[WCUSP] Fascist America, in 10 easy steps | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

Wed Apr 25 09:17:10 CDT 2007

Dear All, Does anyone know the "legal" requirements
for permits for vigils across the street from the
Federal Building. Last Friday Women in Black was told
that we need a permit for every week of the year that
we vigil giving out leaflets mainly  on the Middle
East crisis. For years we have been vigiling there. In
Peace Yvonne. 
---------------------------------
A checkoff list for fascism:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html#article_continue

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Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

FromHitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there
are certain stepsthat any would-be dictator must take
to destroy constitutionalfreedoms. And, argues Naomi
Wolf, George Bush and his administrationseem to be
taking them all 

 Tuesday April 24,2007
The Guardian 

Lastautumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The
leaders of the couptook a number of steps, rather
systematically, as if they had ashopping list. In a
sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracyhad
been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial
law, sent armedsoldiers into residential areas, took
over radio and TV stations,issued restrictions on the
press, tightened some limits on travel, andtook
certain activists into custody.They were not figuring
these thingsout as they went along. If you lookat
history, you can see that there is essentially a
blueprint forturning an open society into a
dictatorship. That blueprint has beenused again and
again in more and less bloody, more and less
terrifyingways. But it is always effective. It is very
difficult and arduous tocreate and sustain a democracy
- but history shows that closing onedown is much
simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the
10steps.
Asdifficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if
you are willing tolook, that each of these 10 steps
has already been initiated today inthe United States
by the Bush administration.

Because Americanslike me were born in freedom, we have
a hard time even considering thatit is possible for us
to become as unfree - domestically - as manyother
nations. Because we no longer learn much about our
rights or oursystem of government - the task of being
aware of the constitution hasbeen outsourced from
citizens' ownership to being the domain
ofprofessionals such as lawyers and professors - we
scarcely recognisethe checks and balances that the
founders put in place, even as theyare being
systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much
aboutEuropean history, the setting up of a department
of "homeland" security- remember who else was keen on
the word "homeland" - didn't raise thealarm bells it
might have.

It is my argument that, beneath ourvery noses, George
Bush and his administration are using
time-testedtactics to close down an open society. It
is time for us to be willingto think the unthinkable -
as the author and political journalist JoeConason, has
put it, that it can happen here. And that we are
furtheralong than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger ofAmerican
authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to
look atthe lessons of European and other kinds of
fascism to understand thepotential seriousness of the
events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

Afterwe 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 waspassed by a
Congress that had little chance to debate it; many
saidthat 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
ofcrisis in which the US accepted limits on civil
liberties, such asduring the civil war, when Lincoln
declared martial law, and the secondworld 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 pendulumwas
able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined
asopen-ended in time and without national boundaries
in space - the globeitself is the battlefield. "This
time," Fein says, "there will be nodefined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like,secretive,
evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's
invocation ofa communist threat to the nation's
security, be based on actual events(one Wisconsin
academic has faced calls for his dismissal because
henoted, among other things, that the alleged
communist arson, theReichstag fire of February 1933,
was swiftly followed in Nazi Germanyby passage of the
Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law withan
open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying
threat can bebased, like the National Socialist
evocation of the "global conspiracyof world Jewry", on
myth.

It is not that global Islamistterrorism is not a
severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing
ratherthat the language used to convey the nature of
the threat is differentin a country such as Spain -
which has also suffered violent terroristattacks -
than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they
face agrave security threat; what we as American
citizens believe is that weare potentially threatened
with the end of civilisation as we know it.Of course,
this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on
ourfreedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have goteveryone scared, the next step is to
create a prison system outside therule of law (as Bush
put it, he wanted the American detention centre
atGuant&aacute;namo Bay to be situated in legal "outer
space") - where torturetakes place.

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

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

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan,and, of course,
Guant&aacute;namo in Cuba, where detainees are abused,
andkept indefinitely without trial and without access
to the due processof the law, America certainly has
its gulag now. Bush and his allies inCongress recently
announced they would issue no information about
thesecret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the
world, which are used toincarcerate people who have
been seized off the street.

Gulags inhistory 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 andguilty, have been tortured in
the US-run prisons we are aware of andthose we can't
investigate adequately.

But Americans still assumethis system and detainee
abuses involve only scary brown people withwhom they
don't generally identify. It was brave of the
conservativepundit William Safire to quote the
anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niem&ouml;ller,who had been
seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for
theJews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the
destruction of therule of law at Guant&aacute;namo set
a dangerous precedent for them, too.

