nuclear
treaty, causing former President Carter to charge his own country has
become the leader in nuclear proliferation. What's more, Bush has
spent about $50 billion on germ warfare "defense" with no known
significant foreign threat to USA.
Americans may think that Webster's view that fascism is often
accompanied by racism doesn't fit them. Indeed, USA's strides to
eliminate racism based on color in the last century are a societal
marvel. But racism against African Americans has largely been replaced
with the foolhardy notion that Americans are better than everybody
else in the world and have the authority to set right any ruler they
believe is in error. This view of their own superiority echoes
Hitler's "master race" view of the German people or the Tokyo
militarists' view in 1940 that a superior Japan was destined to rule
"the eight corners of the world." In this sense, America is very
"racist" indeed and the "aggressive nationalism" highlighted by
Webster's is apparent in the rhetoric of its public officials and the
conduct of its foreign affairs.
Yet another characteristic of the fascist state is its leader's use of
arbitrary power. Note how Bush evades the will of Congress by tacking
on "signing statements" to laws he doesn't like, thus refusing to
enforce them, putting himself above the will of Congress and the
American people. Note how his aides refuse to respond to Congressional
subpoenas to testify. Yet another example is how the Justice
Department's own internal investigators found Bush's appointees filled
nonpolitical posts with party hacks and then lied about what they had
done. "Civil Service Laws Were Breached in Filling Nonpolitical Jobs"
said a New York Times reported July 29th. It should be remembered
Hitler followed a like policy when he purged Jews from their
government posts. When tyrants rule, merit is ever subservient to
loyalty.
Of course, Bush has not flung thousands of Americans into prison to
torture and murder them as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin did, but he
has the power to do so, making the latter half of 2008 a time of
danger for Americans. Wolf writes, "At a point in both Mussolini's and
Hitler's takeovers, citizens witnessed a stunning series of quickly
escalating pronunciamentos or faits accomplis. After each leader made
his bids for power beyond what the Italian parliament and the German
Reichstag allowed him, each abruptly started to claim all kinds of new
rights that were extra-parliamentary; the right unilaterally to go to
war, to annex territory, to veto existing laws, or to overrule the
judiciary," etc.
To repeat the question, "Is America fascist?" the answer is that the
machinery is in place for a totalitarian takeover at the direction of
a tyrant. While it is true that the U.S. is not a one-party state
(some will dispute this owing to the many similarities of the two
major parties) like fascist Italy and Germany, and it does have free
elections, for the first time in its history in 2000 and 2004 an
ominous cloud of doubt has hung over the authenticity of the popular
vote and a vast segment of the voting public today does not trust the
election machinery to record their vote as they intend. There are no
mass arrests and executions in the thousands and millions that
typified the regimes of Hitler and Stalin (Stalin had 681,000 people
executed in 1937-8 "Great Terror" alone); free speech still exists
(under Stalin, a person could be imprisoned for making a Stalin joke);
and the government has not put its leaden hand on business as Putin
has done although crony capitalism in the selection of defense
contractors is rampant. These vital distinctions set America apart
from the totalitarian society. Yet, with each passing day in its "War
on Terror" the Bush regime tightens its hold on the machinery to
establish totalitarian rule here.
Americans need to keep in mind that worse than anything President Bush
has inflicted upon its own citizenry is what its wars of aggression
have inflicted on innocent humanity abroad. A million dead Iraqis
can't give a damn by what terminology you describe the United States.
If the American people allow their government to make criminal wars to
deprive innocent foreigners of their lives and liberties they do not
deserve to enjoy either at home.
Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based writer who has worked as a reporter for
the Chicago Daily News, a columnist for wire services, a news director
for a large civil rights organization, and as a publicist for
colleges, labor unions and entrepreneurial start-ups. Reach him at
<mailto:sherwoodr1@xxxxxxxxx>sherwoodr1@xxxxxxxxx Phone: 305-205-8281.
The writer is indebted to Naomi Wolf for her book, "The End of
America." Ms. Wolf is cofounder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical
Leadership, New York, an organization that teaches young women how to
assume leadership roles.)
