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An Iron Fist In A
Velvet Glove
How American Democracy
Relies on Fascism
By Ted Rall
01/03/08 "ICH"
-- - -NEW YORK--What would you do if you learned that Bush
Administration officials wanted to round up thousands of
Americans and throw them into concentration camps?
For all we know, there is no slippery slope. It's entirely
possible that extraordinary rendition, eliminating habeas
corpus, and the torture camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere are
exactly what the government says they are--tools for fighting
terrorists, not domestic political opponents. But how likely is
it?
History is clear: Over and over again, the U.S. government
places fascists in powerful positions. Once in office, they
exploit wars and national tragedies to roll back hard-won
freedoms. They're Democrats as well as Republicans.
As has happened with increasing frequency in recent years,
another blockbuster story revealing the anti-democratic impulse
within the top echelon of the U.S. government has appeared and
vanished overnight. According to Cold War-era files declassified
last week, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly advised
President Harry Truman to arrest "all individuals potentially
dangerous" to national security, jail them in military prisons
and try them before kangaroo tribunals that "will not be bound
by the rules of evidence."
"For a long period of time the FBI has been accumulating the
names, identities and activities of individuals found to be
potentially dangerous to the internal security through
investigation," Hoover wrote in a 1950 memo. "These names have
been compiled in an index, which index has been kept up to
date."
Capitalizing on anti-communist hysteria at the start of the
Korean War, Hoover asked Truman to preemptively detain 12,000
people, 97 percent of them American citizens, in order to
"protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage."
Hoover was a lunatic. Truman ought to have fired him on the
spot. Instead, in September 1950 Congress took his advice and
passed a law authorizing the detention of "dangerous radicals"
if the president declared a national emergency. Truman signed
it. In fact, he declared such an emergency three months later.
No one knows why, but the president never actually followed
through with mass arrests. Hoover's "subversives"--people
suspected of left-wing political sympathies--remained free. He
was wrong. There were no acts of sabotage.
It wasn't the first time the government went "crazy."
Between 1919 and 1921 the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor
of the FBI) carried out the Palmer Raids, named for Alexander
Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's attorney general. The BOI rounded up
10,000 lefties, anarchists and foreigners on a list compiled by
a young J. Edgar Hoover, then in charge of the Justice
Department's General Intelligence Division. Many were tortured.
Five hundred fifty were deported.
Palmer's clampdown accomplished nothing. On September 16, 1920,
a bomb attributed to anarchists went off on Wall Street, killing
38 people and wounding over 400.
Crazy...like a fox.
During the 1960s and 1970s the CIA--in violation of its charter,
which limits the agency to acting overseas--cooperated with
local police departments across the country to compile a list of
300,000 Americans and organizations suspected of opposing the
Vietnam War.
On April 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed National
Security Decision Directive No. 52. Reagan targeted 400,000
people for arrest and confinement at concentration camps in
mothballed Army bases. The National Security Council's "secret
government within a government," as Congressional investigators
later described it, planned to cancel the 1984 presidential
election so Reagan could remain in office indefinitely.
"Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example, helped draw up a
controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a
national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread
internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military
invasion abroad," The Miami Herald reported on July 5, 1987.
People who hate The People never sleep. In 2006 Congress passed
the National Defense Authorization Act, which overturns the
Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibited the use of combat
troops on the soil of the United States. For the first time in
128 years, the president can declare martial law in case of a
hurricane, riot or terrorist attack. In May 2007 Bush attached a
National Security Presidential and Homeland Directive to the
National Defense Authorization Act. In case of a "national
emergency"--the president could declare it without consulting
anyone--he could suspend the Constitution and appoint an
unelected provisional government under a "national continuity
coordinator."
To an optimist, America's brushes with fascism seem like
comforting evidence that the system works. Despite it all, even
taking into account grotesqueries such as the concentration
camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, the First
Amendment remains in force. Few Americans feel threatened by
government tyranny. Few worry about getting shot by
trigger-happy soldiers or being detained in concentration camps
(unless they're flood victims in New Orleans).
So why does a democracy need fascist schemes like Reagan's
Rex-84 Alpha Explan (a FEMA plan to put American protesters
against a planned war against Nicaragua into camps)? Because
American democracy is an iron fist in a velvet glove, a glove
that's becoming increasingly transparent.
Threats of repression are rarely carried out. They don't need to
be.
If potential opponents are afraid, there's little need for
concentration camps. The threat of repression (and actual
crackdowns, explained away as exceptional excesses and brushed
off with a token apology) creates a chilling effect on people
who might pick up a rock instead of a sign.
A dog doesn't have to bite everyone every day to earn a fearsome
reputation. Mount cameras all over the place, and you don't need
to have anyone actually watching on the other side.
In a country whose legal framework authorizes the government to
kidnap, torture and murder them, opponents of U.S. policy must
decide whether getting out of line--anything from a letter to
the editor to direct action--is worth the risk of getting
kidnapped, tortured and murdered.
Ted Rall is the author of the book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is
Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and
graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy
challenge. www.tedrall.com
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