Now arriving in bookstores is Naomi Wolf's The End of America, and I recommend it most highly. It reminds me somewhat of Glenn Greenwald's How Would a Patriot Act? from last year, but with its more up-to-date information and its compelling frame, it offers an excellent guide to what we need to do as we enter the new legislative season and next year's elections.
Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, offers a succinct distillation of the book's premise in his recommendation:
Most Americans reject outright any comparison of post 9/11 America with the fascism and totalitarianism of Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile. Sadly, the parallels and similarities, what Wolf calls the 'echoes' between those societies and America today, are all too compelling.
Join me below the fold for more...
Naomi Wolf is primarily known for her writings on feminist issues, but here she takes a broad look at how the Bush administration is steadily and sharply eroding our Constitutional rights. Subtitled "Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot," she seeks to awaken those who believe the loss of those rights can't happen here, or who believe that the pendulum will magically start to swing back the other way all on its own, or indeed, those who fail to understand how vitally important those rights are:
I am one of the citizens who needed to relearn these lessons. Though I studied civics, our system of government was taught to me, as it was to you, as a fairly boring explication of a three-part civil bureaucracy, not as the mechanism of a thrilling, radical and totally unprecedented experiment in human self-determination. My teachers explained that our three-part system was set up with "checks and balances," so that no one branch of government could seize too much power. Not so exciting: this sounded like "checks and balances" in a bureaucratic turf war. Our teachers failed to explain to us that the power that the Founders restrained in each branch of government is not abstract: it is the power to strip you and me of personal liberty. (My emphasis)
Wolf describes several previous dark periods in American history, when our rights seemed to be under siege (the Civil War, the arrest of Eugene Debs in 1918, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, among others.) Yes, in those earlier times, the pendulum did indeed swing back--but she feels this time is different:
We are so familiar with, and so reliant upon, the pendulum. That is why you are so sure that "America is different." but the pendulum's working depends on unrestricted motion. In America, up until now, the basic checks and balances established by the Founders have functioned so well that the pendulum has always managed to swing back. Its very success has made us lazy. We trust it too much....
The pendulum cannot work now as it has before. there are two major differences between these past examples...and the situation we face today.
First...President Bush has defined the current conflict with global terrorism as open-ended. This is a permanent alteration of the constitutional landscape.
The other difference between these examples and today is that when prior dark times unfolded in America, we forbade torture, and the rule of law was intact. Legal torture, as you will see, acting in concert with the erosion of the rule of law, changes what is possible.
The book is constructed around the "ten classic steps" that dictators take to shut down a free society, using many examples, including the regimes of Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy and Stalin's Soviet Union. While Wolf recognizes that many people have an emotional reaction to any comparisons with Nazi Germany, given these dangerous times she stands her ground on the analogy:
I also know there is a kind of intellectual etiquette, an unwritten rule, that Nazism and Hitler should be treated as stand-alone categories.
But I believe this etiquette is actually keeping us from learning what we have to learn right now. I believe we honor the victims of Nazism with our willingness to face the lessons that history--even the most nightmarish history--can offer us about how to defend freedom.
The bulk of the book consists of ten chapters, each devoted to one of the classic steps taken by dictators to "shut down democracies all over the world at many different times." They are:
1. Invoke an Internal and External Threat
2. Establish Secret Prisons
3. Develop a Paramilitary Force
4. Surveil Ordinary Citizens
5. Infiltrate Citizens' Groups
6. Arbitrarily Detain and Release Citizens
7. Target Key Individuals
8. Restrict the Press
9. Cast Criticism as "Espionage" and Dissent as "Treason"
10. Subvert the Rule of Law
These ten chapters offer 117 succinct pages detailing the attacks on freedom perpetrated by the Bush administration in these areas. Most of the examples will be familiar to frequent readers of DailyKos and similar websites. Some examples are painfully fresh in the memory, some may have been temporarily forgotten in the relentless flood of new daily outrages, and some may be new to you. But this is a powerful presentation of them.
We have the administration's constant use of phrases such as 'axis of evil,' 'global caliphate,' 'evildoers,' and 'a threat to civilization itself.' We have the powerful lobbying of the security industry to cash in on both the "anti-terror biz" and its corollary, which "designates U.S. citizens as potential security threats."
We have the secret prisons of the CIA overseas and Guantanamo Bay.
The classic secret prison system starts out modestly and metastasizes. Initially, the government targets people seen by the rest of the population as being "evil:" dangerous radicals or outright criminals. At this stage, the prisons--even the mistreatment and torture of prisoners--are publicized, to general acceptance or even approval: Cartoons in the German press from 1931 to 1933 made light of prisoner abuse. Early on, the secret prisons and even the abuse make citizens feel safer: They can't imagine that they themselves might ever be subjected to mistreatment.
And then there is a "mission creep"--always. The thick black line that has separated "us" from "them" starts to blur.
We're taken through the private armies of Blackwater, the "angry mobs" of Republican staffers who bullied the vote-counting in Florida in the 2000 election. We're reminded of Steven Howards, who in 2006, while taking his young son to his piano lessons, took advantage of an appearance by Dick Cheney to express his opposition to the war in Iraq--andten minutes later was handcuffed by the Secret Service for "assaulting the vice president." (Told you there would be incidents you'd forgotten!)
We get the wiretapping, the infiltration of groups, the Talon database, the no-fly lists.
We cover the story of Chaplain James Yee, who the government accused of "espionage and possible treason" for his helping inmates at Guantanamo--shackled, blindfolded, held in solitary confinement for 76 days, had his reputation destroyed...and was ultiamtely only charged with "adultery, lying to investigators and two counts of downloading porn" before finally being released--but only after being ordered to never discuss his detainment.
We hear about the pressure on scientists and academics to change their findings. We hear about the campaign against the Dixie Chicks.
She reminds of us the proscription on photographing the returning caskets of our Iraq War dead (and points out that Nazi Germany unloaded the coffins of their war dead at night.)
We learn of the Iraqi CBS news cameraman Abdul Ameer Ounis Hussain, who was first wounded by the US military and then taken into custody by them...and languished for a year without due process in Abu Graib. We are reminded of when the Department of Homeland Security accused author
Greg Palast and TV producer Matt Pascarella of "unauthorized filming of a 'critical national security structure'" while filming Katrina evacuees encamped near an Exxon/Mobil refinery.
We hear all this and much more. But most importantly, in each case, comparisons are made with specific tactics used by everyone from Hitler and Stalin to Chile's Pinochet and Paraguay's Stroessner in building their freedom-suffocating security apparatus.
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 experience a different event that would force us to look back and think....
Near the beginning of her book, Wolf reminds us that the Founders "did not mean for powerful men and women far away from citizens--for people with their own agendas, or for a class of professionals--to perform the patriots' tasks, or to protect freedom. They meant for us to do it: you, me, the American who delivers your mail, the one who teaches your kids."
Later, she closes her book with this call to arms:
Bullies are cowards. Time and again, when people have awakened to danger and risen together to confront those who have sought to oppress them, citizens in their thousands have crumbled walls and broken open massive prisons. In our own nation, in times of eclipse, patriots have become rebels again and said: "No, the union is not going down, not on my watch."
When that happens, there is no power that can hold these patriots back.
I hope this emboldens you.
An excellent book. Read it, and become emboldened.