The End of America
Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
by Naomi Wolf
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007,
paperback
p4
Americans expect to have freedom around us just as we expect to
have air to breathe, so we have only limited understanding of
the furnaces of repression that the Founders knew intimately.
Few of us spend much time thinking about how "the system"
they put in place protects our liberties. We spend even less time,
considering how dictators in the past have broken down democracies
or quelled prodemocracy uprisings. We take our American liberty
for granted the way we take our natural resources for granted,
seeing both, rather casually, as being magically self-replenishing.
We have not noticed how vulnerable either resource is until very
late in the game, when systems start to falter. We have been slow
to learn that liberty, like nature, demands a relationship with
us in order for it to continue to sustain us.
Most of us have only a faint understanding
of how societies open up or close down, become supportive of freedom
or ruled by fear, because this is not the kind of history that
we feel, or that our educational system believes, is important
for us to know. Another reason for our vagueness about how liberty
lives or dies is that we have tended lately to subcontract out
the tasks of the patriot: to let the professionals-Y'' scholars,
activists, politicians-worry about understanding the Constitution
and protecting our rights. We think that "they" should
manage our rights, the way we hire a professional to do our taxes;
"they" should run the government, create policy, worry
about whether democracy is up and running. We're busy.
But the Founders did not mean for powerful
men and women far away from the 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.
p7
In 2002 the Bush administration created and named "Department
of Homeland Security." White House spokespeople started to
refer to the United States, unprecedentedly, as "the Homeland."'
American Presidents have before now referred to the United States
as "the nation" or "the Republic," and to
the nation's internal policies as "domestic."
By 1930 Nazi propagandists referred to
Germany not as "the nation" or "the Republic"-which
it was-but rather as "the Heimat "-"the Homeland
...
p11
At times in our own history our commitment to freedom has faltered.
The Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 made it a crime for Americans
to speak critically- to "bring into contempt or disrepute"-of
then-President John Adams and other U.S. leaders. But Thomas Jefferson
pardoned those convicted under these laws when he took office.
During the Civil War, President Lincoln
suspended habeas corpus, effectively declaring martial law in
several states: Close to 38,000 Americans were imprisoned by military
authorities during the war-many for simply expressing their views.
But when the war ended in 1865, the Supreme Court ruled that it
had been unconstitutional for military tribunals to try civilians.
In 1918, labor leader Eugene Debs was
arrested for giving a speech about the First Amendment; he got
a ten-year jail sentence. Raids swept up hundreds of other activists."
But after World War I ended, the hysteria subsided.
During World War II, the justice Department
rounded up 110,000 innocent Japanese-Americans and imprisoned
them in camps. When the war was over, these innocent Americans
were released as well.
Anti-communist anxiety led the nation
to tolerate the McCarthy hearings; but the pendulum swung back
and Senator Joe McCarthy himself was condemned by his colleagues.
... 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, without looking
at what a pendulum requires in order to function: the stable framework
that allows movement; space in which to move; that is, liberty.
The pendulum cannot work now as it has before. There are now two
major differences between these past examples of the pendulum's
motion and the situation we face today. First, as Bruce Fein of
the American Freedom Agenda and writer Joe Conason have both noted,
previous wars and emergencies have had endpoints. But President
Bush has defined the current conflict with global terrorism as
being 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.
p15
Everything changed in America in September of 2006, when Congress
passed the Military Commissions Act." This law created a
new legal reality that heralds the end of America if we do not
take action. Yet most Americans still do not understand what happened
to them when that law passed.
