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TechnoratiFascist America, in 10 Easy Steps
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 today 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' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognize 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 US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 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 US 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 - hydra-like, 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 civilisation 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 center at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes 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 first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-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 offenses, 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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: 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 US 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 Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticized Bush; and thousands of ordinary US 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".
"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 US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. 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 US 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 rightwing 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 realize 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 US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offense - 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 senator 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 militias' 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 WH 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 US citizens realizing it yet - the power over US 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 US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing 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 US 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.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
130 Comments so far
Show AllI'm listening ATL. I agree that even taking Wolfe's argument can add to irrational fear...and of Bush too...as if he is the biggest threat to freedom. How about ole' Abe lincoln? No one ever mentions how Bush's decisions pale in comparison to what occurred during the Civil War. We should guard against fascism, but I've noticed that people only talk about it when a Republican is in the White house. That crap all but disappears during a Democrat..and Clinton's foreign policy wasn't exactly defined as "non intervention".
She misses one biggie. Maybe it could fall under #9 Dissent equals treason, but it should be seperate. They come for the means of the people to resist, meaning weapons. Anyone who lived in Hungary in 1956 remembers how the Soviets came into the homes and took the guns away. Kinda sad that she fails to mention this.
It's been quite a while so no one will probably be back here but let me try to make my original point again because people are accusing me of a lot of things but in this whole board no one seems to address what I was trying to say which is basically that corrupt, destructive forces in politics or in human nature feed off of paranoia. McCarthyism or our current administration use fear and paranoia and so did Hitler. But ironically, isn't comparisons of the US today to Nazi Germany a similar sort of paranoia possibly. Maybe not, I'm just posing the question. But no one's listening. It seems more important to attack me because I'm not cheering along with the mob.
You know, what I'm saying is that people like to invent horrible and evil enemies like commies and terrorists. They can then use the hatred and fear that these evil enemies inspire as a way to manipulate other people. And isn't Hitler the greatest evil enemy in our recent past. And don't these comparisons work as a way to inspire fear and hatred of an evil enemy. Why? Why do we need to fear and hate an evil enemy of any kind? Look at the responses on this board. I said nothing even remotely supporting Bush or his policies but because I questioned things a little I am immediately accused of secretly being one of "them." The hated evil enemy that must be feared and attacked. Is that not like when people were accused in the past of secretly being commies for trivial reasons.
I for one am going to stand up for myself and say fuck you Naomi Wolf for trying to manipulate me with your propaganda but I'm not going to fear and hate any "enemy." Even republicans.
There is still hope that this will not happen. More of our soldiers in the Middle east are beginning to sense that something is wrong with the way they are being used. The general who would have to command the attack on Iran, if it is ordered, has said he will resign if that order is given.
Doesn't a facsist state have to have a large, strong police force to carry out its secret arrests of dissidents? Wouldn't the govt. have to have the support of the military?
Remember the movie,"Seven Days in May?"
Purgegate: More Bush/Rove Soviet Style Thuggery
.
Bush/Rove/Cheney/Gonzalez Commissariat
Political appointees oversee science (FDA & global warming) in this administration.
Political appointees botch, bungle and butcher Iraq reconstruction and Katrina relief.
Political appointees are sent into the CIA executive suite for a political cleansing mission.
Political appointees set up a propaganda office in the DOD to deliberately and maliciously mislead the nation into war while refusing to plan for known obstacles ultimately leading to thousand of troop' deaths and injuries.
The hue and cry over Purgegate is that the Justice Department has traditionally been significantly and honorably immune to rank political interference. Not under our presently governing thugs.
Despoiling democracy and honor while emulating a Soviet/Communist Commissariat model government is the operational and ethical basis of Gonzalez and his handlers.
Good news. If politicizing the Justice Department finally brings out the backbones of our legislators, Republican and Democratic alike, shout hosannas. Citizens of the entire planet sincerely want the America that strives for honor, honesty and equal treatment under the law to reappear.
Craig Johnson
Labels: Bush, Cheney, commissariat, communism, gonzales, Published Letters, Purgegate, soviet
# posted by cognitorex @ 3/25/2007 and carried by Kikoshouse blog
OK.
I didn't read in detail, but I think I see a picture.
I agree with on the Nazis in America I agree. I'll even add
an important(I hope) point: Rockefeller brought from post-WWII Germany Nazi psychiatrists and propagandists - to brainwash the population (success here) and to strengthen the bully (Nazi) party (success here too).
As far as Stalin is concerned, well ... I think you're ill-informed. And no, my source is not CIA. Trust me, I had my more reliable sources.
The fact that Stalin was an enemy of Hitler doesn't mean that he was a good guy.
Ad
This was a response to the second post. I didn't notice the first one. I am reading it.
AD,
I have really very little patience for this BS and justification of ignorance.
Yes, history is written by the victors, but still historians spend their lives to uncover truth, and they have their methods.
It's a pity that you didn't continue your studies.
So, you don't trust historians, you don't bother to search for truth and just repeat the garbage the demagogues offer you
- them you trust. You are very smart.
eurobelle,
AI = Artificial Intelligence, i.e., making computers with human-like capacities to reason, form goals, make plans, and carry out actions, which is particularly worrisome if such computers are connected to some mobile mechanical device (the computer can be inside the moving machine as in the traditional conception of a robot, but that really is not necessary). The upper limits on such machine intelligence could be far above the upper limits on human intelligence.
Science fiction writers who have written for many years about the day when AI-programmed machines will be able to wipe humans from the face of the earth were not engaging in wild speculation. It is a real danger. Bill Joy, formerly of Sun Microsystems, is one figure in the public eye who has spoken often of the dangers. The end could very well start with some fascist power creating AI-programmed fighting machines and using those to dominate others and then others responding by making their own intelligent machines. It could quickly get out of hand with dire consequences.
