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America is going fascist
The signs are all there for anyone to see, and time is getting
short for action
By Michael Nenonen
12/04/07 "The
Republic" -- -- Reading
Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young
Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007), I realized the hour is
later than I thought.
Many of us have watched the Bush regime’s actions with a growing
feeling of horror intertwined with a sense that somehow we’ve
seen all of this before, but we aren’t sure where. We’re
confused because what we’re seeing conflicts with unexamined and
deeply held assumptions we have about American freedom. Wolf’s
short but meticulously documented book shows that what is
happening in America has indeed happened many times before, not
in the United States, but rather in places like Chile, Italy,
Russia, and Germany. In each case, people couldn’t understand
why they didn’t recognize where they were heading before they
passed the point of no return.
It's shifting fast
Wolf argues that the United States is undergoing a “fascist
shift” from an authoritarian but still relatively open society
to a totalitarian society. The techniques for forcing this shift
have evolved over the last century and are now studied by
aspiring tyrants the world over. These methods are even part of
the formal curriculum in places like the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the
School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia, where
thousands of Latin Americans have been trained by the United
States government in the most savage techniques of insurgency
and counterinsurgency. Fascists use ten basic strategies to shut
down open societies. They invoke an external and internal threat
in order to convince the population to grant their rulers
extraordinary powers. They establish secret prisons that
practice torture, prisons that are initially few in number and
only incarcerate social pariahs, but that quickly multiply and
soon imprison “opposition leaders, outspoken clergy, union
leaders, well-known performers, publishers, and journalists.”
They develop a paramilitary force that operates without legal
restraint. They set up a system of intense domestic surveillance
that gathers information for the purposes of intimidating and
blackmailing citizens. They infiltrate, monitor, and disorganize
citizens’ groups. They arbitrarily detain and release citizens,
especially at borders. They target key individuals like civil
servants, academics, and artists in order to ensure their
complicity or silence. They take control of the press. They
publicly equate dissent with treason. Finally, they suspend the
rule of law. All of these strategies are being employed in
America today.
Consider the evidence
The Bush administration and its supporters have consistently
portrayed the security threat posed by international terrorists
as a threat to the very survival of Western civilization in
order to justify permanent war and to keep the American public
in a state of panic and paranoia.
The prisons at Guantanamo and God-knows how many CIA “Black
Sites” torture their inmates, even though human rights
organizations have demonstrated that the majority of at least
Guantanamo’s inmates are innocent victims of mass arrests. The
inmates are designated as “enemy combatants” who have no rights
under international or American law. And there is nothing
stopping American presidents from filling these prisons with
American citizens. In an April 24 2007 article for the
Huffington Post, Wolf writes that thanks to 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.”
She points out that while currently Americans in such situations
will be spared any torture except psychosis-inducing isolation
and can look forward to eventual trials, these rights typically
evaporate in the final stages of a fascist shift.
They're called "mercenaries"
Military contractors are the regime’s paramilitary force.
Blackwater’s mercenaries, many of whom were trained by Latin
America’s most horrific police states, have operated in Iraq
outside of Iraqi, American, and military law, and have murdered
uncounted innocent Iraqis with impunity. Domestically,
Blackwater was contracted to provide hundreds of armed security
guards in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and
there’s evidence that they fired on civilians. Blackwater’s
business plan calls for their use in future disasters and
emergencies throughout the United States, and it’s supported by
some of the biggest powerbrokers in America.
American intelligence agencies are now bypassing court orders to
wiretap citizens’ telephones, spy on their e-mails, and monitor
their financial transactions, and the USA Patriot Act forces
corporations, booksellers, librarians, and doctors to turn over
previously confidential information about Americans to the
state.
Thousands of human rights, environmental, anti-war, and other
citizens’ groups have been infiltrated by government agents,
many of whom have clearly acted as agent provocateurs in order
to undermine the groups’ solidarity and to legitimize police
actions against them.
Political opponents listed
America’s Transportation Security Administration maintains a
terrorist watch list of tens of thousands of Americans who are
now subjected to security searches and arbitrary detention at
airports. The list includes people like Democratic Senator
Edward Kennedy and respected constitutional scholar Walter F
Murphy.
US Attorneys, CIA agents, military lawyers, and other civil
servants who’ve disagreed with the Bush administration have been
threatened and fired. David Horowitz and his colleagues have
mounted a well-funded nation-wide intimidation campaign that has
university students spying on their professors and that has
successfully coerced regents at State Universities to discipline
or fire left-leaning professors like Ward Churchill. The
regime’s supporters have organized campaigns to damage the
careers of artists like the Dixie Chicks for criticism of the
president and his policies.
