Not invoking Godwin's Law

[mdlbear]

Guardian | Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

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.

Naomi Wolf
Tuesday April 24, 2007
Guardian

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.

Got this from the lovely, talented, and normally mild-mannered vixyish. It was sort of apparent, but I haven't seen the steps set out this clearly before. The book referenced in the article, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, was published last month and is available here.

So I don't want to invoke Godwin's Law here, but rather the reverse. So with a little prodding from technoshaman, here's what Vixy says at the end of her post:

But not long ago, in a conversation about this kind of thing with a co-worker who follows news & politics pretty heavily, I asked him rather bleakly, "what can we do?"

He said, "Keep talking about it."

So I'm talking about it. Your turn.

Comments

[tagryn]

And I keep saying, people who myopically focus on this Administration as the key to the problem are missing the long-term trends of which Dubya is just the current apex. Does anyone really believe a Hillary-headed White House is going to lead the charge towards a return to strict Constitutionality and a reduction of governmental power and interference into citizens' daily lives?

Somehow, the whole 'lets get just "our guys" back into power and everything will be fine!' viewpoint doesn't cut it for me.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Hillary isn't "our guys", at least she isn't *my* "our guys"... no, there's a long road ahead and it doesn't lead through having another Clinton in the White House. But Confucius say longest journey start with single step...

[mdlbear]

One has to start somewhere. It's likely to take more than a generation to undo the damage, and I'm not sure what the solution is going to involve. Very likely "the blood of patriots and tyrants", as Thomas Jefferson put it.

[mithriltabby]

I think the road leads through electoral reform: ranked-choice voting to make third parties viable and publicly financed electoral campaigns to allow people to make it into office without wealthy backers. (Your local franchises are Californians for Electoral Reform and the California Clean Money Campaign respectively.) Otherwise, we go on with the entrenched Republican and Democratic parties that don’t have to do more than not be each other, instead of actually doing their jobs of serving the people.

Not quite

[capplor.livejournal.com]

I don't think the job will be finished and "We'll all live happily ever after" if we get Bush out. I do think that's a vital first step, though. Given a choice, I'll take someone OTHER than Hilary, but if she gets the nomination, she gets my vote, period. No third party spoilers for me.

--REB

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

Oh my, no. That's one of Naomi Wolf's points, and actually stated explicitly in the article, if you read it. She says: "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."

In other words, it's human nature-- anybody might be tempted and corrupted by too much power.

Stating that it's this administration doing it (and using the phrase "this administration" necessarily points out that Bush isn't the only person in it) is merely because they're the ones in power doing it now. But whoever they hand the power over to, first of all, it could for all we know be the same cadre of people behind them, and second of all, even if it's a total change of administration, it's still too much power.

You should really read it, because the author makes it very clear that she is not saying "let's just get 'our guys' back into power and everything will be fine." That's not her point at all. Her point is "people need to start doing something about taking back the power that shouldn't be anybody's in the first place."

[tagryn]

I hope so, because Wolf is very much one of those who I expect would mute their criticism when Hillary becomes President. As a vocal feminist, she would have a difficult decision whether to go after the first female president, or to support her against the inevitable Republican/partisan attacks, even when the values she mentions in the piece continue undergoing quiet demolition in the background.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU, not only for picking up the torch on this, but for referencing Powells instead of yonder 800 pound space monkey... the more we support the idea of a decentralized web with our feet and our wallets, the better chance we have of making it a reality. Places like Amazon and Google scare me precisely because their ubiquity - and the fact that they are publicly traded and thus considerably more subject to the whims of the bureaucrats - makes them an easy target for enemies foreign and domestic...

[mdlbear]

You're welcome! Powell's is a little more expensive, and has a slightly smaller selection sometimes, but I use it when I can. I looked into selling my CD through Amazon. No thanks. And the amount of information they keep on customers is just plain scary.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

has a slightly smaller selection sometimes,

Really? At least in the stuff I go looking for (filling in the gaps in Mother's Newberry collection, which involves some fairly old and hard to get stuff), they tend to have a *better* selection...

CD Baby is the way to go for selling one's own CD. gaiaconsort turned me on to them many moons ago, before I ever knew what "filk" was...

About that same number of moons ago I had an Amazon account with my Speakeasy email address. I had to give up the account when I moved, and it ceased to exist. Last year when I got Speakeasy again, I got the same username. (Lucky me.) They were still sending me crap! And it took me *months* and a special back-door intervention to get them to stop!

*sigh*