Frankly, guys, I am pessimistic - sometimes it's just too late - too much money in the hands of the few, the population too dumb etc.
Speaking of coal miners, Thom Hartmann's father was a coal miner, he got cancer because of some toxic conditions, suit
the bastards, and corporate lawyers came to a dying miner.
Guess how many of them? OK, nobody can.
27 suits. Nice, balanced justice. Try not to become pessimistic.
MLO,
I'd like to read the interview with you grandfather. I too come from a grandfather who was a coal miner and he too says that the country needs to unionize again to get things done. Let me know.
Also, don't worry too much about americans being docile. We are not. The media just chooses to say that and not show the protests and rallies that have happened. We are Americans and Americans do not like others telling us what to do. We are a counry of rebels. Remember that always!
When was this a free democracy? I did history in college - including the American Revolution, and last time I checked the current form of government of the USA was initially developed as a representative democracy of landowning white males who were desperate not to allow the riff-raff too much power.
That being said, we had been making slow progress towards truer representative democracy until the unions got scared by McCarthy. These men and women, especially coal and rail workers, gave their very blood for things as simple as worker safety, i.e., removal of dead bodies from the mines. I know, my grandfather was one of those who was there. I interviewed him about it when I was still in Jr. High. That interview radicalized me in some ways. I wish some of the coal mining war survivors were still around to talk to today's youth who don't understand that giving all your time to your job is a bad, bad idea. We have a new company store, its name is Citibank, Deutsche Bank, etc. Nothing changed.
I know people from all kinds of backgrounds - the very rich, to the very poor. The socioeconomic divisions are greater than any of race, creed, or color. Period. The historical record clearly represents that the very wealthy despise the poor and even the "merchant class". The "merchant class" of today includes all white collar workers, the so-called Upper Middle Class. The Republicans do not serve them either. Small business is not served by either party - but especially not among the old wealth elites who really run the Republican party.
The Democrats are no better. Their allegiance is to a foreign power instead of the best interests of the USA.
I agree we need to throw them all out, but after the success of the Populists in the 19th century, laws were purposely passed to prevent that from happening again. Also, there is a basic problem of people not understanding that it makes no difference what you do on the national scale if you are not making a difference on the local scale. Your vote might count locally. But, really, if you don't watch them closely, they don't even bother to count the votes.
Clean elections? What are those?
I am with a growing group of people who are just plain exhausted. We have created the same world that has always been. The rich keep getting money, the poor keep getting poorer. The greedier always wins. The problem is that there is no sense of "virtue" as the Founders would say in the current environment. Only of vigilant warfare for profit. It fits our founding. After all, this nation was started by a bunch of privateers, smugglers, and pirates. Not something the propaganda machine wants the majority to know.
Still, I vote, though I know it makes little difference. I try to learn what I can about local candidates, but the current state of journalism is so bad, that I am unsurprised to find little of use to understand which candidate best represents me. Though, the guy who believed in predatory lending as his duty from God that ran in our local elections was rather soundly trounced. But most unconnected nuts are.
Become the loud-mouth at the school board or the city meetings. Write letters, be a pain locally to get the changes there. Do the same on the county and state levels. Only then will you be heard on the national level. Now, I know the IQ of the average state legislature is less than Congress (a.k.a., immeasurably low), but sometimes you can get through their politics-addled minds.
Pax,
MLO
kivals,
I am not sure I understand
Are against the universal health care and strong unions,
or you stressing priorities in education.
Personally, I am against teaching values only without knowledge - it doesn't work. Besides, isn't this brainwashing? I mean pure brainwashing.
I wonder if I would like to live a world without the humanities, art and social sciences. Do you think it's possible?
Please clarify.
eurobelle,
I am certainly not against any of the goals you mentioned, but I happen to think unless a young generation of computer-savvy progressives comes of age, all the goals are hopeless. With AI, robot armies can wipe out any number of poorly equipped humans, and though counter-measures are always possible, it can become several orders of magnitude more difficult without comparable technical skills and knowledge.
I studied AI in graduate school long ago (leaving it when I realized all the good AI jobs in the US were "defense" related), and I am convinced that devastating robot weaponry is not only possible, but inevitable, and will be coming soon to a fascist government near you. And other high tech weapons that fascist would find very useful are being developed. One uses a form of sound wave to completely debilitate, though not kill, all persons within a certain radius -- perfect for crowd control. I worry that too few progressives think enough about the dangers presented by new technologies as they are too focused on the environmental issues. Usually what gets you is what you are not paying attention to.
Frankly, something else makes me extremely pessimistic – intellectual, and, frankly, ethical limitations of the most.
Whenever there is a talk about activism and changes, people usually proudly announce that they wrote a letter, or distributed leaflets. I haven't heard from anyone: "Starting with tomorrow, I refuse to be a scoundrel. My boss will ask me tomorrow to help to eliminate John Johnson who has been with the company for 25 years, has a decent salary. Our CEO, need more billions, and Johnson has to go. It will be my duty to constantly monitor Johnson, report, irritate him, and when he possibly confronts me, declare him insane. No, I am not going to it."
