A Fascist US in 10 steps

[alanora]

here goes an attempt at posting via pasting....

Editor's Note:

Here is an article for every patriot who loves freedom.
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there
are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take
to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi
Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be
taking them all.
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Fascist America, in 10 easy steps - by Naomi Wolf

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 essent-
ially 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 scarce-
ly 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."

{snip}


See the the rest of this article here:
https://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/24/708/