- 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
recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even
as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much
about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland"
security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland"
- didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
-
- It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George
Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down
an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable
- as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that
it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
-
- 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 civilisation".
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 centre 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, labour 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 metastasise, becoming ever
larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. 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 offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the
Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular
courts to abandon the rule of law in favour 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 terrorise 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 neighbours to spy on neighbours. 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 programme 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 favour 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
organisations 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 criticised 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 penalise 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 organisations 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 criminalise 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 realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly,
foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president
has the power to call any 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 offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We
have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look
like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going
to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
-
- Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder:
it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society,
at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition
leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those
arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades
of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom.
If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
-
- 10. Suspend the rule of law
-
- The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave
the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a
national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare
- he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he
has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and
its citizens.
-
- Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown
and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times
editorialised 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
realising 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.
-
- · Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of
Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited
2007
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