STATUS: 100% complete, though the text and footnotes haven't really been reviewed thoroughly, let alone any of the more minor formatting issues....
Chapter 2 -- Invoke an External and Internal Threat

    Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.
        John Adams

After September 11, 2001, we Americans learned in dramatic new ways that we were facing a terrifying external threat.  We saw it in the carnage in lower Manhattan, but the administration also used a new set of phrases that defined for us a new reality.  "Evildoers" who envied us and hated our freedoms were determined to annihilate us.  By October 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act--that in the end, when it became law, topped 400 pages--rushed through Congress.  Lawmakers passed it overwhelmingly--though many said that they had scarcely read it.  Some remarked that it would have seemed unpatriotic to resist passing the law.[1]

White House rhetoric elaborated on the all-encompassing nature of the terrorist threat: it was an "axis of evil." ("Axis" is Mussolini's coinage; in 1936 he first offered the simile of an axis to describe the fascist states' collaboration).[2] By March 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, it was common for administration spokespeople to refer to Muslim terrorists as "evil." (Our allies, said the White House, were the countries of the "New Europe"--a phrase Hitler coined to describe Axis powers.)

By 2006 Bush was comparing Osama bin Laden to Lenin and Hitler; bin Laden posed a "threat to civilization" itself.[3] The White House deployed the term Islamofascism to convey the idea that this global, ever-growing, and ever-shifting enemy wished to enslave us utterly.[4] Bush said that we were now committed to a global "war on terror." This war is eternal in time and space, with no endpoint at which you can say "We have won" or "We have lost." The "evildoers" want a "global caliphate," and the battlefield is the whole world. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote an essay in Newsweek that invoked the specter that terrorists representing "Islamic Fascism" are seeking technologies to make "radical Islam a global power, allowing new killing on an unimagined scale."[5]

All those who seek to close down an open society invoke a terrifying external threat. Why is it so important for such leaders to whip up this kind of terror in a population?

Free citizens will not give up freedom for very many reasons, but it is human nature to be willing to trade freedom for security.  People fear chaos and violence above all.  Before 1922 in Italy and before 1933 in Germany, citizens of those nations suffered from mayhem playing out on the streets, and labored in economies ravaged by inflation and war.[6] In both Italy and Germany, many citizens were eventually relieved when fascists came to power because they believed that order would be restored.

But we are not wracked by rioting in the streets or a major depression here in America today. That is why the success that the Bush administration has had in invoking "Islamofascism" is so insidious: We have been willing to trade our key freedoms for a promised state of security in spite of our living in conditions of overwhelming stability, affluence, and social order.  This is quite a feat in the annals of such victories: It is unprecedented to strip people of key freedoms in an atmosphere of bourgeois equilibrium. It takes potent mythologizing.

All fascist leaders tell citizens a story of an encircling global threat that is evil incarnate: "Fascists need a demonized enemy against which to mobilize followers," writes political theorist Robert O. Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism. Each culture, he writes, identifies its own national enemy.[7] Paxton points out that once an enemy has been identified, the elites create myths inflaming fears that the population begins to suffer from in relation to this "other." The "enemy" is functional: What matters to a fascist leader is not to get rid of the enemy but rather to maintain an enemy.[8] (Because this is what really counts, Arendt points out that the "enemy" status can be shifted from group to group: when the Nazis had overcome the "enemy" represented by Jews, they moved on the demonize the Poles.)[9]

There is no reason the external enemy can't be real. International terrorism aimed at the West is all too real. Often fascist leaders invoke a threat that has elements of truth as its basis--but a truth that is distorted to their purposes. Fascist leaders, Paxton writes, do not elaborate a philosophy so much as a "mood" that whips up what he calls "the mobilizing passions" of the population: "At bottom is a passionate nationalism," he points out. "Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one's own community or nation has become the victim." These attitudes, he argues, form the "emotional lava that set fascism's foundations." Among the themes that fascist elites develop when they are driving toward an authoritarian system are:

* A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions; ...

* The belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any actions, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external; ....

* The superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason.[10]

Fascist leaders invariably describe this external threat as being global; impure; secretive; able to assume "harmless" camouflage that lets its members infiltrate ordinary society. They always portray this enemy as being backed by powerful international financiers who operate in subterranean ways, and as being capable of and intent upon destroying everything that the citizens of that society hold most dear. The threat is described as hydralike: If you cut off one of its heads, two more grow in its place.

Italian fascists used this tactic: In 19191 they warned that "Where there were external enemies, now there are internal foes. On one side real Italians, lovers of their country. On the other, their enemies, the cowards who seek to blow to pieces our national grandeur." By 1922, a fascist newspaper urged Italian women to get used to Arditi bloodshed, because death squads were necessary in order to rescue Italy from the "Bolshevik beast."[11] Italian fascist mythmaking exaggerated real dangers that Italy truly faced.