Bythe way, the establishment of military tribunals
that deny prisonersdue process tends to come early on
in a fascist shift. Mussolini andStalin set up such
tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set upthe
People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial
system: prisonerswere held indefinitely, often in
isolation, and tortured, without beingcharged with
offences, and were subjected to show trials.
Eventually,the Special Courts became a parallel system
that put pressure on theregular courts to abandon the
rule of law in favour of Nazi ideologywhen making
decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste 

Whenleaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift"
want to close down anopen society, they send
paramilitary groups of scary young men out toterrorise
citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian
countrysidebeating up communists; the Brownshirts
staged violent ralliesthroughout Germany. This
paramilitary force is especially important ina
democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and
so you needthugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11have proved a bonanza for
America's security contractors, with the
Bushadministration outsourcing areas of work that
traditionally fell to theUS military. In the process,
contracts worth hundreds of millions ofdollars have
been issued for security work by mercenaries at home
andabroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives
have been accused ofinvolvement in torturing
prisoners, harassing journalists and firing onIraqi
civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate
contractors in Iraqby the one-time US administrator in
Baghdad, Paul Bremer, thesecontractors are immune from
prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq,you could argue; however,
after Hurricane Katrina, the Department ofHomeland
Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private
securityguards in New Orleans. The investigative
journalist Jeremy Scahillinterviewed one unnamed guard
who reported having fired on unarmedcivilians in the
city. It was a natural disaster that underlay
thatepisode - but the administration's endless war on
terror means ongoingscope for what are in effect
privately contracted armies to take oncrisis and
emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs inAmerica? Groups of angry young Republican men,
dressed in identicalshirts and trousers, menaced poll
workers counting the votes in Floridain 2000. If you
are reading history, you can imagine that there can
bea need for "public order" on the next election day.
Say there areprotests, or a threat, on the day of an
election; history would notrule out the presence of a
private security firm at a polling station"to restore
public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

InMussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist
East Germany, incommunist China - in every closed
society - secret police spy onordinary people and
encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. TheStasi
needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under
surveillanceto convince a majority that they
themselves were being watched.

In2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau
wrote in the NewYork Times about a secret state
programme to wiretap citizens' phones,read their
emails and follow international financial
transactions, itbecame clear to ordinary Americans
that they, too, could be under statescrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as
beingabout "national security"; the true function is
to keep citizens docileand inhibit their activism and
dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

Thefifth thing you do is related to step four - you
infiltrate and harasscitizens' groups. It can be
trivial: a church in Pasadena, whoseminister preached
that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself
beinginvestigated by the Internal Revenue Service,
while churches that gotRepublicans out to vote, which
is equally illegal under US tax law,have been left
alone.

Other harassment is more serious: theAmerican Civil
Liberties Union reports that thousands of
ordinaryAmerican anti-war, environmental and other
groups have been infiltratedby agents: a secret
Pentagon database includes more than four
dozenpeaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by
American citizens inits category of 1,500 "suspicious
incidents". The equally secretCounterintelligence
Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department
ofDefense has been gathering information about
domestic organisationsengaged in peaceful political
activities: Cifa is supposed to track"potential
terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US
citizenactivists. A little-noticed new law has
redefined activism such asanimal rights protests as
"terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist"slowly
expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

Thisscares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game.
Nicholas D Kristofand Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative
reporters who wrote China Wakes:the Struggle for the
Soul of a Rising Power, describe
pro-democracyactivists in China, such as Wei
Jingsheng, being arrested and releasedmany times. In a
closing or closed society there is a "list"
ofdissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted
in this way onceyou are on the list, and it is hard to
get off the list.

In 2004,America's Transportation Security
Administration confirmed that it hada list of
passengers who were targeted for security searches or
worseif they tried to fly. People who have found
themselves on the list? Twomiddle-aged women peace
activists in San Francisco; liberal SenatorEdward
Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after
Venezuela'spresident had criticised Bush; and
thousands of ordinary US citizens.

ProfessorWalter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton
University; he is one of theforemost constitutional
scholars in the nation and author of theclassic
Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated
formermarine, and he is not even especially
politically liberal. But on March1 this year, he was
denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was onthe
Terrorist Watch list".