This law gives the president-any president-the
authority to establish a separate justice system for trying alien
unlawfiul enemy combatants. It defines both "torture"
and "materially support[ing] hostilities" broadly. The
MCA justice system lacks the basic protections afforded defendants
in our domestic system of laws, in our military justice system,
or in the system of laws used to try war criminals-Nazi leaders
got better civil liberty protection than alien enemy combatants,
as did perpetrators of genocide like Slobodan Milosovic. And persons
accused by the president (or his designees) of being alien unlawful
enemy combatants are forbidden from invoking the Geneva Conventions,
a treaty that represents the basic protections of justice common
to all civilized nations. The United States has signed the Geneva
Conventions and agreed to abide by them, and this repudiation
is a radical departure from our traditions. Under the MCA, the
government can used "coerced" interrogation to obtain
evidence. Finally, and perhaps most damagingly, the MCA denies
unlawful alien enemy combatants the right to challenge the legitimacy
of their confinement or treatment. So, while the MCA provides
all sorts of rules that the military is supposed to follow, it
will be difficult, if not impossible to hold anyone accountable
for breaking those rules.
But this is not all. The president and
his lawyers now claim the authority to designate any American
citizen he chooses as being an "enemy combatant"; and
to define both "torture" and "material support"
broadly. They claim the authority to give anyone in the executive
branch the power to knock on your door, seize you on the street,
or grab you as you are changing planes at Newark or Atlanta airports;
blindfold you and put earphones on you; take you to a cell in
a navy prison; keep you in complete isolation for months or even
years; delay your trial again and again; and make it hard for
you to communicate with your lawyer. The president claims the
authority to direct agents to threaten you in interrogations and
allow into your trial things you confessed to while you were being
mistreated.
The president claims the authority to
do any of those things to any American citizen now on his say-so
alone. Let me repeat this: The president asserts that he can do
this to you even if you have never committed a crime of any kind:
"enemy combatant" is a status offense. Meaning that
if the president says you are one, then you are.
p19
John Adams letter to Abigail Adams, July 7,1775
But a constitution of government, once
changed from freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost,
is lost forever.
p23
... historians focus on how populations in fascist or totalitarian
systems adapt to fear through complicity: In this view, when a
minority of citizens is terrorized and persecuted, a majority
live out fairly normal lives by stifling dissent within themselves
and going along quietly with the state's acts of violent repression.
The authors of an oral history of Nazi Germany point out that,
though it may sound shocking, fascist regimes can be "quite
popular" for the people who are not being terrorized.
Both perspectives are relevant here: Top-down
edicts generate fear, but when citizens turn a blind eye to state-sanctioned
atrocities committed against others, so long as they believe themselves
to be safe, a fascist reality has fertile ground in which to take
root.
p23
Huey Long (attributed)
When America gets fascism it will be called
anti-fascism.
p25
We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow eternal,
ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults. But
the Founders would have thought we were dangerously naive, not
to mention lazy, in thinking of democracy in this way. This view
- which we see as patriotic - is the very opposite of the view
that they held. They would not have considered our attitude patriotic
- or even American. The Founders thought, in contrast, that it
was tyranny that was eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding
all assaults, whereas democracy was difficult, personally exacting,
and vanishingly fragile.
p35
John Adams
Fear is the foundation of most governments;
but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men, in
whose breasts it predominates, so stupid and miserable, that Americans
will not be likely to approve of any political institution which
is founded on it.
p40
Hitler's Germany was no anarchic state: He used to law to legitimate
virtually everything he did. Hitler often boasted that "We
will overthrow Parliament in a legal way through legal means.
Democracy will be overthrown with the tools of democracy."
"I can say clearly," he announced at a Nuremberg rally
in 1934, "that the basis of the National Socialist state
is the National Socialist law code." He called Nazi Germany
"this state of order, freedom and law:"'
Dictators can rise in a weakened democracy
even with a minority of popular support. Hider never won a majority:
In the election in 1932, only 13.1 million Germans voted for the
Nazi party. Although National Socialism was the largest single
party, the Nazis had fewer seats in government than the combined
opposition parties did. At that point they could still have been
defeated." Their numbers declined further in the next election.
At that critical time, Brownshirts waged
a campaign of violence against Nazi Party opponents in the streets.
A sense of crisis descended on the country. A coalition of conservatives
united to provoke a constitutional crisis in Parliament as well.
Lawmakers then engaged in frenzied negotiations to head off civil
war. The conservative majority still believed at that point that
if Hider were appointed Reich Chancellor they would be able to
control him. They made a deal: Hitler was sworn in as Reich Chancellor
entirely legally on January 30, 1933.
