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 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 to 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 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 United States.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
After
we were hit on Sept. 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock.
Less than six weeks later, on Oct. 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 United States 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 -- hydralike,
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 civilization 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 can take 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 firsthand
accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people,
innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the U.S.-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
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
U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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, and 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 U.S. 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 Sen. Edward
Kennedy, a member of Venezuela's government (after Venezuela's president
had criticized Bush), and thousands of ordinary U.S. 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," he said.
"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 U.S.
citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of
mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the U.S. military
before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and
released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon
Mayfield, a U.S. 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 U.S.
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 U.S. 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 United States 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 U.S. military in
Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning
independent) reporters and camera operators from organizations 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 U.S. 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 right-wing
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 U.S. 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 U.S.
citizens will get a trial eventually -- for now. But legal rights
activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush
administration is increasingly and aggressively trying to find ways to
get around giving even U.S. 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
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 Sen. 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 militia 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 W.H. 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 U.S. citizens realizing it yet -- the power over
U.S. 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 U.S. newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a
right-wing 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 United States
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.
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