http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7534

December 3, 2007

America is Going Fascist

The signs are all there for anyone to see, and time is getting short
for action

by Michael Nenonen

Reading Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young
Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007), I realized the hour is later
than I thought.

Many of us have watched the Bush regime’s actions with a growing
feeling of horror intertwined with a sense that somehow we’ve seen all
of this before, but we aren’t sure where.

We’re confused because what we’re seeing conflicts with unexamined and
deeply held assumptions we have about American freedom.

Wolf’s short but meticulously documented book shows that what is
happening in America has indeed happened many times before, not in the
United States, but rather in places like Chile, Italy, Russia, and
Germany.

In each case, people couldn’t understand why they didn’t recognize
where they were heading before they passed the point of no return.

It's shifting fast

Wolf argues that the United States is undergoing a “fascist shift”
from an authoritarian but still relatively open society to a
totalitarian society.

The techniques for forcing this shift have evolved over the last
century and are now studied by aspiring tyrants the world over.

These methods are even part of the formal curriculum in places like
the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously
known as the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia, where
thousands of Latin Americans have been trained by the United States
government in the most savage techniques of insurgency and
counterinsurgency.

Fascists use ten basic strategies to shut down open societies.

They invoke an external and internal threat in order to convince the
population to grant their rulers extraordinary powers.

They establish secret prisons that practice torture, prisons that are
initially few in number and only incarcerate social pariahs, but that
quickly multiply and soon imprison “opposition leaders, outspoken
clergy, union leaders, well-known performers, publishers, and
journalists.”

They develop a paramilitary force that operates without legal
restraint.

They set up a system of intense domestic surveillance that gathers
information for the purposes of intimidating and blackmailing
citizens.

They infiltrate, monitor, and disorganize citizens’ groups.

They arbitrarily detain and release citizens, especially at borders.

They target key individuals like civil servants, academics, and
artists in order to ensure their complicity or silence.

They take control of the press.

They publicly equate dissent with treason.

Finally, they suspend the rule of law.

All of these strategies are being employed in America today.

Consider the evidence

The Bush administration and its supporters have consistently portrayed
the security threat posed by international terrorists as a threat to
the very survival of Western civilization in order to justify
permanent war and to keep the American public in a state of panic and
paranoia.

The prisons at Guantanamo and God-knows how many CIA “Black Sites”
torture their inmates, even though human rights organizations have
demonstrated that the majority of at least Guantanamo’s inmates are
innocent victims of mass arrests.

The inmates are designated as “enemy combatants” who have no rights
under international or American law.

And there is nothing stopping American presidents from filling these
prisons with American citizens.

In an April 24 2007 article for the Huffington Post, Wolf writes that
thanks to 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.”

She points out that while currently Americans in such situations will
be spared any torture except psychosis-inducing isolation and can look
forward to eventual trials, these rights typically evaporate in the
final stages of a fascist shift.

They're called "mercenaries"

Military contractors are the regime’s paramilitary force.

Blackwater’s mercenaries, many of whom were trained by Latin America’s
most horrific police states, have operated in Iraq outside of Iraqi,
American, and military law, and have murdered uncounted innocent
Iraqis with impunity.

Domestically, Blackwater was contracted to provide hundreds of armed
security guards in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and
there’s evidence that they fired on civilians.

Blackwater’s business plan calls for their use in future disasters and
emergencies throughout the United States, and it’s supported by some
of the biggest powerbrokers in America.

American intelligence agencies are now bypassing court orders to
wiretap citizens’ telephones, spy on their e-mails, and monitor their
financial transactions, and the USA Patriot Act forces corporations,
booksellers, librarians, and doctors to turn over previously
confidential information about Americans to the state.

Thousands of human rights, environmental, anti-war, and other
citizens’ groups have been infiltrated by government agents, many of
whom have clearly acted as agent provocateurs in order to undermine
the groups’ solidarity and to legitimize police actions against them.

Political opponents listed

America’s Transportation Security Administration maintains a terrorist
watch list of tens of thousands of Americans who are now subjected to
security searches and arbitrary detention at airports.

