Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps

By Naomi Wolf, Chelsea Green Publishing
April 28, 2007

Alternet Editor's note: This is adapted from Wolf's forthcoming book
"The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot."

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 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 to
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 realize.

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 United States.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.

After we were hit on Sept. 11 2001, we were in a state of national
shock. Less than six weeks later, on Oct. 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 civilization." There have been other
times of crisis in which the United States 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 -- hydralike, 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 civilization 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 Guant=E1namo Bay to be situated in legal "outer
space") -- where torture can take 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, labor 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, Guant=E1namo 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 metastasize, becoming ever larger and more
secretive, ever more deadly and formalized. We know from firsthand
accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people,
innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the U.S.-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 Niem=F6ller, 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 Guant=E1namo
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 favor 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 terrorize 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 neighbors to spy on neighbors. 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 program 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 favor of peace, found itself
being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches
that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under U.S.
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, and 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 organizations engaged in peaceful
political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist
threats" as it watches ordinary U.S. 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 Sen. Edward Kennedy, a member of Venezuela's
government (after Venezuela's president had criticized Bush), and
thousands of ordinary U.S. 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," he said.

"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 U.S. citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guant=E1namo who
was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by
the U.S. military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has
been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a U.S. 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 penalize 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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
United States 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 U.S. military in Iraq firing upon
or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters
and camera operators from organizations 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 U.S. military and taken to
violent prisons; the news organizations 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
criminalize 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 right-wing
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 U.S. 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 Guant=E1namo's, in every
satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at
Guant=E1namo, is all isolation cells.)

We U.S. citizens will get a trial eventually -- for now. But legal
rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the
Bush administration is increasingly and aggressively trying to find
ways to get around giving even U.S. 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
editorialized 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 Sen. 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 militia 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 W.H. 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 U.S. citizens
realizing it yet -- the power over U.S. 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 U.S. newspaper were charged with
treason or espionage, as a right-wing 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 United States 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.