But Nazis directed events to cascade rapidly
after that: They staged torchlight marches while all marches by
the Communist opposition were forbidden. When thousands of citizens
marched against the new government nonetheless, police arrested
their leaders. Twenty opposition newspapers took issue with the
new Nazi leadership-but then the papers were banned; local authorities
cracked down on free assembly across the country.
p41
Hitler told the Cabinet that an amendment to the Constitution
was required, the Enabling Act, which would allow him permanently
to circumvent some powers of the Parliament. It was now legal
for the state to tap citizens' phones and open their mail."
Appalled at the terrorist threat, and
not wanting to be seen as unpatriotic, there was little debate:
lawmakers of all parties passed the Enabling Act by a wide majority:
441 to 94. The constitution remained, but from then on, Hitler
could govern by decree.
p43
... the surveillance industry is huge business: "[S]urveillance
technologies are emerging as one of the ripest plums for companies
to pluck in the new 'anti-terrorism biz.' In 2003, business writers
estimated that this burgeoning industry was worth $115 billion
a year. If trends continued, they estimated, the windfall from
new surveillance and security demands would bring in $130 to $180
billion a year by 2010.
p43
A 2003 study found that 569 companies had registered Homeland
Security lobbyists after 9/11.2' The New York Times reported that
"the major defense contractors want to move into the homeland
security arena in a big way." Dr. William Haseltine, who
sits on the boards of many of the organizations that analyze this
industry, including the Trilateral Commission and The Brookings
Institution, and who is one of the founders of the American Freedom
Campaign, says that the "security-industrial complex"
rivals the "military-industrial complex" in influencing
policy.
p43
Peace is bad for business. When the former Soviet Union fell apart,
the U.S. defense industry was staring into the face of a falling
market share: To grow, it would have to find a new enemy. It would
also help if it expanded its product line from building fighter
jets to the newfangled demand for applications involving surveillance.
Dr. Haseltine points out that the Department
of Homeland Security has, like the Defense Department, an external
corollary in private industry; so the relationships between the
two departments are now institutionalized.' The Department of
Homeland Security will be almost impossible to dismantle whether
or not it is successful in protecting Americans: An $1 15-billion-a-year
industry can exert major pressure on policy-making, and the Department
of Homeland Security is not going to go away, even if tomorrow
all the Muslim terrorists in the world were to lay down their
arms.
p45
Fifth Amendment to the Constitution
No person shall be ... deprived of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law...
p45
Sixth Amendment to the Constitution
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused
shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial
jury... and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation;
to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory
process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the
Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
p45
The Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Since then, our Western legal
tradition has held that everyone deserves some kind of judicial
process before being thrown into prison. This simple yet radical
notion that you cannot be unaccountably imprisoned is the cornerstone
of all democracy. We Americans expect that we can't be thrown
into jail without hope of getting out. That faith is so essential
a part of our liberty that we scarcely think about it.
This guarantee that you can't be randomly
jailed is strengthened by the concept of habeas corpus. This is
the law, dating from 1679, that undergirds our freedom as Americans.
The phrase comes from the Latin; it is a writ "to have the
body." Having the right to habeas corpus means that if they
grab you and throw you in jail, you have the right to see the
evidence against you, face your accusers, and have a hearing before
an impartial judge or jury to establish whether you actually committed
the crime of which you are accused. In short, it means that if
you are innocent, there is hope that you can prove that you are,
and hope that you can eventually get out. It means your innocence
protects you.
Your innocence does not protect you in
a dictatorship.
Just as habeas corpus, or some equivalent
procedure, is the cornerstone of virtually every democracy, so
a secret prison system without habeas corpus is the cornerstone
of every dictatorship.
p51
Eighth Amendment to the Constitution
Excessive bail shall not be required.
. nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
p51
Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights
"Guantánamo is a twenty-first
century Pentagon experiment that was, in fact, outlawed by the
Geneva Conventions of 1949."
p51
Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights
"[Guantánamo] is similar in
purpose to the German World War II operations that led to them
{Geneva Conventions] ban: it is an interrogation camp, and interrogation
camps are completely and flatly illegal."
p52
According to a Seton Hall University study, most of the Guantánamo
prisoners are innocent, and were swept up by Northern Alliance
warlords in Afghanistan simply because the United States had offered
bounties of up to $5000 per prisoner, a major sum for that area.
The warlords often simply gave the United States names of neighbors
with whom they had disputes, or even of random villagers, to get
the money.
p54
Even after Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006,
most Americans continue to assume that the only way one can be
subjected to "harsh interrogations" or other abuse is
if one is actively engaged in terrorist crimes against the United
States. Even now, many well-informed people believe that you can't
possibly be mistreated if you are a U.S. citizen.
But President Bush has claimed the "unilateral
authority" to "arrest virtually anyone, anywhere, citizen
or noncitizen, even in the United States, if he deemed them an
enemy combatant," warns [Michael] Ratner.
p57
Bybee-Gonzales 2002 "torture memo"
[Torture] covers only extreme acts. Severe
pain is generally of the kind difficult for the victim to endure.
Where the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to
that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or
organ failure. Severe mental pain requires suffering not just
at the moment of infliction but it also requires lasting psychological
harm, such as seen in mental disorders like post-traumatic stress
disorder. Additionally, such severe mental pain can arise only
from the predicate acts listed .... Because the acts inflicting
torture are extreme, there is significant range of acts that though
they might constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or
punishment fail to rise to the level of torture."
p59
Michael Ratner
"The Pentagon has made up a new term
"enemy combatant'... This is a totalitarian system in which
there are no checks or balances on the executive. The president
can do whatever he wants, acting as a dictator. In this system
the courts have no independent function and can't protect anybody's
rights...
p59
Michael Ratner
... the president can designate people
enemy combatants and detain them for whatever reason he wants
... there are no charges and prisoners have no lawyers, no family
visits, no court reviews, no rights to anything, and no right
to release until the mythical end to the "war on terror."
p69
Military tribunals are the enablers of a fascist shift.
Lenin responded to an assassination attempt
by setting up secret military tribunals that bypassed the established
court system." Mussolini set up military tribunals to dispense
summary justice. Stalin used a revived system of secretive military
tribunals that also bypassed the judiciary.
The Nazis also setup a tribunal system,
"People's Courts," that bypassed the formal legal system.
These courts had originally been established as "an emergency
body set up to dispense summary justice on looters and murderers"
in 1918. These "courts" were able to sentence those
charged with "treason" and were characterized by "the
absence of any right of appeal against their verdicts." The
"will of the people" took the place of the rule of law.'°
When the Nazis first came to power, not
only was there still an independent judiciary in Germany-there
were still judges outraged at SA and SS abuses of prisoners, and
human rights lawyers who shared their outrage. Earlier, one of
these independent lawyers had actually sought to prosecute the
SS for prisoner abuse. It was at that point that the "People's
Courts" went after the lawyers, the military tribunals were
strengthened, and Hitler sought legislation that retroactively
protected the SS from prosecution for acts of torture."
p81
Ari Fleischer, former Bush White House Press Secretary, 2001
People need to watch what they say, watch
what they do.
p83
In China, Communist officials subject citizens to three forms
of government surveillance, together called the "iron triangle."
(Bush referred to three of his aides as "the iron triangle.")This
consists of the residence permit, which limits where you live;
the secret personnel file, which records your sins and political
liability; and the work unit, which supervises every aspect of
your life. The dangan, or secret personnel file, shadows every
Chinese citizen. "The dangan looks like a manila envelope,
and there is a special postal system for transferring them around
the country. If you make a serious political mistake, your leaders
put a note in your dangan, and it will haunt you in the future
whenever you try to change your job, go abroad, or get a promotion
."
p85
Dictatorships use citizen surveillance in a clear way: to blackmail
and coerce the people, especially critics. In the 1960s and 1970s.
