Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps
By Naomi Wolf, Chelsea Green Publishing
Posted on April 28, 2007, Printed on April 28,
2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/51150/
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 Guantánamo 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, 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 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 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 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 Guantánamo 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 servan