Weimar Germany, too, faced obvious dangers: not a Jewish conspiracy, of course, but multiple crises indeed.  The Versailles treaty had humiliated veterans and eviscerated the industrial base of the nation; inflation was rampant, as was violent crime; many people felt that the moral base of their society was crumbling; their allegiances to Parliamentary processes were weak; and many Germans romanticized the "good old days" of the stable rule of the Chancellor Otto von Bismark. Violent street brawls erupted continually between Communists and Social Democrats on one side, and Brownshirts and Free Corps veterans on the other. Between 1924 and 1933, propagandists for the rising National Socialist party took these real threats and embellished them. Dangers were everywhere, they wrote; good Germans had been "stabbed in the back" by "November traitors" who had sold out their nation and enslaved its citizens to the humiliating Treaty of Versailles.[12] To real threats, these propagandists added fantasy ones: an urban, degenerate "Jewish influence" was undermining the values of pure-blooded Germans: they faced "the hyrda of the black and red International, of Jews...."[13]

(Our own Presidents in the past have sometimes stirred up this fear of a shadowy internal and external threat: When faced the possibility of war with France in the 1790s, President John Adams suggested that the many French refugees in the country at that time posed a threat to social order and a danger of subversion, and implied that they were domestic traitors.)


THE RISE OF HITLER

Many of us have the impression that the Nazi seizure of power had a certain nightmare inevitability about it: We tend to see Nazism as an incomprehensible evil that subsumed Germany like a metaphysical whirlwind or a Biblical curse.

But that frame doesn't help us learn the lessons that we need.

Hitler could never had ascended to power as he did if the Reichstag had not first cravenly, but legally, weakened Germany's system of checks and balances.  Lawmakers who were not Nazis--who in fact were horrified by Nazis--unwittingly opened the door for Nazis to overturn the rule of law, and did so before the Nazis even came formally to power.[14]


The Nazis rose to power in a living, if battered, democracy, through a day-by-day accretion of decisions -- a set of tactics: "Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in 1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945," writes historian Richard J. Evans. But Evans also writes that "[D]evelopments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points..."[15]

Hitler's predecessor, Reich Chancellor Heinrich Bruning, was not a National Socialist; he was a centrist. But he tampered with the framework of German democracy, reduced the power of the Parliament, and restricted civil liberties in a way that Nazis seized upon. Increasingly, the Republic was governed by emergency decree. The erosion of the rule of law unbolted the door for and Hitler, and Hitler then used the law to burst it open and let the flood ensue.[16]

Hitler's Germany was no anarchic state: He used to law to legitimate virtually everything he did.  Hitler often boasted that "We will overthrow Parliament in a legal way through legal means.  Democracy will be overthrown with the tools of democracy."[17] "I can say clearly," he announced at a Nuremberg rally in 1934, "that the basis of the National Socialist state is the National Socialist law code." He called Nazi Germany "this state of order, freedom and law:"'[18]

Dictators can rise in a weakened democracy even with a minority of popular support. Hider never won a majority: In the election in 1932, only 13.1 million Germans voted for the Nazi party. Although National Socialism was the largest single party, the Nazis had fewer seats in government than the combined opposition parties did. At that point they could still have been defeated."[19] Their numbers declined further in the next election.

At that critical time, Brownshirts waged a campaign of violence against Nazi Party opponents in the streets. A sense of crisis descended on the country. A coalition of conservatives united to provoke a constitutional crisis in Parliament as well. Lawmakers then engaged in frenzied negotiations to head off civil war. The conservative majority still believed at that point that if Hider were appointed Reich Chancellor they would be able to control him. They made a deal: Hitler was sworn in as Reich Chancellor entirely legally on January 30, 1933.

But Nazis directed events to cascade rapidly after that: They staged torchlight marches while all marches by the Communist opposition were forbidden. When thousands of citizens marched against the new government nonetheless, police arrested their leaders. Twenty opposition newspapers took issue with the new Nazi leadership-but then the papers were banned; local authorities cracked down on free assembly across the country.[20]

Soon, Germans learned of a terrorist threat: The Reichstag was set on fire on February 27, 1933. That would be like someone trying to set fire to the Capitol. A disturbed young Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was accused of having set the fire. Some historians believe the Nazis engineered this attack themselves.

First, Nazi leader Hermann Goering informed Germany that it was now on a "war footing." Goering warned the nation that the Reichstag fire was just part of a larger plot: Communist terrorists, he said, had planned to poison the water supply and kidnap the families of government ministers. He claimed also to have evidence that these shadowy terrorists were planning bombing attacks on rail-roads, electrical works, and other infrastructure sites. These threats were never substantiated, but the nation was terrified nonetheless.[21]

The Nazi Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, introduced "clause 2": It suspended parts of the German constitution. It shut down freedoms of expression and of the press and freedom of assembly. Clause 2 also gave police forces the power to hold people in custody indefinitely and without a court order. The law, and cowed lawmakers, had well prepared the way.[22]

At last, Hitler told the Cabinet that an amendment to the Constitution was required, the Enabling Act, which would allow him permanently to circumvent some powers of the Parliament. It was now legal for the state to tap citizens' phones and open their mall.[23]

Appalled at the terrorist threat, and not wanting to be seen as unpatriotic, there was little debate: lawmakers of all parties passed the Enabling Act by a wide majority: 441 to 94. The constitution remained, but from then on, Hitler could govern by decree.

