History Forum / General / General Topics / April 2007

Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps

Published on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 by The Guardian/UK

Steps That Any Would-Be Dictator Must Take To Destroy Constitutional
Freedoms. And George Bush and His Administration Seem To Be Taking
Them All
by Naomi Wolf

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 recognize 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 realize.

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 civilization". 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 center at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer
space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as
outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or
"criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison
system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the
prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition
members, labor activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and
sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns
ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin
American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for
closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in
Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial
and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly
has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced
they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site"
prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who
have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasize, becoming ever larger and more
secretive, ever more deadly and formalized. We know from first-hand
accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people,
innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are
aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve
only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It
was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-
Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political
prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't
understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo
set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny
prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift.
Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the
Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the
judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation,
and tortured, without being charged with offenses, 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 favor 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 terrorize 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 neighbors to spy on neighbors. 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 program 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 favor 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 organizations 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 criticized Bush; and
thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is
one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author
of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated
former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But
on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark,
"because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from
flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in
September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the
web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the
constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution?
Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of
the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was
accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US
military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been
detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly
identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into
and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation
against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on
the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they
don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state
universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph
Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's
Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing
pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift
punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not
"coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants
are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given
regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate"
early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional
Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure
on regents at state universities to penalize 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 organizations 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
criminalize 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 realize
that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly,
passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the
power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to
define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate
to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define
"enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans
accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be
completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the
power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow,
or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy
brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while
awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers
psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why
Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every
satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at
Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights
activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush
administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get
around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a
status offense - 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
editorialized 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...
continues here:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/24/708/