There's a wonderful article by Naomi Wolf in the Guardian this week, which examines the recent military coup in Thailand and the shopping list of freedoms that the regime removed in order to dismantle democracy.
Wolf argues that, although the Thai regime were improvising as they went along, they were essentially following a blueprint that has been set down by fascists over the centuries.
Wolf further argues that, because Americans are born under freedom, they have a very hard time ever imagining those freedoms being removed from them, which actually makes them strangely susceptible to that very thing.
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.
She then sets out the ten steps that a fascist dictator would have to take in order to essentially suspend democracy.
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."
After the horrendous events of 9-11 Bush declared an open ended war, what Orwell referred to as "perpetual war". It is a war which has no easily defined conclusion. It is not, for example, like the Falklands war, where the planting of a flag in Port Stanley tells us that our objective has been achieved. This war is without any obvious conclusion, and this is deliberately so. Only by declaring a war so amorphous could Bush so easily have segued from the pursuit of al-Qaeda to the invasion of Iraq.
From there we know that Bush and Co would have really liked to expand their war into Iran and Syria, another two country's with no link to 9-11. The point of the open war is that Bush can continually claim for himself the power's of a war time President and challenge the patriotism of any who question him. But one must remember that declaring an open ended war was a chosen response. It was not necessary that Bush did this.
He could have decided to track down al-Qaeda, but he didn't. He decided to wage war against terrorism. By casting his net this wide he granted himself an astonishing amount of leeway.
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.
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.
At first we are told the people being sent to such a terrible place are "the worst of the worst". Eventually, of course, Americans will learn that even their own citizens are capable of being thrown into such legal limbo, as in the case of
Jose Padilla, confirmed by President Bush as an "enemy combatant". There are many on the right who take comfort from the fact that American courts have at least ensured that Padilla must face a military tribunal, but even this is not without precedent.
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.
It's very hard when one looks at the tribunal currently being held to come the conclusion that these are anything other than show trials.
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.
I have been writing recently about the unprecedented power that this militia army enjoys in Iraq, where it roams free from any chance of prosecution, but after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Bush employed
these militia armies on American soil. They were reported to have fired at unarmed civilians in that city.
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.
All surveillance programmes are
always to protect the citizen from foreign intervention according to the regime that installs it. The real function of the programme is to discourage dissent and create the fear that one must be careful as one is constantly being watched.
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".
Whilst all this is going on, the definition of terrorism is slowly expanded to include one's political opponents. In a recent change in US law, animal rights activists have been labelled, "terrorists". Yesterday on the radio I heard John Reid refer to hackers as "electronic terrorists". This is what happens, the term expands until it includes anyone who offers any 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.
What kind of person could find themselves on such a list in the US? "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."
But how would one get on to such a list? Professor Walter F Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University, was stopped as he tried to board a plane "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.
So speaking out against Bush's violations of the Constitution is enough to have one included on a terrorist watch list.
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.
There is a long record of the Bush regime and their supporters of
having certain academics removed from their posts because their thinking and teachings were not "co-ordinated" as Goebbels might have put it. We have also recently witnessed the firing of 8 US Attorney's for failing to carry out the wishes of the regime.
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.
Then of course, there are the cases where the US has actually
shot and killed reporters in Iraq and, of course, we have
the US attack on Al Jazeera television.
And, as we
witnessed only
yesterday, there is the almost constant planting of false news stories in the media causing a sort of muddying of the waters, where one becomes unsure of what is true or false, which eventually lessens the citizens demands for accountability.
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.
What's scary about this is just how keen Bush's supporters have been to
label any form of dissent as treason. The most ridiculous example having happened only the other day, when Tom Delay
accused Harry Reid of treason for daring to say that the Iraq war was lost.
One must never forget that Bush has granted himself the power to label any American citizen an enemy combatant; the definition of which he, and he alone, gets to define.
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'."
I've condensed Wolf's article as much as I could and recommend you read the whole thing by clicking on the title. She concludes:
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."
What is undeniable though is that Bush has carried out every action that one would normally associate with the early days of a fascist regime, he has granted himself the same kind of powers and he has done so with Republicans and their supporters applauding him every step of the way and attacking the patriotism of anyone who objects.
Sitting on the other side of an ocean it is very hard to equate the US of 2007 with the US that Bush took over in 2001. The United States of 2001 was not one that anyone on the planet associated with torture and secret detention centres. That was simply unthinkable. Likewise, the suspension of Habeas Corpus was something that I would have imagined Americans would have revolted over rather than idly sitting by whilst these fundamental freedoms were removed.
The only thing that gives me any form of comfort is that the American people had the good sense to elect the Democrats in the November mid term elections and restore a system of checks and balances which the Republicans had been criminally negligent in upholding.
However, that is but a finger in the sea wall with regard to what has been lost.
Click title for full article.