I haven't encountered such declarations.
eurobelle,
I think the best approach is to teach one's children, or other children, both progressive values and math/science/technical skills. AI (Artificial Intelligence) is coming in the next couple of decades, and it will enable the few to totally control the many, unless of course some of the many have the will and the technical expertise to thwart such plans. The future revolutionaries, "freedom fighters," will be computer jocks disrupting the plans of the empire.
eurobelle, you have made some good points, but as far as "fairy tales" I read, I read them in high school and undergraduate college history text books in the USA, in high school civics and undergraduate college government text books, and I read it today in the US mainstream media, but luckily I've got to the point I can through this BS pretty damn well probably I began to see through it pretty early with the hard core way a lot of this "how saintly, if not godlike Uncle Sam was" and how "demonic those terrible Communists in Moscow" were. I would later become a sold independent progressive journalist in the proud tradition of George Seldes and I F Stone, and do so for years before retiring after becoming financially secure. The journalistic experience helped become even better at sifting through BS. Now journalism is obviously the first draft of history, but since so much of that first draft in this country minus mine and a few others like mine is fairy tales, we are left with fiction passing itself off as history.
Furthermore, history is always written by the victors in wars and other conflicts, which often distorts the hell out of it. Think Mexican War. Would it have been called that if Mexico won it? How about the Napoleonic Wars if France, where the first Napoleon was from had won them instead of the monarchies which ganged up on the French republic? Then try the Indian Wars in this country. Would they have been called that if the Indians won them?
Other fairy tales I've dealt with, and still continue to deal with, include but aren't limited to the way the Communists in Moscow were out to get Uncle Sam and Britannia after the Second World War and just couldn't wait to attack Western Europe. On this I would be in good company with the very independent and impartial Research and Analysis Branch of what was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the USA's official espionage agency during the Second World War and until Harry Truman as president abolished it in 1946.
Now this R and A outfit was doing a good job, but they ended up eliminated in turf war with those who were anything but impartial or independent. How did this happen? Can you say knee jerk anti communist purge? I bet you can if you read "Blowback," a book by Christopher Simpson detailing how hard core Nazis infiltrated and came to dominate the US intelligence community after the Second World War with the help of such powerful people as Allen Dulles big time Nazi lover that he was and cozy dealer with Nazis before the Second World War right up to US entrance into that war, head of the Secret Intelligence Branch of the OSS during and after the Second World War, who brought these very Nazis including some who been high up in the SS into the Secret Intelligence Branch and later into the Central Intelligence Agency when it came into being by purging the records of these Nazis' past. Then these hard core Nazis would put out the same lies about Moscow that they put out to get the Nazis control of the government in Germany. This would end up in the White House, at first being challenged by R and A, but when the fight got hot and heavy, the Secret Intelligence Branch had all its dirty Nazi linen cleaned up, but R and A had one individual who at one time had been a Communist, a party member back in the 1930s, and R and A didn't have this hidden. With Dulles and his gang getting hold of this, they had all the advantage, as Dulles and his crowd had been saying that R and A was pro communist, and R and A had been saying Dulles and his gang were pro fascist, which they were, but the Dulles gang had covered their tracks by so expunging the hard core Nazi past of their Nazis that R and A couldn't prove anything even though it was true, but this one former Communist at R and A finally did it as Harry Truman's administration didn't really know who to believe and weren't at all aware that the source of the lies about Moscow was coming such hard core Nazi types or that would have been the end of the old ball game for Dulles and his gang. With Truman having bought into this fraud, things got even worse. Then Joseph Mc Carthy would come out with his hot air about communists in the State Department, where people from R and A got transferred out of what had been until 1947 the War Department, and would then become the "Defense" Department." These hard core Nazis would continue to dominate the CIA, and some of these Nazis had been on list the top of the US military command in Europe was keeping of people to be arrested, detained and tried for war crimes by a war crimes tribunal there on the European continent.
These Nazis used the USA and the rest of the West to carry out a grand crusade against Moscow, which the Nazis had lost out to, ultimately resulting in their goal of destruction of the USSR being achieved. Now they almost surely have us in their gun sights, but today they may more likely be in Pentagon black ops, as the CIA has lost some of its enthusiasm for W, with his administration outing a covert employee, blaming the 9/11 attacks on the CIA by blaming it on the intelligence community, and by blaming failure to find WMDs in Iraq on the CIA.
But as John Pilger, probably the most respected journalist on British soil has said, the "war on terror" has just been something to take the place of the Cold War by finding a new " "enemy" that we're now supposed be afraid of and hate. These kinds of people always need new "enemies" for us to fight, whether in a war of words and ideas or in a shooting war.
Smedley Butler, a two time Medal of Honor winning US Marine general put it well when he said, "War is a racket." Indeed it is, at least for the few making the piles of money off it, but not for those poor souls who have to go out to fight it.
Kivals,
I don't know anything about technology, and your picture of our future is scary. I must admit the idea of a war on a scale you envision doesn't appeal to me, no matter who wins. I don't believe in inherent superiority of any group, including progressives.
Actually, I was thinking recently about a lie we were told about our beautiful future when computers will work; and we'll spend our happy days on the beach.
In reality, we work like idiots (we actually are), being monitored every second, and the computers, and human (hardly) monitors – monsters are laughing.
I do know quite a lot about societies and human nature, including that
- egalitarian societies are not only more humane, but also much more stable
- it's wise, therefore, to strive for an egalitarian society
What is A1?
Eurobelle, I've read fairy tales in high school and undergraduate history text books in the USA, and today I read them in the US mainstream press. I read it from people who think "they," whoever they are, hate "us."
History, I have to say is written by the victors in wars and conflicts, and this can't help but often distort, and many times, result in fiction being passed off history. Think the Mexican War. Had Mexico won it, would it be called the Mexican War? How about the Indian Wars in the USA? Oh yeah, how about the Napoleonic Wars, if France instead of the monarchies in Europe led by George "nutty as a fruitcake" III had won it?
Correction:
I can't imagine ...
