Author of "10 steps" speaks publicly for the first time about legacy of modern-day tyranny
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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.
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