Read This Book
The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot
I normally don't recommend books to people but I can't stop talking about how great this book is. It is simple, poignant, timely, and essential reading for anyone who cares about the country they live in and where it is going.
Don't let the title scare you off, the "end" of America might not be what you have in mind. The end will simply be in America which no longer observes the rule of law, the Constitution. It will be a country that tortures people openly, sometimes with public sanction.
It will be a country that has secret prison systems set up, a country in which American citizens are held and tortured for years without the right to a fair trial.
It will be a country where habeas corpus -- the right to a trial in existence for 600 years since the Magna Carta-- will be discarded upon the sole discretion of the executive.
It will be a country where the media is afraid to speak against those in power.
It will be a country of rampant nationalism and neighbors spying on neighbors all while being spied on by the government. In essence, it will be a very different country then the one you might have grown up in.
Here are the 10 steps;
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy (can be a real enemy!)2. Create a secret prison system where torture takes place (Guantánamo, CIA black sites)
3. Develop a private army accountable only to the president (CIA, Blackwater)
4. Set up an internal surveillance system and monitor at ordinary citizens (NSA wiretapping)
5. Harass citizens' groups (antiwar groups targeted)
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release (Military Commissions Act, suspend habeas corpus)
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press (censor, then accuse Bill Keller, editor of New York Times of treason)
9. Dissent equals treason (Fox, right-wing noise machine)
10. Suspend the rule of law (more than 700 signing statements)
Then check out a MUST READ Naomi Wolf interview Read an excerpt before you buy the book:
Watch Naomi Wolf interviewed on Air America
Listen to a short interview with Sam Seder
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Read also:
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps -- Naomi Wolf, Guardian
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
Naomi Wolf v Alan Wolfe in debate, round one
Is America on the road to fascism?
Editor's note: Two weeks ago, Naomi Wolf, author of the forthcoming The End of America, published an essay in the Guardian entitled "Fascist America, in ten easy steps", in which she argued that, "beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society". She went on to list the ten tactics, which included invoking a "terrifying internal and external enemy", establishing a surveillance system and suspending the rule of law. "As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol," Wolf concluded, "the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded."
The piece was one of the week's most widely read and hotly debated, so Comment is Free has invited Wolf back to do a dialogue with Boston College professor (and homophonous namesake) Alan Wolfe, author of the recent book, Does American Democracy Still Work? The dialogue is in two parts. You can read the second one here.
You and I are in the same position -- and everyone on the Internet. We have to switch our model of leadership and return it to the Revolutionary American model of citizen leaders. The Congress is not going to save us. The mainstream media is not going to save us. The pundits are not going to save us. The U.N. is not going to save us. The European Union is not going to save us. There is not a force on earth that can save us, except for our own talking to each other, clearly and urgently, to explain and convey the nature of this threat, and then for us to take radical action NOW. So that's why I wrote it this way.
Our strategy has to be that thousands, and we hope soon millions, of other citizens who are persuaded by the argument will speak to each other and then mobilize in a hurry to confront these abuses. It depends on citizens acting as journalists, citizens acting as advocates, citizens acting as leaders and revolutionaries to mobilize one another. So that's A.
B is, you're absolutely right about the incremental nature of this kind of shift. That's why I spend so much time looking at the early years of earlier such shifts. Americans tend to think that the closing down of a modern parliamentary society happens in some giant, dramatic explosion. But it doesn't. In a democracy as sophisticated or resilient as ours had been, it's going to be closed down incrementally.
If you go back to Berlin in 1931, it wouldn't have looked so unrecognizable to us. There was a Parliament that was meeting there. There was a constitution. There were abortion rights organizations, human rights lawyers and activists. There were gay rights organizations. There was modern art. People were doing what we're doing. People were going to the movies. They kept living -- and that's why I draw on diaries and memoirs and personal accounts. People were doing what we're doing. They were shopping. They were leading their lives, even as the catastrophe was tightening and tightening around them.
...
The really important thing to understand, which is why I walk the reader so carefully through the way democracies really curve down, is democracies can reach a point of no return. And it's sudden when that happens. And it's disorienting. There's a point at which democracy can no longer heal democracy. People have got to understand that. People need to realize that the day we made it legal, essentially, for the state to torture people, that was one of those vertical lines on the chart. We're now in a place where it is legal, the White House has claimed, to knock on your door or my door, and say: You are an enemy combatant. Come with us. Then there is what Jose Padilla went through, in three years of solitary confinement -- making it difficult to see a lawyer, making it difficult to see his family.
You owe it to yourself to watch this all interview. (From a talk she gave at the University of Washington)