Part 1: Rise of Fourth Reich in America
http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1450&category=Environment
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061245585/ctoc
2008 by Linda Moulton Howe
Without habeas corpus in the United States today,
what we now have is a Fourth Reich, somebody in a position of power -
the President, the Attorney General, the head of Homeland Security can
simply
point a figure at you and designate you as an undesirable and hence,
an enemy combatant, and they can grab you and imprison you
and you dont even get a day in court, much less a lawyer.
- Jim Marrs, Author, The Rise of the Fourth Reich
<image001.jpg>
The Rise of the Fourth Reich 2008 by Jim Marrs,
published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061245585/ctoc
<image002.jpg>
Nazi Third Reich flag.
August 1, 2008 Wise County, Texas - Recently I read a new book
published in July 2008 that documents surprising links between Adolph
Hitlers Nazi Third Reich (1933 to 1945 empire) in Germany - and
Americas banks, business owners, political power-brokers and wars -
past and present.
The new book is entitled, The Rise of the Fourth Reich by New York
Times best-selling author, Jim Marrs. Jim has been tracking down facts
and trying to make sense of American political history since his
college days as a journalism major at the University of North Texas in
Denton. He graduated in 1966 and began a newspaper reporting and
editing career at the Denton Record Chronicle, the Lubbock Avalanche
Journal and the Fortworth-Star Telegram where he was an investigative
reporter, cartoonist, and earned photography awards.
By 1988, Jim Marrs decided that he had to put his big file about
President John F. Kennedy's assassination into a book he called
Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Two months after its release
in 1989, Jim received a call from Hollywood film director, Oliver
Stone, who wanted to option Crossfire for the movie that became JFK.
Jim began asking book editors what they thought was the next big,
secret government cover-up beyond the JFK assassination. Everyone said
UFOs. That's what lead Jim to write his 1997 book, Alien Agenda, which
has become the top selling non-fiction UFO book in the world. Next was
Rule By Secrecy, in 2000, which links the money-power elite of America
with the money-power elite of Europe back to the money-power elite of
Mesopotamia which is modern day Iran and Iraq! According to Sumerian
cuneiform tablets, Mesopotamia was controlled and manipulated by non-
humans called Annunaki that had their own agendas on this planet.
After American buildings, planes and lives were destroyed on September
11, 2001, Jim did his own research and became convinced there were
other truths beyond the official government version and wrote The
Terror Conspiracy published in 2006, followed in 2007 by Psi Spies:
The True Story of America's Psychic Warfare Program.
Now in his newest book, The Rise of the Fourth Reich, Jim Marrs lays
out in great detail with names, places and dates his assertion that
Hitlers National Socialism (NAZI) did not die at the end of World War
II because prot?s of Hitler had spread corporate front companies
around the world. Further, the United States imported Hitlers best
rocket scientists in Project Paperclip to test V-2 rockets at the
White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico.
Even current President George W. Bushs grandfather - Prescott Bush was
intimately connected in the 1930s to 1940s with the powers that
represented the Rockefellers and Rothschild banking and business
interests that were also involved in the creation and growth of Hitler
and his Nazi Party. In late 1942, the U. S. government actually
prosecuted Prescott Bush under the Trading With The Enemy Act because
he was handling money for German steel magnate, Fritz Thyssen, who was
helping to finance the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Third Reich.
Creating wars for profit and stripping civilian liberties are Nazi
goals. Jim Marrs warns that is already happening in the United States.
Interview:
<image003.jpg>
Jim Marrs, Journalist and Author,
The Rise of the Fourth Reich 2008,
Wade County, Texas.
Jim Marrs, Journalist and Author, Wise County, Texas:Today, almost
every thinking person agrees that the United States is off on the
wrong path. Some how, weve gotten off on the wrong foot. Weve taken
the wrong turn. Were into dangerous waters and waters that, in many
ways, are contrary to the liberties and freedom that this country was
built on. The problem is that no one knows whom to identify. Liberals
blame the conservatives. Conservatives blame the liberals. Republicans
blame Democrats. Democrats blame Republicans.