Edgar Hoover's FBI amassed files on the private lives of political,
union, Civil Rights, anti-war, and other leaders, and blackmailed
or harassed them. The FBI's Counter Intelligence Programs (COINTELPRO)
actions against civil rights workers and the left in the 1960s
included planting fake evidence on them, sending bogus letters
accusing them of adultery to ruin their marriages (one fake letter
called Dr. King an "evil, immoral beast" and suggested
he kill himself), disclosing activists' sexually transmitted diseases,
tapping their phones, getting activists fired from their jobs,
distributing false articles that portrayed them as drug abusers,
and planting negative articles about them in newspapers.'
p89
First Amendment
Congress shall make no law.. . prohibiting...
the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition
the Government for a redress of grievances.
p94
... the [Transportation Security Administration] TSA Administration
does keep a "list." The American citizens on the list
who do not fit a terrorist profile range from journalists and
academics who have criticized the White House to activists and
even political leaders who have also spoken out.
These TSA searches and releases would
be trivial in a working democracy. In the 1960s, peace activists
found it merely irksome to be trailed by FBI agents, and in the
1980s those who organized The Committee in Solidarity with the
People of El Salvador (CISPES) on college campuses were even amused
sometimes to find, on submitting a Freedom of Information Act
request, that there was a file open on them. But once the first
steps in a fascist shift are in place, being on "the list"
is not really funny any more.
... Now there are tens of thousands of
people on the list. Where did the list come from? In 2003, President
Bush had the I intelligence agencies and the FBI create a "watch
list" of people thought to have terrorist intentions or contacts.
These agencies gave the list to the TSA and the commercial airlines.
60 Minutes got one copy of the list; It was 540 pages long. That
list of people to be taken aside for extra screening had 75,000
names on it. The more stringent "no-fly list" had 45,000
names; before 9/11 there were just 16 names. The list is so secret
that even Congresspeople have been prevented from looking at it.
People on the list endure searches that can last for hours. One
American citizen, Robert Johnson, described "the humiliation
factor" of being strip-searched: "I had to take off
my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off
ç my socks. I was treated like a criminal." Donna
Bucella, who was at that time head of the FBI program that oversaw
the list, told 60 Minutes, "Well, Robert Johnson will never
get off the list."
On December 6, 2006, Democrats in Congress
tried to find out more about recent reports that the Department
of Homeland Security "was using a scoring system" that
rated the dangers posed by people crossing American borders. The
Democrats were worried that these lists did not simply keep people
from flying-they could keep them from getting jobs as well. According
to the New York Times, Vermont Senator Patrick J. Leahy said that
"the program and broader government data-mining efforts could
make it more difficult for innocent Americans to travel or to
get a job without giving them the chance to know why they were
labeled a security risk." So now there is not just the anxiety
that you might be detained - you could also, if you are on certain
secret lists, be turned down for a job and never know why.
p98
... in the 1950s the FBI confiscated the passports of intellectuals
and journalists who had been critical of anticommunist witch hunts.
p101
Fourth Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in
their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants
shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation,
and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized.
p103
Every pro-democracy movement depends on people being willing and
able to march as a mass; the sheer numbers of citizens is one
of a budding or threatened democracy's most potent weapons. It
is masses of people united who brought down the Berlin Wall; stood
up to Chinese tanks; and overwhelmed a dictator in the Philippines.
Massed citizens ended Jim Crow laws and brought the war in Vietnam
to a close. It is so simple a tool, but so powerful.
This is why a dictatorship restricts the
movements and assembly of its citizens-usually through municipal
ordinances and curfews: Mussolini's arditi, for instance, warned
Italian citizens to stay indoors during the fascists' mass rallies.
In Mexico, police shot at and wounded student protesters in 1968.25
General Pinochet's forces also fired at protesters in 1982.26
Suppression of protests habituates citizens to the idea that the
state has the right to direct their movements and to disperse
large groups or to keep them from gathering in the first place.
p106
In 2001, the National Science Foundation made it clear that its
grants would no longer go to research on the basis of the science
alone if that research undermined the Bush administration's agenda.
p108
Whether driven by Mussolini or by Goebbels, by Pinochet or by
China's Politburo, it's always the same tactic: The state leans
on university administrators, who lean on professors and students.