The list includes people like Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy and
respected constitutional scholar Walter F Murphy.

US Attorneys, CIA agents, military lawyers, and other civil servants
who’ve disagreed with the Bush administration have been threatened and
fired.

David Horowitz and his colleagues have mounted a well-funded
nation-wide intimidation campaign that has university students spying
on their professors and that has successfully coerced regents at State
Universities to discipline or fire left-leaning professors like Ward
Churchill.

The regime’s supporters have organized campaigns to damage the careers
of artists like the Dixie Chicks for criticism of the president and
his policies.

The administration has Fox News in its pocket, it has paid journalists
for positive coverage, it has disseminated misinformation through the
media, and it’s ferociously attacking critical journalists.

Arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high.

The Bush administration’s outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame was
done in retaliation against her husband, Joseph Wilson, whose New York
Times op-ed piece exposed lies that the Bush administration used to
lead the nation to war.

Worse than this, independent journalists appear to be marked for death
by American forces in Iraq.

In her Huffington Post article, Wolf writes, “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. . . . 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.” The goal of these
tactics, as she writes in The End of America, is to create “a new
reality in which the truth can no longer be ascertained and no longer
counts.”

Dissent = treason

In recent years, prominent Republicans like Ann Coulter, Melanie
Morgan, and William Kristol have accused liberal journalists of
treason and espionage for publishing leaked material damaging to the
administration, and in February 2007, Republican Congressman Don Young
said “Congressmen who wilfully take actions during wartime that damage
morale and undermine the military are sabateurs, and should be
hanged.”

This would be amusing, were it not for the Bush administration’s
revival of the draconian 1917 Espionage Act after half a century’s
slumber.

And finally, the Bush administration shows contempt for the law.

In The End of America, Wolf writes that Bush has used more signing
statements than any previous president, and by doing so has relegated
“Congress to an advisory role. This abuse lets the President choose
what laws he wishes to enforce or not, overruling Congress and the
people. So Americans are living under laws their representatives never
passed. Signing statements put the president above the law.”

He has also gutted the Posse Comitatus Act, which was created to
prevent the president from maintaining a standing army for use against
American citizens.

Wolf writes that the 2007 Defence Authorization Bill lets the
president “expand his power to declare martial law and take charge of
the National Guard troops without the permission of the governor when
‘public order’ has been lost; he can send these troops out into our
streets at his direction—overriding local law enforcement
authorities—during a national disaster, epidemic, serious public
health emergency, terrorist attack, or ‘other condition.’”

On its own, this is an incredible expansion of presidential power, but
when combined with the use of military contractors like Blackwater it
gives the president almost dictatorial authority.

Wolf shows that fascist shifts don’t happen overnight, but rather over
a course of years during which the fascists’ plans unfold at an
accelerating pace.

Germany in 1933 was further along this path than it was in 1931, and
Germany in 1935 was farther along than it was in 1933.

Similarly, America in 2007 is farther along the path than it was in
2005, or will be in 2009, provided that a massive pro-democracy
movement, complete with impeachment proceedings, doesn’t reverse the
shift while there’s still time.

A simple Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential election won’t do
the job unless the institutional and legal environment created by the
Bush administration is thoroughly dismantled.

Regardless of whether the next president is a Republican or a
Democrat, he or she will inherit a legacy of centralized power that a
democracy simply can’t tolerate.

Left behind

Unfortunately, during the shift opposition politicians and activists
still tend to perceive the world through a democratic frame of
reference, and this prevents them from seeing that their opponents are
no longer operating within this frame.

As the opposition is tying its boxing gloves, the fascists are
breaking out the machetes.

Wolf’s work has its problems.

She doesn't acknowledge that Black and Indigenous Americans have long
lived under quasi-fascist rule, she doesn't examine the role that
previous administrations have played in setting the stage for the Bush
regime, and she doesn't acknowledge the roles played by corporatism,
widespread social dislocation and the radical Christian right in the
rise of a fascist American zeitgeist.

Despite this, The End of America needs to be read by as many people as
possible.

