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An entire Crisis Industry has arisen since Congress legalized Psychological Operations in 2012
Sane Progressive
This is the piece that is referenced by Debbie during her livestream
BOSTON BOMBING Naomi Wolf Exposes Fake News False Flags
Meanwhile, see if there is anything you can recognise here
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
Naomi Wolf
24 April, 2007
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 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 realise.
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 civilisation". 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 centre 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, labour 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 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
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
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 favour 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 terrorise 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 neighbours to spy on neighbours. 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 programme 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 favour 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
organisations 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 criticised 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 penalise 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 organisations 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 criminalise 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
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 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
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
editorialised 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 senator 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 militias' 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 WH 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 US citizens realising it
yet - the power over US 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 US newspaper were charged with
treason or espionage, as a rightwing 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 US 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.
· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young
Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.
Debbie, Sane Progressive talks about the potential for
abuse of psychiatry in America to silence critics.
We've been here before.
Debbie will be too young to know this but I remember
very well in the early 70's how the Soviet Union was rightly criticised for the
same thing - political dissidents were labelled as delusional and/or
schizophrenic.
Interesting how the only people interested in this
nowadays were Russians. It's a narrative long disappeared and forgotten in the
West.
Read this NYT article from back in 1983
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