Italian Fascists leaned on university
rectors to scrutinize the politics of those whom they oversaw:
The rector of Milan's Catholic University actively informed on
politically anti-Fascist students to the secret police. If you
were either a student or a professor in Mussolini's Italy, expressing
unpopular views could get you fired-or even arrested and sent
to internal exile. By 1927, if you wanted to secure welfare benefits
or get a job or a promotion, citizens, including academics, faced
a political litmus test.'°
Germany emulated the tactic: From the
early 1930s, professional purges led so many Jewish and "communist"
academics and scientists to emigrate that this led to a major
brain drain. By 1933, about 2,000 of the nation's premier artists
and writers had fled as well." The Nazi periodical The Nettle
depicted this emigration as "a triumph for the German nation."
The National Socialist German Students'
League was set up in 1926. It sought to get independent professors
fired and to direct the universities' resources toward Nazi goals
rather than toward pure research. By 1933, Propaganda Minister
Goebbels set in motion one of these purges: "By the beginning
of the academic year 1933-34, 313 full professors had been dismissed
.... By 1934, some 1600 out of 5000 university teachers had been
forced out of their jobs .... Very quickly, newly Nazified Education
Ministries made political criteria central not only for appointments
but also for teaching and research:"' On May 10, 1933, pro-Nazi
students also orchestrated a series of book burnings-events designed
to look "spontaneous" but actually directed behind the
scenes by Goebbels.'
This pressure on students and academics
worked in Chile in the early 1970s as well. Chilean students had
been among the few who still dared to march, hold meetings, pass
out flyers, and create posters attacking Pinochet after his military
coup. But Pinochet purged nonaligned academics and university
administrators and put his own military officers in those positions.
He closed down whole departments, gutted some university programs,
and moved others to new locations. He made it clear that student
life was now under new management: that of his cronies. It was
obvious to Chilean academics that they had to support the Junta
or give up their careers."
Students and academics are always democracy's
foot soldiers: Czech students helped bring about the Prague Spring
democracy movement. Students in Shanghai and Beijing led the democracy
movement in 1989: It was Chinese art students who set up the statue
of Lady Liberty in Tiananmen Square.
p114
First Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting
an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
p114
In all dictatorships, targeting the free
press begins with political pressure-loud, angry campaigns for
the news to be represented in a way that supports the group that
seeks dominance. Attacks escalate to smears, designed to shame
members of the press personally; then editors face pressure to
fire journalists who are not parroting the party line. A caste
of journalists and editors who support the regime develops, whether
out of conviction, a wish for advancement, or fear.
Such regimes promote false news in a systematic
campaign of disinformation, even as they go after independent
voices.
America is still a fairly open society
in which assertions can be independently verified and a thriving
Internet community can tear apart false allegations. Even in the
United States, though, opinion is being penalized, and false news
is being disseminated which disorients the public.
p123
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
'The great masses of the people will more
easily fall victims of a big lie than a small one."
p126
Adolf Hitler
"... all effective propaganda must
be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans
until the last member of the public understands what you want
him to understand."
p128
Democracy depends on a social agreement that is so obvious to
us that it usually goes unspoken: There is such thing as truth.
In an open society, we know facts may be hedged and spun in the
back-and-forth of debate, but truth is the ground from which the
edging or spinning begin. Democracy depends upon accountability;
accountability requires us to be able to tell truth from lies;
and to be able to tell truth from lies, we all first must agree
that truth matters.
p130
Once you accomplish this flooding of the plain of discourse with
lies, you are much closer to closing down an open society. If
citizens can't be sure you are telling the truth or not, you can
manipulate people into supporting almost anything the state wants
to undertake; and it is also much more difficult for citizens
to advocate or mobilize on their own behalf: How can they be sure
what is right and what is wrong?
At a time such as this, it -is up to U.
S. citizens who are not part of the formal media world to publish
online, research aggressively, check facts assiduously, expose
abuses, file Freedom of Information Act requests, publish 'zines,
write op-eds, and take ownership of producing as much of the news
and information stream as they can.