________________________________________________________

Harry

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7534

December 3, 2007

America is Going Fascist

The signs are all there for anyone to see, and time is getting short
for action

by Michael Nenonen


Reading Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young
Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007), I realized the hour is later
than I thought.

Many of us have watched the Bush regime’s actions with a growing
feeling of horror intertwined with a sense that somehow we’ve seen all
of this before, but we aren’t sure where.

We’re confused because what we’re seeing conflicts with unexamined and
deeply held assumptions we have about American freedom.

Wolf’s short but meticulously documented book shows that what is
happening in America has indeed happened many times before, not in the
United States, but rather in places like Chile, Italy, Russia, and
Germany.

In each case, people couldn’t understand why they didn’t recognize
where they were heading before they passed the point of no return.

It's shifting fast

Wolf argues that the United States is undergoing a “fascist shift”
from an authoritarian but still relatively open society to a
totalitarian society.

The techniques for forcing this shift have evolved over the last
century and are now studied by aspiring tyrants the world over.

These methods are even part of the formal curriculum in places like
the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously
known as the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia, where
thousands of Latin Americans have been trained by the United States
government in the most savage techniques of insurgency and
counterinsurgency.

Fascists use ten basic strategies to shut down open societies.

They invoke an external and internal threat in order to convince the
population to grant their rulers extraordinary powers.

They establish secret prisons that practice torture, prisons that are
initially few in number and only incarcerate social pariahs, but that
quickly multiply and soon imprison “opposition leaders, outspoken
clergy, union leaders, well-known performers, publishers, and
journalists.”

They develop a paramilitary force that operates without legal
restraint.

They set up a system of intense domestic surveillance that gathers
information for the purposes of intimidating and blackmailing
citizens.

They infiltrate, monitor, and disorganize citizens’ groups.

They arbitrarily detain and release citizens, especially at borders.

They target key individuals like civil servants, academics, and
artists in order to ensure their complicity or silence.

They take control of the press.

They publicly equate dissent with treason.

Finally, they suspend the rule of law.

All of these strategies are being employed in America today.

Consider the evidence

The Bush administration and its supporters have consistently portrayed
the security threat posed by international terrorists as a threat to
the very survival of Western civilization in order to justify
permanent war and to keep the American public in a state of panic and
paranoia.

The prisons at Guantanamo and God-knows how many CIA “Black Sites”
torture their inmates, even though human rights organizations have
demonstrated that the majority of at least Guantanamo’s inmates are
innocent victims of mass arrests.

The inmates are designated as “enemy combatants” who have no rights
under international or American law.

And there is nothing stopping American presidents from filling these
prisons with American citizens.

In an April 24 2007 article for the Huffington Post, Wolf writes that
thanks to 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.”

She points out that while currently Americans in such situations will
be spared any torture except psychosis-inducing isolation and can look
forward to eventual trials, these rights typically evaporate in the
final stages of a fascist shift.

They're called "mercenaries"

Military contractors are the regime’s paramilitary force.

Blackwater’s mercenaries, many of whom were trained by Latin America’s
most horrific police states, have operated in Iraq outside of Iraqi,
American, and military law, and have murdered uncounted innocent
Iraqis with impunity.

Domestically, Blackwater was contracted to provide hundreds of armed
security guards in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and
there’s evidence that they fired on civilians.

Blackwater’s business plan calls for their use in future disasters and
emergencies throughout the United States, and it’s supported by some
of the biggest powerbrokers in America.

American intelligence agencies are now bypassing court orders to
wiretap citizens’ telephones, spy on their e-mails, and monitor their
financial transactions, and the USA Patriot Act forces corporations,
booksellers, librarians, and doctors to turn over previously
confidential information about Americans to the state.

Thousands of human rights, environmental, anti-war, and other
citizens’ groups have been infiltrated by government agents, many of
whom have clearly acted as agent provocateurs in order to undermine
the groups’ solidarity and to legitimize police actions against them.

Political opponents listed

America’s Transportation Security Administration maintains a terrorist
watch list of tens of thousands of Americans who are now subjected to
security searches and arbitrary detention at airports.