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

"Iexplained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched
but had, inSeptember 2006, given a lecture at
Princeton, televised and put on theweb, highly
critical of George Bush for his many violations of
theconstitution."

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

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

James Yee, a UScitizen, was the Muslim chaplain at
Guant&aacute;namo who was accused ofmishandling
classified documents. He was harassed by the US
militarybefore the charges against him were dropped.
Yee has been detained andreleased several times. He is
still of interest.

BrandonMayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon,
was mistakenly identifiedas a possible terrorist. His
house was secretly broken into and hiscomputer 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 onthe list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals 

Threatencivil servants, artists and academics with job
loss if they don't toethe line. Mussolini went after
the rectors of state universities whodid not conform
to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who
purgedacademics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's
Augusto Pinochet; sodoes the Chinese communist
Politburo in punishing pro-democracystudents and
professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, sothose seeking a
fascist shift punish academics and students
withprofessional loss if they do not "coordinate", in
Goebbels' term,ideologically. Since civil servants are
the sector of society mostvulnerable to being fired by
a given regime, they are also a group thatfascists
typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for
theRe-establishment of a Professional Civil Service
was passed on April 71933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several
states putpressure on regents at state universities to
penalise or fire academicswho have been critical of
the administration. As for civil servants,the Bush
administration has derailed the career of one military
lawyerwho spoke up for fair trials for detainees,
while an administrationofficial publicly intimidated
the law firms that represent detaineespro bono by
threatening to call for their major corporate clients
toboycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in aclosed
blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of
thesecurity clearance she needed in order to do her
job.

Mostrecently, the administration purged eight US
attorneys for what lookslike insufficient political
loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civilservice in
April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step
thateased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to
follow.

8. Control the press

Italyin 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 dictatorstarget
newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass
them inmore open societies that they are seeking to
close, and they arrestthem and worse in societies that
have been closed already.

TheCommittee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US
journalists are atan 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
ananti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a
criminal complaintagainst reporter Greg Palast,
claiming he threatened "criticalinfrastructure" when
he and a TV producer were filming victims ofHurricane
Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a
bestsellercritical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writershave been punished in other
ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in aNew York Times
op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of
afalse charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired
yellowcake uranium inNiger. His wife, Valerie Plame,
was outed as a CIA spy - a form ofretaliation that
ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss arenothing, though, compared
with how the US is treating journalistsseeking to
cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The
Committeeto Protect Journalists has documented
multiple accounts of the USmilitary in Iraq firing
upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded(meaning
independent) reporters and camera operators from
organisationsranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While
westerners may question theaccounts by al-Jazeera,
they should pay attention to the accounts ofreporters
such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters
havebeen wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry
Lloyd in 2003. Both CBSand the Associated Press in
Iraq had staff members seized by the USmilitary and
taken to violent prisons; the news organisations
wereunable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time inclosing societies, real news is supplanted
by fake news and falsedocuments. Pinochet showed
Chilean citizens falsified documents to backup his
claim that terrorists had been about to attack the
nation. Theyellowcake charge, too, was based on forged
papers.

You won'thave a shutdown of news in modern America -
it is not possible. But youcan have, as Frank Rich and
Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, asteady stream of
lies polluting the news well. What you already have
isa White House directing a stream of false
information that is sorelentless 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 theirdemands for accountability bit by
bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Castdissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'.
Every closingsociety does this, just as it elaborates
laws that increasinglycriminalise 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 ofclassified information
"disgraceful", while Republicans in Congresscalled for
Keller to be charged with treason, and
rightwingcommentators and news outlets kept up the
"treason" drumbeat. Somecommentators, as Conason
noted, reminded readers smugly that onepenalty for
violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason isright to note how serious a threat that
attack represented. It is alsoimportant to recall that
the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editorof
Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was,
in fact,executed. And it is important to remind
Americans that when the 1917Espionage Act was last
widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 PalmerRaids,
leftist activists were arrested without warrants in
sweepingroundups, kept in jail for up to five months,
and "beaten, starved,suffocated, tortured and
threatened with death", according to thehistorian Myra
MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America
fora decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies
ofthe people". National Socialists called those who
supported Weimardemocracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circlecloses: most Americans do
not realise that since September of last year- when
Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military
Commissions Actof 2006 - the president has the power
to call any US citizen an "enemycombatant". He has the
power to define what "enemy combatant" means.The
president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in
the executivebranch the right to define "enemy
combatant" any way he or she wantsand then seize
Americans accordingly.

