Naomi
Wolf updates her ‘10 steps to fascism’
Naomi
Wolf’s 2007 article was a seminal one and her 10 steps to fascism
provide the template for measuring countries.
I
would argue that, although she acknowledges a continuity from George
W.Bush, through Obama, to Trump there are things that are left out of
the mirror.
Right
now, from where I sit Britain seems even further along the path to
fascism because they do not have to overcome a Constitution or Bill
of Rights.
Indications
in the area of human rights are:
- the incarceration of Julian Assange
- the Skripal case and how it has been used to further geopolitical interests
- the harassment of whistleblowers and the case of Melanie Shaw
- the imprisonment without due legal process of Tommy Robinson.
I
am sure there is a lot I have left out.
The Guardian has gone from a liberal critic of society when this article was published to being one of the main supporters of the Establishment and its aggressive war policies.
Dr
Naomi Wolf Offers an Update on Where the US is Now in Regard to the
"Ten Steps to Fascism." Is It Zero Hour for Democracy?
From
Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps
that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional
freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration
seem to be taking them all
Naomi
Wolf
24 April, 2017
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.
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