Fascist America, in 10 easy steps 


by Naomi Wolf
 
Global Research, April 25, 2007 
The Guardian - 2007-04-24 


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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

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. 
 

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