... Blogging has to lead the way, because
this is the access point for citizen journalism. But bloggers
must take their impact far more seriously, becoming warriors for
truth and accountability: Citizens have to start to produce reliable
samizdat. Opinion is important, but opinion alone is totally inadequate
when the ground of truth itself is under assault. Bloggers must
become rigorous and fearless documentarians and reporters-not
just to critique the news, but also to generate the news. Citizens
in every venue must now apply to their work the accuracy and accountability
that news editors have traditionally expected of their writers
and researchers. The locus of the power of truth must be identified
not in major news outlets but in you. You - not "they"
- must take responsibility for educating your fellow citizens.
p138
In 1917, the nation was at war; of course we need to root out
spies during wartime. But its history is sinister.
In the nineteen-teens, a wave of left-wing
activism swept the nation. Many of the activists working for better
conditions and higher wages were also against the nation's entry
into the war.
So as the country prepared for war, President
Woodrow Wilson's communications machine issued a wave of propaganda
to whip up war fervor. Congress quickly passed the 1917 Espionage
and Trading with the Enemy Act, which criminalized antiwar remarks.
Hundreds of American citizens were prosecuted for objecting to
military recruitment or for speaking or writing things that could
remotely be interpreted as dissent from the government's line.
Citizens' meetings were raided by government spies and there were
sweeping arrests without warrants. It was against the law under
the 1917 Espionage Act to mail an antiwar opinion or even to advocate
for a referendum on whether or not the United States should enter
the war. Officials of the post office leaked files on antiwar
"traitors" to newspapers.
Sentences were severe: A Kansas City man
got ten years in prison for having written a letter to a newspaper.
A mother of four criticized the war and got five years in jail.
Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate, tried to challenge the Act
in 1918, invoking the First Amendment. Debs was found guilty and
was sentenced to ten years."
The Palmer Raids were the culmination
of these events. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer used the
1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act to gather information
on 260,000 citizens; the raids arrested 10,000 citizens as well
as immigrants in 1919. The mass arrests were warrantless and the
authorities created fake documents to deport whom they could.
Teachers, librarians, and working men and women were jailed. Scores
in Connecticut alone were "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured
and threatened with death in futile efforts to extract confessions."
But in spite of all these arrests and imprisonments, evidence
to support Palmer's accusations of a revolutionary network never
surfaced."
The pendulum swung back: a group of patriotic
lawyers, led by future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter,
issued a report calling the raids and arrests "utterly illegal."
Palmer's power waned. Nonetheless, the fear remained. After the
Palmer raids, many Americans were scared to subscribe to certain
journals; teachers policed what they said in the classroom; editors
weighed ) their words. Dissent was muted for a decade.
p139
In November of 2006, the Senate passed The Animal Enterprise
Terrorism Act-which allows federal prosecutors to "enhance"
prison terms for convicted activists. When I first saw this, I
thought that it was likely that soon an American environmentalist
or animal rights activist would be prosecuted severely under "terrorism
enhancement" guidelines aimed at crimes against animal processing
facilities. Indeed, those trials began seven months later. The
"terrorists" being sentenced for attacks on commercial
processing facilities now looked like the boys and girls next
door.
p142
Presidential Oath of Office
I do solemnly swear... that I will faithfully
execute the office of President of the United States, and will
to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution
of the United States.
p143
Is it reasonable - is it really a matter of common sense - to
assume that leaders who are willing to abuse signing statements;
withhold information from Congress; make secret decisions; lie
to the American people; use fake evidence to justify a pre-emptive
war; torture prisoners; tap people's phones; open their mail and
e-mail; break into their houses; and now simply ignore Congress
altogether - leaders with, currently, a 29 percent approval rating
- will surely say, come 2008, "The decision rests in the
hands of the people. May the votes be fairly counted"?
p144
Bush has used more signing statements than any other president.
The way Bush is using signing statements essentially relegates
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.