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

WeUS citizens will get a trial eventually - for now.
But legal rightsactivists at the Center for
Constitutional Rights say that the Bushadministration
is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to
getaround giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy
combatant" is astatus offence - it is not even
something you have to have done. "Wehave absolutely
moved over into a preventive detention model - you
looklike you could do something bad, you might do
something bad, so we'regoing to hold you," says a
spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americanssurely do not get this yet. No wonder:
it is hard to believe, eventhough it is true. In every
closing society, at a certain point thereare some
high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders,
clergyand journalists. Then everything goes quiet.
After those arrests, thereare still newspapers,
courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a
civilsociety. There just isn't real dissent. There
just isn't freedom. Ifyou look at history, just before
those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

TheJohn Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave
the president newpowers over the national guard. This
means that in a national emergency- which the
president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can
sendMichigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency
that he has declaredin Oregon, over the objections of
the state's governor and its citizens.

Evenas Americans were focused on Britney Spears's
meltdown and the questionof who fathered Anna Nicole's
baby, the New York Times editorialisedabout this
shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington
is thatlaws that strike to the heart of American
democracy have been passed inthe dead of night ...
Beyond actual insurrection, the president may nowuse
military troops as a domestic police force in response
to a naturaldisaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist
attack or any 'othercondition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the
PosseComitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the
federal government fromusing the military for domestic
law enforcement. The Democratic senatorPatrick Leahy
says the bill encourages a president to declare
federalmartial law. It also violates the very reason
the founders set up oursystem of government as they
did: having seen citizens bullied by amonarch's
soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this
kind ofconcentration of militias' power over American
people in the hands ofan oppressive executive or
faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerableto the
violent, total closing-down of the system that
followedMussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup
of political prisoners.Our democratic habits are too
resilient, and our military and judiciarytoo
independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in
democracycould be closed down by a process of erosion.

Itis a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift
you see the profileof barbed wire against the sky. In
the early days, things look normalon the surface;
peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in
Calabriain 1922; people were shopping and going to the
movies in Berlin in1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it,
the horror is always elsewhere -while someone is being
tortured, children are skating, ships aresailing:
"dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything
turnsaway/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn awayquite leisurely, keeping tuned
to internet shopping and American Idol,the foundations
of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something
haschanged profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly:
our democratictraditions, independent judiciary and
free press do their work today ina 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 thepresident - without US citizens realising it
yet - the power over UScitizens of freedom or long
solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

Thatmeans a hollowness has been expanding under the
foundation of all thesestill- free-looking
institutions - and this foundation can give wayunder
certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome,
we have tothink about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, thereis another attack
- say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive
candeclare a state of emergency. History shows that
any leader, of anyparty, will be tempted to maintain
emergency powers after the crisishas passed. With the
gutting of traditional checks and balances, we areno
less endangered by a President Hillary than by a
President Giuliani- because any executive will be
tempted to enforce his or her willthrough edict rather
than the arduous, uncertain process of
democraticnegotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major USnewspaper were
charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing
effortseemed to threaten Keller with last year? What
if he or she got 10years in jail? What would the
newspapers look like the next day?Judging from
history, they would not cease publishing; but they
wouldsuddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriotsare trying to
hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us -
staffat the Center for Constitutional Rights, who
faced death threats forrepresenting the detainees yet
persisted all the way to the SupremeCourt; activists
at the American Civil Liberties Union; and
prominentconservatives trying to roll back the
corrosive new laws, under thebanner of a new group
called the American Freedom Agenda. This
small,disparate collection of people needs everybody's
help, including thatof Europeans and others
internationally who are willing to put pressureon the
administration because they can see what a US
unrestrained byreal democracy at home can mean for the
rest of the world.

Weneed to look at history and face the "what ifs". For
if we keep goingdown this road, the "end of America"
could come for each of us in adifferent way, at a
different moment; each of us might have a
differentmoment when we feel forced to look back and
think: that is how it wasbefore - and this is the way
it is now.

"The accumulation of allpowers, legislative,
executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... isthe
definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still
have thechoice to stop going down this road; we can
stand our ground and fightfor our nation, and take up
the banner the founders asked us to carry.

&middot; Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of
Warning to aYoung Patriot will be published by Chelsea
Green in September.

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