TGRF,
If you were sarcastic and referred to slavery and permanent
wage slavery, I apologize.
I can imagine one can pronounce such BS in all seriousness.
TGRF,
I know how I will die - from laughter.
Can I recommend you familiarize yourself with the history of your own country. You might need go back to school - they are introducing history now.
"easy to subjugate this population, nor any with a history of freedom."
A slogan is a slogan is a slogan.
Can I suggest you manipulate somewhere else.
This albeit earnest article reflects more fear than anything. Perhaps those sharing those fears can take comfort in the 200,000,000 guns owned by American citizens - no one should think it will be easy to subjugate this population, nor any with a history of freedom. This is the actual, if simplistic rationale behind GWB's foreign policy vision; i.e. the world will be a safer place when democracy prevails.
Fears are understandable and warrant sympathy. Fearmongering, when deliberate, is malevolent.
As for the communist / fascist comparison in some of the comments: communist regimes have wrought more devastation by far than all other death-dealing, including plagues. Estimates ( by Russians ) of Stalin's tally range from 50,000,000 to 70,000,000 alone. Globally the number is estimated at over 100,000,000. To me, these regimes are/were indistinguishable from fascism; both subjugate and dominate their populations, those in power thinking the masses unentitled to rule their own destinies.
AD,
I don't know which fairy tales you read, and it doesn't matter.
Can I recommend you familiarized yourself with history (history?, history? what's that?)?
Ah, if I understand it correctly, our brilliant educators
(lead by someone else in this free country) only now are planning to introduce history. They are probably still not sure, whether the students should actually know something or just have fun, fun, fun.
Oh, of course, the criticism of Alexander Cockburn's remark was wrong. Joseph Stalin was certainly not near the tyrant Adolph Hitler was and never supported genocide against anyone. He stood up to fascism by supporting the Spanish republic when no country but Russia would, at least not with anything but lip service
Oh, of course, the criticism of Alexander Cockburn's remark was wrong. Joseph Stalin was certainly not near the tyrant Adolph Hitler was and never supported genocide against anyone. Actually were it not for Stalin, we'd still be fighting the Nazis today or be under the Swastika, ya'll!
Nothing lasts.... this moment this regime this bunch of tyrants- they will falter and fall. The ballyhoo around the word fascism/corporatism seems like some negative mantra....repeated as if its a static condition. Nothing is....it will change.
We can do something about it these people and systems are not all powerful....
The future is not determined we are not fated to be a planet of serfs....
This website itself is a testament....you are not a slave-you are making you voice heard...
If we don't have the internal conditions for being empowered-no one can give them to us....
What can we do to make the world a little healthier today?
I live in a state with large military bases and very pro-military politicians and economy--especially outside the metro area of the largest city which is a good deal more economically diverse than the rest of the state. A disturbing, now prevalent trend I've seen creeping since Collin Powell spewed his first war-trigger whoppers re bogus satellite images of Saddam's tanks approaching the his neighbor's border before Oil War One (and Kuwaiti babies thrown out of incubators--remember that Bush 1 corporate PR fabrication?) is the stench of pervasive cultural militarism in Bush's Amurka and the intellectual laziness and personal cowardice of "mainstream" liberals to resist this.
Twice in the last 48 hours I've been confronted by Republicans claiming (1) No matter what crimes Bush has done he has protected "us" from terrorism, and (2) "All I know is that me and my buddies are fighting for Bush in Iraq so's my little daughter won't never have to grow up and be forced to wear a burkha."
I began to respond with some facts and was interrupted on both occasions by "mainstream" liberals (one an old hippy who long ago fell on his New Age blissed out buttocks so he doesn't actually have to engage in any activism) in the immediate vicinity who sprang to the Republicans' defense to "restore harmony in the debate" as the hippy put it before he began gushing about how the soldiers fighting over in Iraq are the "real heroes," etc. with zero discussion of the real bloody viscera of the war and its hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian victims--U.S. and Iraqi. This is the old 1960s "if you don't support the war you don't support the troops" canard that the Boomer hippy generation--once THEIR asses were no longer in the draft line--utterly failed to learn from.
By corporatist media design NONE of these neo-con dupes or lazy liberals have ever heard of the 2005 National Intelligence Estimate (leaked in early 2006) compiled by over a dozen U.S. military and civilian intelligence agencies that stated that Bush's war policies, far from reducing the threat of terrorism, have substantially increased it. This was confirmed earlier this year by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruikshank of the New York University's Center on Law and Security in their exhaustively documented study on the increase in terrorist numbers and terrorist incidents worldwide since Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003:
http://www.lawandsecurity.org/publications/Iraq_Effect_Full_Study.pdf
Lazy liberals giving cover to Right-wing militarist bull-crap because they are too effing lazy and fearful of disrupting their navel-gazing blissful emotional equilibrium by researching the facts (and thereby being forced to confront the blood and guts horror Team Bush is promulgating on the world--in Somalia now, too, although one hears precious little about it in Amurkan Big Media) is what I'm on about. The smelly squatting, cosmetically surgically enhanced bulk of the Boomer '60s generation has cruelly betrayed subsequent generations--especially with regard to passively allowing the spread of rampant militarism and the looming destruction of a sustainable biosphere for human beings. The environmental threat alone makes the PNAC terror wars pale in magnitude, potential suffering and mass extinctions of human, animal and plant populations. There is the fascism of political systems and there is the timid inward withdrawal of the fearful that is the servant of the now dominant, withered spirit of the times in Amurka: The culturally pervasive fascism of the mind that gives countenance to the outward spread.