Joseph Stalin too used the "internal and external threat" narrative. Party functionary Sergei Kirov was assassinated in Moscow in 1934, probably with Stalin's blessing. Stalin blamed the murder on counterrevolutionary "terrorists." He warned Russians of a world-wide conspiracy of capitalist-imperialist villains determined to wage a war against the country, and working in concert with an internal network of other "counterrevolutionary terrorists," "assassins," and "wreckers."[24] The fear engendered by that story set the stage for the mass arrests of 1937 to 1938.

The hydra narrative became boilerplate for would-be dictators: During the Cold War, Communist leaders urged East German and Czech citizens to beware a bloodthirsty cabal of "capitalist imperialists" as well as domestic "enemies of the revolution."[25]

In September 1973, General Pinochet's military junta displayed a cache of arms on television and told Chilean citizens that the Unidad Popular (whom they called "terrorists") planned to assassinate many of Chile's military leaders in one blow.[26]

Is the "Islamofascism" threat new, or is the way we are hearing about it new -- for us? The Clinton administration was profoundly worried about Islamic terrorism: The bombing of the USS Cole and the first attack on the World Trade Center took place on Clinton's watch. But the language that President Clinton and his State Department used to describe the same terrorists then was quite different from the language we hear today, and 9/11 itself does not explain the difference: Clinton's team used language about a serious geopolitical threat, but we did not hear mythologizing about a hydra of "evil" and "evildoers."

Extremist Islamic terrorists do seek to harm us. But Bush has universalized the fanatical claims of the most fanatical elements of the threat. The United Kingdom and Spain have suffered grave terrorist assaults, but those nations have, in contrast, described the same people and the same threat in more prosaic language. British and Spanish citizens think they are facing a serious security concern; Americans, however, fear that the same threat can bring about the end of civilization.

THE "SECURITY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX"

America is not driven by pure ideologies the way that fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were. In America, profit drives events where ideology does not: Within days of the 9/11 attacks, security companies were lobbying airport and government officials to invest in new technologies of surveillance. Six years later, the surveillance industry is huge business: "[S]urveillance technologies are emerging as one of the ripest plums for companies to pluck in the new nti-terrorism biz"'[27] In 2003, business writers estimated that this burgeoning industry was worth $115 billion a year. If trends continued, they estimated, the windfall from new surveillance and security demands would bring in $130 to $180 billion a year by 2010.

Lockheed Martin, Acxiom, ChoicePoint, and other companies have sharply increased their investment in lobbying for a piece of this profit: ChoicePoint alone quadrupled the money it put into lobbying after 9/11. A 2003 study found that 569 companies had registered Homeland Security lobbyists after 9/11.[28] The New York Times reported that "the major defense contractors want to move into the homeland security arena in a big way."[29] Dr. William Haseltine, who sits on the boards of many of the organizations that analyze this industry, including the Trilateral Commission and The Brookings Institution, and who is one of the founders of the American Freedom Campaign, says that the "security-industrial complex" rivals the "military-industrial complex" in influencing policy.[30]

Peace is bad for business. When the former Soviet Union fell apart, the U.S. defense industry was staring into the. face of a falling market share: To grow, it would have to find. a new enemy. It would also help if it expanded its product line from building fighter jets to the newfangled demand for applications involving surveillance.

Dr. Haseltine points out that the Department of Homeland Security has, like the Defense Department, an external corollary in private industry; so the relationships between the two departments are now institutionalized.[31] The Department of Homeland Security will be almost impossible to dismantle whether or not it is successful in protecting Americans: An $115-billion-a-year industry can exert major pressure on policy-making, and the Department of Homeland Security is not going to go away, even if tomorrow all the Muslim terrorists in the world were to lay down their arms.

But what if Islamic terrorism does subside? A foreign enemy's actions will always be unpredictable. But you can also identify a more reliable domestic enemy in need of surveillance: us. A powerful lobby is now served by policies in which government increasingly designates U.S. citizens as potential security threats, which in turn creates a demand for more and more costly high-tech watching.

The ACLU is measured in describing how this profit potential affects legislation: "It is not possible to determine the overall extent to which private-sector lobbying has actually driven the government's push for increased surveillance, as opposed to simply helping companies fight for a pieces of a pre-determined government pie. . .but in at least some cases, major new impetus for surveillance-friendly policies has clearly come from the private sector.... There is much more money to be made providing complex, cutting-edge technological solutions to security problems," they note, than there is in solutions that may be more truly effective but cheaper, such as strengthening cockpit. doors. "It would be a double tragedy," their report continues, "if the emerging surveillance-industrial complex were not only to lobby for increased surveillance of Americans, but also to divert resources from security measures that would be far more likely to be effective in protecting Americans from attacks."[32]

So: the state has now identified, mythologized, and institutionalized an external and internal threat -- indefinitely. Who is caught in the middle between the mythologies of the external and internal enemies? Ordinary Americans -- us.