The administration has Fox News in its pocket, it has paid
journalists for positive coverage, it has disseminated
misinformation through the media, and it’s ferociously attacking
critical journalists. Arrests of US journalists are at an
all-time high. The Bush administration’s outing of CIA operative
Valerie Plame was done in retaliation against her husband,
Joseph Wilson, whose New York Times op-ed piece exposed lies
that the Bush administration used to lead the nation to war.
Worse than this, independent journalists appear to be marked for
death by American forces in Iraq. In her Huffington Post
article, Wolf writes, “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. . . . 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.” The goal of these tactics, as she
writes in The End of America, is to create “a new reality in
which the truth can no longer be ascertained and no longer
counts.”
Dissent = treason
In recent years, prominent Republicans like Ann Coulter, Melanie
Morgan, and William Kristol have accused liberal journalists of
treason and espionage for publishing leaked material damaging to
the administration, and in February 2007, Republican Congressman
Don Young said “Congressmen who wilfully take actions during
wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are
sabateurs, and should be hanged.” This would be amusing, were it
not for the Bush administration’s revival of the draconian 1917
Espionage Act after half a century’s slumber.
And finally, the Bush administration shows contempt for the law.
In The End of America, Wolf writes that Bush has used more
signing statements than any previous president, and by doing so
has relegated “Congress to an advisory role. This abuse lets the
President choose what laws he wishes to enforce or not,
overruling Congress and the people. So Americans are living
under laws their representatives never passed. Signing
statements put the president above the law.” He has also gutted
the Posse Comitatus Act, which was created to prevent the
president from maintaining a standing army for use against
American citizens. Wolf writes that the 2007 Defence
Authorization Bill lets the president “expand his power to
declare martial law and take charge of the National Guard troops
without the permission of the governor when ‘public order’ has
been lost; he can send these troops out into our streets at his
direction—overriding local law enforcement authorities—during a
national disaster, epidemic, serious public health emergency,
terrorist attack, or ‘other condition.’” On its own, this is an
incredible expansion of presidential power, but when combined
with the use of military contractors like Blackwater it gives
the president almost dictatorial authority.
Wolf shows that fascist shifts don’t happen overnight, but
rather over a course of years during which the fascists’ plans
unfold at an accelerating pace. Germany in 1933 was further
along this path than it was in 1931, and Germany in 1935 was
farther along than it was in 1933. Similarly, America in 2007 is
farther along the path than it was in 2005, or will be in 2009,
provided that a massive pro-democracy movement, complete with
impeachment proceedings, doesn’t reverse the shift while there’s
still time. A simple Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential
election won’t do the job unless the institutional and legal
environment created by the Bush administration is thoroughly
dismantled. Regardless of whether the next president is a
Republican or a Democrat, he or she will inherit a legacy of
centralized power that a democracy simply can’t tolerate.
Left behind
Unfortunately, during the shift opposition politicians and
activists still tend to perceive the world through a democratic
frame of reference, and this prevents them from seeing that
their opponents are no longer operating within this frame. As
the opposition is tying its boxing gloves, the fascists are
breaking out the machetes.
Wolf’s work has its problems. She doesn't acknowledge that Black
and Indigenous Americans have long lived under quasi-fascist
rule, she doesn't examine the role that previous administrations
have played in setting the stage for the Bush regime, and she
doesn't acknowledge the roles played by corporatism, widespread
social dislocation and the radical Christian right in the rise
of a fascist American zeitgeist. Despite this, The End of
America needs to be read by as many people as possible.
Wolf writes about America, but Canadians don’t have any cause
for comfort. Canadian and American military forces are already
deeply enmeshed. Thanks to NAFTA, we’re tied at the hip to the
American economy, while the Security and Prosperity Partnership
is integrating our countries’ security forces and harmonizing
our no-fly lists. The Harper government is eager to kowtow to
the Americans, even to the point of refusing to advocate for
Canadian citizens on American death rows. The powerful think
tanks and lobbying groups that influence our provincial and
federal governments, such as the Fraser Institute and the
Canadian Council of Chief Executives, either can’t see the shift
for what it is or they don’t care. More than all of this,
however, is the simple reality that once the shift is complete,
the American government will act even more irrationally and
belligerently than before. Canada has resources like oil and
water the United States is going to need, and the Canadian
border is less defensible than the French border was in 1940.
Americans and Canadians have to fight back more fiercely than
ever before, to organize and lobby and fill the streets with
mass protests, to raise awareness and forge alliances with
anyone opposed to totalitarianism regardless of whether they’re
liberals, socialists, or conservatives. We have to take all the
steps that have rescued dying democracies in the past, and to
take them immediately, in the desperate hope that it isn’t
already too late.
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