Watch as we are yet again herded like sheep into choosing between the 2 corporate candidates in 2008
any candidates planning to actually represent the people will be declared "unelectable" by the corporate owned media well before 2008 (not allowed to debate, rarely, if ever, seen or heard in their media
so we can't support a candidate who shares our values...we must select between the 2 bought-and-paid-for whores our corporate masters will declare as our only real choices....."A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush"..."you're wasting your vote"..."he's unelectable"....let them use their influence to filter me into supporting one of theirs again ?
I'd rather die than contribute to their rigged control of our country again. I refuse to passively participate in the corporate ownership of our country. I'm not voting for their candidates....ever again
TheCommonGoodIllinois@yahoo.com
But will there still be NASCAR, Football, Basketball, Baseball, Hockey,n beer? cable tv an church on Sunday?
The zombies won't notice.
I've been using the "F" word for Bush and his merry gangsters for thirty years and it is quite refreshing to hear someone
ditto - its good to use words to describe and the "F" word describes these monsters best. War Crimes against Humanity.
That's for sure!
I hope you are not planning communist future.
Can I suggest Social-democracy instead?
"The worst communist excesses were nothing compared to those of the fascist, and any real progressive should know this. As Alexander Cockburn has pointed out, Joseph Stalin probably only had at most a few hundred thousand people killed"
Communism wasn't fascism, but Cockburn's statement, if indeed he said it, is embarrassingly demagogical. I have no doubt he knows better.
One can be intelligently and decently progressive, no need to
lie.
What a magnificent article !
You make good points, and almost surely it's as bad as you point out, but comparing the worst excesses of communism to fascism is the fallacy of the false equation. Get real! The worst communist excesses were nothing compared to those of the fascist, and any real progressive should know this. As Alexander Cockburn has pointed out, Joseph Stalin probably only had at most a few hundred thousand people killed, not good, but in no way did he ever consider wiping out people of a certain race, color, creed, ancestry or national origin the way Nazis thought nothing of wiping out all the Jews, Gypsies, etc, and did their damnedest to achieve, but the "terrible" Red Army and Red Air Force got in their damn way, as did some other folks.
But what is absolutely needed, and Cindy Sheehan has called for it, is an real independent of the 9/11 attacks, which hasn't come close to happening so far. The establishment's 9/11 conspiracy theory doesn't get it.
For victims it doesn't matter whether their careers and lives have been destroyed because of Bush, or because of a trustee, supervisor and/or colleagues. Similarly, for institutions it doesn't matter whether they have been destroyed because of Bush or because of a trustee etc. It's indecent to limit one's indignation to Bush & Co. It's wonderful to live a privileged
life, it's less wonderful to live this privileged life in time of general abuse.
It's also naive to expect solidarity.
Frankly, I am sick and tired of this hypocrisy.
I can provide a long list of Ph.D.s who were fired because
they weren't a-ses kissing collaborators, and something tells me that a number of those who are shocked, shocked now, were instrumental. They probably don't recall now; this doesn't change the reality and the memory of the victims. These remember.
Something else, Sam.
We know already that you have no knowledge of history.
So, my lesson #1
-no justice, no peace, no unity.
lesson #2
-in such polarized in economic, legal, political etc. terms society talk about unity is amusing. Continue dreaming.
I am laughing. Loudly.
Dear Sam,
I'd like to remind you that every fascist ruler talks about national unity not, about division.
I know history is not taught in American school.
As far as the rest is concerned, go and report to Rove that I wasn't nice to you.
any sharecropper knows that slavery nevver ended - any wage slave knows the same - lots of folks bemoaning the fate of the US - lots and lots more (native americans, maybe mexicans, many arabs, lumumba's congo, allende's chile and the list goes on, have been waiting for this a long damn time - not to mention the mountains and rivers and salmon and grand banks and four corners and our own bodies with their toxic loads - truly, but for the fact that it has taken too long to die its own natural death and therefore cost so many species their existence (this is no joke! consider the wreckage and the ruin!) this final spiral into oblivion that the USA is on would be cause to rejoice.
Like many others have already said, I have seen this coming for some years now. I first became aware of politics while living in Europe for almost 8 yeas. There was much more political talk among the young, and when Saddam Hussein was gassing people back in the 80's. the streets were filled with posters pasted to walls telling of the USA's aid in supplying the deadly toxins to Saddam. The day Reagan bombed and tried to kill Ghaddafi, I was teaching two students: one from Lebanon and the other from Syria. I felt embarrassed to be from the US.
The other thing I noticed was how much better educated they were – especially in matters of government. The teenagers wee informed and opinionated. Back in the states, were oblivious, or at least the majority of the people were. America was being dumbed down. I cold go on with more examples but I'm tired of writing.
The last thing I want to say is the only reason I support the right of each citizen to carry own a gun is for hunting and protection. With Blackwater becoming a growing paramilitary force in the States, we are all going to need guns if things ever each that point.
I still have no desire to deal with Sam, but I'll restate some of my remarks.
I think the article is missing the analysis of the causes of the disaster (yes, Naomi missed some history classes)
I think it would be nice, if Naomi adds to her vocabulary, such words and concepts as exploitation, and workers right as human rights. It is indicative that she doesn't mention the destruction of the unions.
Violence is not the answer. Our glorious revolution in 1776 changed the form but not the substance of tyranny.
I can't deal now with Sam, but I resent his Rovian twisting and turning.
If my sainted mother were still alive (she would be 86 this coming October), she would be terrified for the remaining future of her two adult kids (me, now almost 50, and my late sister, who would be 43 this past April 12th), and my later father (who would have turned 88 this past March), would be equally concerned, but duly quiet, as was his nature.
What now feels like eons ago, when I was still in my 30's, I took my mother and father to the USS NC ship in Wilmington, NC. There, we saw a memorial to all of the men who died in NC in WWII.
