ALTERNET– Editor’s note: This is adapted from Wolf’s forthcoming book “The End of
America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.”
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 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 to
professionals such as lawyers and professors — we scarcely recognise
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 United
States.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
After
we were hit on Sept. 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock.
Less than six weeks later, on Oct. 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 United States 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 — hydralike, 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 civilization 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 centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer
space”) — where torture can take 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 firsthand accounts,
photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty,
have been tortured in the U.S.-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 offences, 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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, and 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 U.S.
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
Sen. Edward Kennedy, a member of Venezuela’s
government (after Venezuela’s
president had criticized Bush), and thousands of ordinary U.S.
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,” he said.
“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 U.S.
citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of
mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the U.S. military
before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and
released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield,
a U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 United States 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 U.S. military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon
unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from
organizations 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 U.S. 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 right-wing
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 realise 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 U.S. 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
U.S. citizens will get a trial eventually — for now. But legal rights
activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush
administration is increasingly and aggressively trying to find ways to
get around giving even U.S. citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a
status offence — 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. The Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy says the bill
encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates
the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they
did: Having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders
were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militia power
over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of
course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total
closing down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or
Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too
resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind
of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our
experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It
is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile
of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal
on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria
in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931.
Early on, as W.H. Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere — while
someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing.
“Dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite
leisurely from the disaster.”
As Americans turn away quite
leisurely, keeping tuned to Internet shopping and American Idol, the
foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has
changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: Our democratic
traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a
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 the
president — without U.S. citizens realizing it yet — the power over
U.S. citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so
alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the
foundation of all these still free-looking institutions, and this
foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such
an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs.”
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack — say, God
forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency.
History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain
emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of
traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a
President Hillary than by a President Giuliani, because any executive
will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the
arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What
if the publisher of a major U.S. newspaper were charged with treason or
espionage, as a right-wing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last
year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers
look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease
publishing, but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now,
only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny
for the rest of us — staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who
faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all
the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties
Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new
laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom
Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s
help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are
willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a
United States unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the
rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the “what
ifs.” For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could
come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of
us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and
think: That is how it was before, and this is the way it is now.
“The
accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in
the same hands is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison.
We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our
ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders
asked us to carry.
© COPYRIGHT ALTERNET, 2007
Photo by flickr user david_shankbone
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