Well, what Ive done in my new book, The Rise of the Fourth Reich, is
to document and show that we can all agree to point the finger at the
one group that its still politically correct to vilify and that is
Nazis.
But you have to understand that a Nazi is not necessarily a jack-
booted, Swastika-bearing German. The term Nazi is an acronym for
National Socialism. That is the political system Adolph Hitler put
into power in Germany in the 1930s. Even though the Germans were
defeated in WWII, Nazism, or National Socialism, never was defeated.
In fact, it was embraced by the ruling, wealthy, elite that runs the
United States of America. These people supported Hitler in his rise to
power. They supported Hitler through WWII and continued to support
National Socialism long after Hitler passed from the scene.
The ruling elite did this in connivance with many wealthy Americans
who saw profit and power and control in this system and they have
slowly turned the once-free United States Republic into a new empire
of the wealthy a Fourth Reich.
WHAT IN JULY 2008 ARE THE BIGGEST SIMILARITIES BETWEEN ADOLPH HITLERS
THIRD REICH OF WWII AND MODERN AMERICA AND THIS WORLD?
We see the erosion of individual liberties. If you say anything thats
unpopular, you even risk jail and a fine. We also see increasingly
that our police forces are no longer the citizen warriors or blue-clad
police from a few years ago. They are now black-clad with the cold
scuttle helmet, the same design that the Nazi troops used in WWII.
And we also see that Hitler, when he invaded Poland, he didnt want to
upset the German people by calling up general conscription (drafting
youth into war), so he used reserve troops to start WWII, just like
were using our reserve troops to fight imperial wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Of course, then you come up through the similarities and
parallels between the burning of the Reichstag and Enabling Act with
the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in the United States and
the rapid passage of the Patriot Act and the creation of Homeland
Security. The parallels between WWII Germany and modern America are
all there.
The big difference in modern America with Nazi Germany is that in the
Germany of the 1930s, the state gained control over the corporations.
Today in modern America, we see that the corporations have gained
control over the state. But the end result is the same.
America Without Habeas Corpus
UNDER THIS CURRRENT ADMINISTRATION, WE STILL DONT EVEN HAVE A
RESTORATION OF HABEAS CORPUS, WHICH MEANS ANY AMERICAN CITIZEN CAN BE
ARRESTED WITHOUT CHARGE STATED.
Thats right. Thats why we no longer have a Republic. Without habeas
corpus in the United States today, what we now have is a Fourth Reich,
somebody in a position of power - the President, the Attorney General,
the head of Homeland Security can simply point a figure at you and
designate you as an undesirable and hence, an enemy combatant, and
they can grab you and imprison you and you dont even get a day in
court, much less a lawyer. This administration has systematically
stripped the United States of its fundamental Constitutional rights.
Thats bad enough, but what really concerns me is that so many people
refuse to look at that. They do not want to admit that. They do not
want to see it and so they are allowing it to take place and continue.
[ Editor's Note: Wikipedia - The right to petition for a writ of
habeas corpus has long been celebrated as the most efficient safeguard
of the liberty of the subject. Albert Venn Dicey wrote that the Habeas
Corpus Acts declare no principle and define no rights, but they are
for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles
guaranteeing individual liberty. In most countries, however, the
procedure of habeas corpus can be suspended in time of national
emergency. In most civil law jurisdictions, comparable provisions
exist, but they may not be called habeas corpus.
Modern America: The reach of habeas corpus is currently being tested
in the United States. Oral arguments on a consolidated Guantanamo Bay
detention camp detainee habeas corpus petition, Al Odah v. United
States were heard by the Supreme Court of the United States on
December 5, 2007, and recently by HR 1955 The Violent Radicalization
and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2006. On June 12, 2008, the
Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush recognized habeas corpus
rights for the Guantanamo prisoners. However, the following month, the
4th Circuit Court gave the President the power to arrest and detain
U.S. citizens on native soil indefinitely.]
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