Driving home, mother was in tears, saying "I had no idea so many..." as her voice broke off. Father, relatively silent, serving in WWII as an 82nd Airborne paratrooper, essentially implied that they both knew, more or less, how many, having been through it. I countered, "No father, she means she had no idea how many just from NC." Mother concurred.
As we went more down the road, mother said, "You know dad, when we're gone, there will be no one left to remember." Innocently enough, he disagreed. Agreeing with mother, I said, "No, father, she's right. You and she, your generation, is the last one that lived through it. To me, and my generation, it's merely ancient history that we were taught about, in school. We might know of it, but we cannot remember it, as in having been through it."
At the time, mama's heart felt concern was only that there would be no one left to give the men who lost their lives in WWII their due respect and remenbrance.
But on a side line, she had many a time said, "We must never forget. It can happen anywhere, anytime, even here."
How true.
And saidly, because we were not the ones living through it, we are not atuned to seeing it happen, right before our eyes.
- Wait a moment, I am certainly right, but in totally different way Sam suggests.I won't let Sam to kidnap me.
-"It is saddening to see that the country I grew up in is no longer a freedom based democracy. " I keep hearing this, and I keep asking: "Why did you turn a better country into a worse one" – a totally wrong direction.
- I am irritated. For some reasons, I view Naomi as a person with an impressive range of interests – from her own body parts to her own civil liberties. Did I miss her analytical pieces of health care, wage slavery, Katrina, prison system etc.? Help ....
Well I beg to differ. What "democracy" are you referring to? We began as an oligarchy and a plutocracy if there is a difference. Freedom is not really a political issue since we must first see that we are not free. We have never seen that. The solution lies elswhere and we must see that first. How can we have a "democracy" if we don't apply the principle of freedom to ourselves first, in the workplace as well as the forum? Freedom and democracy are first personal projects. Deep acceptance of the fact that we are slaves may bring personal courage first but who has it?
It is saddening to see that the country I grew up in is no longer a freedom based democracy. What is also saddening is that even when all the pieces are put together the state of denial that some hold. For those who believe that an armed populace forstalls a fascist regime, tell me what good does a .38 pistol do against a cluster bomb? We live in an era where you don't need ground troops to pacify a population when it can drive it back to the stone age. Another sad thought is that a large majority will accept the new regime as long as they are not the ones oppressed. Get with the pogrom! So where does that leave us? Try open revolt and with our media you are the enemy. Try to create change from within and you end up just as corrupt. Pogo was right, we have met the enemy and it is us.
I wonder if the Governors in this country have gotten together with Constitutional experts to discuss the very issue of the Executive declaring Martial Law? Are States bound to obey this Executive Order if there is no breakdown of government function within the State?
What are the Constitutional rights of States under these circumstances?
eurobelle,
You are probably right about the alleged pretender. Most of the con trolls sound so juvenile and this one did not so it threw me off.
I am back with the second, much harsher opinion which stresses the superciality of the article.
My admiration goes to those those who two decades ago saw a problem with American workplace and knew that such society had to end ugly.
To say in 2007:
"There is a problem. Hitler had camps, we have camps ..." is easy, moreover, it's misdirecting - we had sort of camps in years preceding Bush. But one has to have this experience, or at least show interest.
Kivals,
I realized the ATL is a pretender. Now when I actually read the article, I have no doubt about it - there is nothing radical in Naomi's piece.
Progressives: Speaking truth to power, advocating for the welfare of the many and against those who would care only for the few.
McCarthyites: The powerful crushing those who would speak the truth, advocating for the few and against those who would care for the many.
How can anyone possibly compare the two?
I finally scanned the article, which is good, but IMHO still superficial, not analyzing the structural flaws and and changes which took place in decades preceding Bush.
Wolf is probably right about similarities of steps. I don't know anything about Thailand, but I see a difference between a military coup, and the situation in this country.
The process is slow, and the fact that the population is accepting everything (is ready to accept everything) suggests that some important developments preceded Bush.
Naomi mentions some (mostly educational); not surprisingly, she didn't notice "wonderful" American workplace.
Among other things, purges in the non-profit sector preceded to a significant degree Bush.
Many of us have seen the signs and reacted with alarm; this is why I, like many others, want impeachment proceedings brought against Bush and Cheney. Naomi Wolf has made a great contribution by identifying these 10 steps that show the ominous parallel between what is happening here and what happened in so many infamous authoritarian states in the past century. Her analysis needs to be widely publicized.
Perfect.
I agree with "some" and with you.
Some have argued that it's the liberalsd that really keep the system chugging along for the Rethugs. They come in every so often, patch things up, bail out a fleeced program with taxpayer money, help subsidize workers, etc. that companies are too cheap to treat decently themselves, etc.
Read Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath". It describes these "wonderful" government camps for laborers where people had running water, committees, some dignity, etc. And yet, by going about the problem this way, all you really do is force the taxpayer to take up the bill on egregrious labor practices, perhaps even encouraging worse. That's the essential weakness of liberalism, perhaps, in a nutshell: it inadvertently may sometimes aid its detractors. No coincidence, probably.
Better to take on the problem directly, to ask why so few have so much. And how it is that the banks penalize the poor by charging interest, and reward the rich by granting it -- only exacerbating the wounds. Progressive populism is something altogether different.
I still prefer liberals to ... and to pretenders.
Seeing the present criminals as criminals is not enough.
Even a blind person can see this.
We can see deeper.
ATK,
As a well educated from Cambridge, Mass. individual you should be more careful with your terminology.
The suggestion that everyone in Combraidge, Mass. is educated and more importantly can think is funny.