The list includes people like Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy and
respected constitutional scholar Walter F Murphy.

US Attorneys, CIA agents, military lawyers, and other civil servants
who’ve disagreed with the Bush administration have been threatened and
fired.

David Horowitz and his colleagues have mounted a well-funded
nation-wide intimidation campaign that has university students spying
on their professors and that has successfully coerced regents at State
Universities to discipline or fire left-leaning professors like Ward
Churchill.

The regime’s supporters have organized campaigns to damage the careers
of artists like the Dixie Chicks for criticism of the president and
his policies.

The administration has Fox News in its pocket, it has paid journalists
for positive coverage, it has disseminated misinformation through the
media, and it’s ferociously attacking critical journalists.

Arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high.

The Bush administration’s outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame was
done in retaliation against her husband, Joseph Wilson, whose New York
Times op-ed piece exposed lies that the Bush administration used to
lead the nation to war.

Worse than this, independent journalists appear to be marked for death
by American forces in Iraq.

In her Huffington Post article, Wolf writes, “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. . . . 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.” The goal of these
tactics, as she writes in The End of America, is to create “a new
reality in which the truth can no longer be ascertained and no longer
counts.”

Dissent = treason

In recent years, prominent Republicans like Ann Coulter, Melanie
Morgan, and William Kristol have accused liberal journalists of
treason and espionage for publishing leaked material damaging to the
administration, and in February 2007, Republican Congressman Don Young
said “Congressmen who wilfully take actions during wartime that damage
morale and undermine the military are sabateurs, and should be
hanged.”

This would be amusing, were it not for the Bush administration’s
revival of the draconian 1917 Espionage Act after half a century’s
slumber.

And finally, the Bush administration shows contempt for the law.

In The End of America, Wolf writes that Bush has used more signing
statements than any previous president, and by doing so has relegated
“Congress to an advisory role. This abuse lets the President choose
what laws he wishes to enforce or not, overruling Congress and the
people. So Americans are living under laws their representatives never
passed. Signing statements put the president above the law.”

He has also gutted the Posse Comitatus Act, which was created to
prevent the president from maintaining a standing army for use against
American citizens.

Wolf writes that the 2007 Defence Authorization Bill lets the
president “expand his power to declare martial law and take charge of
the National Guard troops without the permission of the governor when
‘public order’ has been lost; he can send these troops out into our
streets at his direction—overriding local law enforcement
authorities—during a national disaster, epidemic, serious public
health emergency, terrorist attack, or ‘other condition.’”

On its own, this is an incredible expansion of presidential power, but
when combined with the use of military contractors like Blackwater it
gives the president almost dictatorial authority.

Wolf shows that fascist shifts don’t happen overnight, but rather over
a course of years during which the fascists’ plans unfold at an
accelerating pace.

Germany in 1933 was further along this path than it was in 1931, and
Germany in 1935 was farther along than it was in 1933.

Similarly, America in 2007 is farther along the path than it was in
2005, or will be in 2009, provided that a massive pro-democracy
movement, complete with impeachment proceedings, doesn’t reverse the
shift while there’s still time.

A simple Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential election won’t do
the job unless the institutional and legal environment created by the
Bush administration is thoroughly dismantled.

Regardless of whether the next president is a Republican or a
Democrat, he or she will inherit a legacy of centralized power that a
democracy simply can’t tolerate.

Left behind

Unfortunately, during the shift opposition politicians and activists
still tend to perceive the world through a democratic frame of
reference, and this prevents them from seeing that their opponents are
no longer operating within this frame.

As the opposition is tying its boxing gloves, the fascists are
breaking out the machetes.

Wolf’s work has its problems.

She doesn't acknowledge that Black and Indigenous Americans have long
lived under quasi-fascist rule, she doesn't examine the role that
previous administrations have played in setting the stage for the Bush
regime, and she doesn't acknowledge the roles played by corporatism,
widespread social dislocation and the radical Christian right in the
rise of a fascist American zeitgeist.

Despite this, The End of America needs to be read by as many people as
possible.

________________________________________________________

Harry