... Fascists coming to power in a weakened
democracy simply start to ignore those assumed agreements. What
has happened in the past is that at a certain point in a weakening
democracy, would-be dictators pretend that everything is as it
should be, but simply stop responding to the will of the people
and the representatives. While the nation is trying to grapple
with this interim period, then such leaders deploy sudden unexpected
changes that assertively upend Parliamentary protocols and expectations.
At this point, the speed of these moves
itself is disorienting: If it takes people some time to figure
out what has happened. (In a very moving scene, Italian legislators
were still frantically trying to engage in standard political
negotiations with Mussolini-even as he simply waited for them
to realize that the time for negotiating was over.) That psychological
hangover-that delay in "getting it"-is a very dangerous
time. This is the moment when action is most necessary, and this
is the moment when the window is closing.
In Italy and Germany, legislators kept
believing that they were still engaged in the negotiated dance
of democracy-even as the militaristic march of dictatorship had
already begun.
At a point in both Mussolini's and Hitler's
takeovers, citizens witnessed a stunning series of quickly escalating
pronunciamentos or faits accomplis. After each leader made his
bids for power beyond what the Italian Parliament and the German
Reichstag allowed him, each abruptly started to claim all kinds
of new rights that were extra-parliamentary: the right unilaterally
to go to war, to annex territory, to veto existing laws, or to
overrule the judiciary.
"I am not a dictator," said
Hitler in 1936. "I have only simplified democracy:"
At this stage, shock follows shock so
quickly that the civil society institutions start to reel. At
this point, in weaker democracies than ours, the police forces
and the army are negotiated with. In any late shift, the final
stage is the establishment of government by emergency decree or
actual martial law and the leader's assertion-usually using the
law to defend this assertion-that he is above the law, or that
he is the law: the decider.
This is a classic coup: In Chile, in 1973,
during a national strike, rumors circulated daily that there would
be a military coup.
Early in the day on September 11, 1973,
the military left their barracks before dawn and occupied most
of the radio stations. They began broadcasting marches and periodic
bulletins that they were assuming control of the country. They
offered [President] Allende a plane to fly out of the country
and declared a national curfew that would begin at 11:00 a.m.
Informed of the military's demands, Allende first told all the
workers to go into the streets and defend the government, but
he later changed his mind and asked them to remain alert at their
factories. Allende refused to surrender, so at noon the air force
bombed the national palace. Allende died.... The military began
arresting a number of prominent government leaders while others
sought refuge in foreign embassies.'
Some opposition members tried to resist
but found they could not overcome the power of the military. The
game was quickly over.
Pinochet even had a commission rewrite
the Constitution; the logic of the rewrite is echoed in the U.S.
Fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Bill: The military could
intervene on behalf of the State whenever there was a threat to
the state.
Historically, the shift to martial law,
or to government by emergency decree, generally takes place during
a crisis. A crisis allows a would-be dictator even in a democracy
to use emergency powers to restore "public order." This
kind of thing won't happen in America.
But we now have a legal infrastructure
in place that could support a "paper coup"-a more civilized,
more marketable version of a real crackdown.
At the end of September 2006, with little
outside debate, Congress passed the Fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization
Bill-a bill that, according to journalist Major Danby, represents
"a sizeable step toward weakening states' authority over
their [National] Guard units." He continues: "The provision
make[s] it easier for the President to declare martial law, stripping
state governors of part of their authority over state National
Guard units in domestic emergencies."
This guts the Posse Comitatus Act, the
provision that the states control their own National Guard units.
When the president invokes section 333, he may expand his power
to declare martial law and take charge of the National Guard troops
without the permission of a 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:' He can direct these
troops to disperse citizens-that is, us-and direct them to stay
in their homes. The president must submit a report to Congress
within 24 hours-after the fact, nonetheless.
According to this new provision, the president
on his or her say-so alone can send troops from Tennessee to-
quell what he or she calls a threat to civil order-say, a peace
march-in Oregon, over the objections of governors of both states.
The president can send what has become his or her army, not the
people's, into our nation's streets and not just this president,
but any president in the future may do this.
Fascism watch
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