There is a difference between "liberals" and "progressives"
or at least I hope there is, otherwise we are really doomed (one-party system doesn't work).
I am sick and tired of liberals in general, and their main concern to be nice, nice, nice (to the right only)
Usually, they don't have any problem destroying the left and the entire world as a consequence.
Yeah
Wary not weary, perhaps a little weary too. I haven't finished my coffee yet.
Eurobelle,
Thanks for the name-calling. I am progressive, liberal from Cambridge, Mass. and very well-educated.
I think the current administration are a bunch of criminals and perhaps the sleaziest in American history.
But I do see a thin line between many extremists, whether McCarthy, David Icke or Naomi Wolf apparently. As matter of fact you can find similar articles on David Icke's site next to the ones about how Skull and Bones members are a reptilian race and like to slaughter and eat babies at Bohemian Grove every year.
Anyway, this thin line between various radical theorists and the damage and violence radical theorists have inspired gives me pause when I read an article like this is all that I'm saying. I am just weary of keeping things in perspective and not letting paranoia crap cloud your mind and distract from more realistic concerns and solutions.
ATL
OK,
There striking similarities, and we just understand
the direction this country is going.
If the ruling group commits so many crimes and still is in power, there is a problem. The nature of society and the nature
of the crimes indicates that the direction is fascist.
ATL
I don't have time, but I'll give a "quick try":
We don't have power.
We are good analysts.
Something very ugly is happening in THIS COUNTRY, not in Siberia
I suggest you see reality, not Rush's et. al. offer
Ask for help if your educational, intellectual background/abilities don't allow you to see/understand clearly.
I love the concept of Republicans as the "thug caste." Since when is the "thug caste" wimpy and gay?
MCCARTHYISM...
How is comparing Americans to Nazis and all this hysteria and paranoia about our possible descent to a Fascist dictatorship any different than McCarthyism and fear of the threat of Communist Totalitarianism from within?
mtn goat -
it doesnt really matter what the proconsumer crowd thinks cause the grizzlies know they are full of sh*t and grizzlies are never wrong - neither are the mountains or the rivers or the tall and thirsty douglas firs nor the salmon nor the nose that hates machines - them that resist what the mountains want will get theirs in the end - its the most basic kind of morality - if you throw the glass against the wall it breaks. hardly matters what the left or the right think - if you can call any of it thinking.
Thank you for saying way more than what I was thinking. So here's my next question. If Congress has the duty to stop this -- to impeach and indict those responsible -- but they fail to act, are they not guilty of obstructing justice?
There is a danger when comparisons are made to nazi germany and european fascism in WW2, however aptly, to a particular stage in their development. They said then that 'it can't happen here' and joe conason says 'it can happen here'. Well the truth is in this far more modern and electronic, computerized world of ours, that it can't happen here...but something else could! Rather than black shirts and storm troopers, we should fear the unobtrusive fascism whereby true equality becomes myth because an unaccountable and unknown elite has access to powers that they restrict to themselves. Who watches the watchers who are watching us when we aren't even allowed to know that they are doing it? Nor know who is doing it nor even what they are doing really? Who are these people? The truth is...__________(deleted)!
Montemerrick, I wish I shared your outlook on life. :) If you are getting by, then godspeed to you.
I think for me, while being in the workforce for the bulk of my adult life hasn't been a pleasant road, I think it helped at the very least to make me far more politically concerned than I was when I was just a student living off of mom and dad. I was very apathetic towards politics until I started actually working for a living. Then I started to see why it all matters and how working and poor people are getting the shaft. It was a splash of ice water on my face. And it's not just the things that happened to me. I got to know people that had to manage on minimum wage jobs. On the other hand, I got to see corporate greed firsthand. I knew people that made six figure salaries in figurehead positions with so little responsibility, they'd be out getting paid to golf.
When America becomes a land where War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength...
PATRIOTISM is TREASON.
"Who appointed you the anointed in deciding what someone elses best interests are? This is the reason you are resisted in the first place."
All I know is that the right doesn't have my best interests at heart as a working person. They do try to pander to me though. If you are not wealthy, they aren't looking out for you. They act like they do, but they don't. They tell you they're keeping you safe from terror, yet they're trying to bust open the piggy bank of social security. They're taxing you while they give breaks to people who don't need them. They're killing the planet while acting as if it isn't being harmed. They're engaging in illegal, immoral, and expensive military rampages while millions upon millions do not even have health insurance.
A lot of working and poor people will vote elephant because they're pro-life, pro-gun, etc. Meanwhile, the elephants truly only care and cater to a small group of Americans, those with a lot of money. Unless you are upper-middle class, they don't care about you.
yeah quit at the same time
well i guess it just depends on what you value and need.
i get by on very little - and if work starts to take up my time i get quite miserable - so i dont work - i live very cheaply and i am quite happy to drive an ancient car and not all that often - i am quite happy to live in a "dump" (although i dont feel that way about it) i am quite happy to fend for myself - i call it freedom - i call it wilderness - doesnt mean i dont get stressed about the bills - i do - but i got stressed about them wheneve3r i had a fulltime job too - working doesnt cure money stress - it makes it worse - plus life is miserable which has to be the first and most important sign that the path is wrong. imagine if food was like your job!
On March 23, 1924, in his "Speech to the Mayors of Italy's Counties, Gathered for the Fifth Anniversary of the Foundation of the Fasci," Benito Mussolini declared:
"Sirs, one must be either for us or against us. [...] Those who are not with us are against us. The political situation in Italy has never been simpler. [...] We will not give an inch. [...] We have a great Italy to build."
you mean to say that we are not the world's number one good guys of history any more?
"The funny thing about all of this is that our fascist path could all be changed in one or two elections. You people need to have more faith in our democracy."
You're right. If only enough people cared to vote, and if enough of those people who did vote didn't vote against their best interests.
Montemerrick-You have a point, but can most people afford to do what you suggest? I'd like to quit my job too, but I have bills! :) Most people can't afford to work when they feel like it. Now if we all quit our jobs at the same time, that would be one thing.
Let's change things by getting the dirty rats out of Washington!
http://www.IMPEACHBUSH.org
jobs are very overrated - surely money is a necessity but it doesnt have to be a job - take a weeks work as s surveyor and then write an essay the next week - restore some fuirniture on the side and learn the birds in the trees behind your house. working all the ttime at the same stupid job is how you are kept in check - you keep the whole she-bang a going if you keep a-going to the job - mussolini is reputed to have said, as was referenced above, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
if you ask the flora and the fauna ofthe average suburb totalitarianism is now!!!!!
quit your job for a better world, now!
build a barn with your neighbor
plant corn in the football stadium
fill the offramp with soil and raise some cane
The funny thing about all of this is that our fascist path could all be changed in one or two elections. You people need to have more faith in our democracy.
I wish I could afford not to work. I hate my job. Unfortunately, many Americans, the ones who should be out in the streets raising hell, are one check away from sleeping under a bridge. I don't think it's that people love their jobs or their bosses. The people are under the thumbs of the companies they work for. People wouldn't play the lottery or dream of being independently wealthy if they loved to work.
iwarrior,
somehow I didn't notice your post, or was busy typing my own -
similar
I have a knife. But seriously, you're probably right.
"A lot of people I consider "activists" won't miss a day of work to go protest. We are all caught in the web of our debt and overworked, overscheduled lives that doesn't leave us any wiggle room to fight for something we believe in lest we risk losing everything."
A very important point.
Do you think it's deliberate.
I know that greedy bastards want to exploit and exploit, but is it possible that in addition to plain sick greed, there is something else - the desire to keep people "busy."
Europeans, for example, know that a person can be productive only 35-40 hours, and most of them don't work more.
Americans work all these countless extra hours probably not productively, but also away from other activities, such as thinking, networking, learning, protesting.
"A lot of people I consider "activists" won't miss a day of work to go protest. We are all caught in the web of our debt and overworked, overscheduled lives that doesn't leave us any wiggle room to fight for something we believe in lest we risk losing everything."
That's partly how the elites do it. They not only keep us distracted and numb, they also wear us down by keeping us busy. We're working two jobs and going school and spending what little free time we have watching tv or medicating ourselves. Most Americans are treading water. It's not that a lot of them won't miss work, they can't afford to.
One other point about classical fascism (I would argue that what we have is the 21st century version): the complete takeover of all governmental agencies, including the military. Interestingly, we have seen the retired generals who have been most outspoken, at least with regard to the expansionist war with Iraq.
The historian Robert Paxton has also written on fascism. He would include extreme nationalism and militarism as hallmarks of fascism, as well as a masculinized culture that glorifies war and warriors, while relegating women back into the "traditional" role of mothers (of the nation, of course).
The cooption of the middle and lower middle class is also an important factor. Their extreme insecurity is assuaged by grandiose nationalism, although they are exploited as soldiers in expansionist wars, and economically by corporate interests that are joined to the state, either through outright corruption, as we have, or through syndicalist (corporatist) economic structures.
Like peacemaker above, I always had trouble understanding German's descent into fascism, but now I can see it quite clearly.
BUT, unlike in Hitlers Germany, WE ARE AN ARMED CITIZENRY. And, if this fascist state ever tries to materialize, a lot of you will give thinks to the National Rifle Association.
By the way, is there a term for this uniquely American
illness - "love of job," or even better "love of boss?"
frank1569
Are you suggesting that it was the Germans that overthrew Hitler?
Do you really imagine mainstream americans risking their lives for ideals? The fascists will probably never threaten white, Christian Americans who go to work, go to the mall, and come home and watch tv.
A lot of people I consider "activists" won't miss a day of work to go protest. We are all caught in the web of our debt and overworked, overscheduled lives that doesn't leave us any wiggle room to fight for something we believe in lest we risk losing everything.
What we got here is corporfascism. The "monied corporations" Jefferson warned about- Eisenhower's "Military Industrial Complex". They haven't taken away enough to get enough of the people angry enough- just yet. But they (the GOP) have already caused much damage- almost too much- especially to the environment in the post deregulation era (deReaganulation)
I personally agree with those who have said fascism has already arrived. The republican party is America's version of the Nazis and the democrats are still sitting on their collective stools waiting for some bell to ring to come back and join the fight.
It's more than time for a change.....
Two missed points:
One: with very few exceptions, fascists systems never survive very long, and the larger the population, the shorter the reign.
Two: unlike every moment in history mentioned, American citizens are well armed and generally pissed off. Although sheep-like usually, when threatened directly, the bullets will start flying.
Fortunately, since Cheney/Bush has destroyed our military, there aren't enough troops to patrol Camden, let alone impose martial law.
As for the tools available to implement a fascist state, I suppose most here are aware of DARPA's research into bee-sized flying robotic recording devices. If that doesn't suggest nightmare scenarios, I do not know what will.
I don't think its quite this bad yet. There are a few folks left that do more than watch TV and go to the mall.
They are a bunch of stinkers though.
I know a number of people who actually could live without working, but somehow they see a sense of life in working, working, working (so stupid).
I know when my shooting moment comes - when I hear once more
"I love my job."
Find another love. I think the elites would have failed without mass collaboration.