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For Arnold Hyman and Wende Jager Hyman, and for Chris and Jennifer Gandin Le, who love this nation.
I wrote this book because I could no longer ignore the echoes between events in the past and forces at work today.
When I discussed these issues informally with a good friend who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors — and who teaches students about the American system of government as a kind of personal response to what happened to her family — she insisted that I present this argument.
I also wrote it as I did because, in the midst of my research, I went to Christopher Le and Jennifer Gandin's wedding.
Chris — the "young patriot" of the subtitle — is a born activist, a natural grassroots leader and teacher. He helps run the Nation Suicide Prevention Lifeline and is active on a range of issues. Chris and Jennifer are characteristic of the kinds of the idealistic young people — idealistic Americans — who need to lead our nation out of this crisis.
I attended Chris and Jennifer's wedding on a warm day in early autumn. It was a scene of perfect Americana: the best of this nation's freedom, bounty, and shelter.
The celebration took place on a green slope along the Hudson River Valley. Jennifer's family decorated the ceremony and reception sites in billowing white chiffon; Chris's mother and his female relatives cooked for days to create wonderful Vietnamese dishes. Jennifer appeared for the vows themselves, glowing, in a white ao dai, the traditional Vietnamese wedding gown, then changed for the dancing—appearing equally radiant—into a purple American ball gown. There were children playing, trees soughing in the wind, the sun dappling the scene; there were toasts and gifts, a great DJ, and bad jokes. Friends of different races and backgrounds were dancing and chatting, and sharing in the affection we all had for the young couple. It was a scene of everything this country should be.
I was there having emerged from my reading and could not ignore the terrible storm clouds gathering in the nation at large, and I felt that the young couple needed one more gift: the tools to fully realize and defend their freedom; the means to be sure that their own children would be born in liberty.
This was not an academic thought. Chris's mother, Le Mai, who welcomed the gusts with wit and style, is a heroine. She fled Vietnam as a young woman, a refugee—a "boat person"—with her less-than-two-months-old Vu (Chris's birth name) in her arms. She knew she had to risk her own life and her child's life for the chance to live in freedom.
With our own until-recent surfeit of liberty, we scarcely understand the preciousness of liberty as she does. But we have to reach this kind of understanding quickly, in order to contend with the crisis we face and to act with the urgency the time requires.
Chris and I have talked about liberty and his faith in the pendulum's ability to "swing back." He also believes many of his peers have little connection to democracy because previous generations have not brought it to life.
It is not just the young who are disconnected from democracy's tasks at just the moment that the nation's freedoms are being dismantled; in my travels across the country, I have heard from citizens of all backgrounds who feel alienated from the Founders' idea that they are the ones who must lead; they are the ones who must decide and confront and draw a line. They are the ones who matter. This book is written for them.
Such citizens need the keys to, the understanding of, the Founders' radical legacy. They need to understand how despots have gone about their work. They need a primer so they and those around them can be well-equipped for the fight that lies ahead.
So they can fight it well.
So that our children may continue to live in freedom.
So that we may all.
Naomi Wolf
New York
June 24, 2007
Dear Chris:
I am writing because we have an emergency.
Here are U.S. news headlines from a two-week period in the late summer of 2006:
July 22: "CIA WORKER SAYS MESSAGE ON TORTURE GOT HER FIRED." Christine Axsmith, a computer security expert working for the C.I.A., said she had been fired for posting a message on a blog site on a top-secret computer network. Axsmith criticized waterboarding: "Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong." Ms. Axsmith lost her job as well as her top-secret clearance, which she had held since 1993. She fears her career in intelligence is over.[1]
July 28: "DRAFT BILL WAIVES DUE PROCESS FOR ENEMY COMBATANTS." The Bush administration has been working in secret on a draft bill "detailing procedures [for] bringing to trial those it captures in the war on terrorism, including some stark diversions from regular trial procedures. . . . Speedy trials are not required. . . . Hearsay information is admissible . . . the [military] lawyer can close the proceedings [and] can also order 'exclusion of the defendant' and his civilian counsel." Those defined as "enemy combatants" and "persons who have engaged in unlawful belligerence" can be held in prison until "the cessation of hostilities," no matter when that may be or what jail sentence they may get.[2]
July 29: "THE COURT UNDER SIEGE." In June 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that denying prisoners at Guantámo judicial safeguards violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law. The Supreme Court also insisted that a prisoner be able to be present at his own trial. In response, the White House prepared a bill that "simply revokes that right." The New York Times editorial page warned, "It is especially frightening to see the administration use the debates over the prisoners at Guantámo Bay and domestic spying to mount a new offensive against the courts.".[3]
July 31: "A SLIP OF THE PEN." U.S. lawyers issued a statement expressing alarm at the way the president was overusing "signing statements." They argued that this was an exertion of executive power that undermined the Constitution. Said the head of the American Bar Association, "The threat to our Republic posed by presidential signing statements is both imminent and real unless immediate corrective action is taken."[4]
August 2: "BLOGGER JAILED AFTER DEFYING COURT ORDERS." A freelance blogger, Josh Wolf, 24, was jailed after he refused to turn over to investigators a video he had taken of a protest in San Francisco. Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, said that, although the jailing of American journalists was becoming more frequent, Mr. Wolf was the first American blogger she knew of to be imprisoned by federal authorities.[5]
August 2: "GOVERNMENT WINS ACCESS TO REPORTER PHONE RECORDS." "A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources. . ." according to The New York Times. A dissenting judge speculated that in the future, reporters would have to meet their sources illicitly, like drug dealers meeting contacts "in darkened doorways."[6]
August 3: "STRONG-ARMING THE VOTE." In Alabama, a federal judge took away powers over the election process from a Democratic official, Secretary of State Worley, and handed them over to a Republican governor: "[P]arty politics certainly appears to have been a driving force," argued the Times. "The Justice Department's request to shift Ms. Worley's powers to Governor Riley is extraordinary." When Worley sought redress in a court overseen by a federal judge aligned with the Bush administration, she wasn't allowed her chosen lawyer. It was "a one-sided proceeding that felt a lot like a kangaroo court. . ." cautioned the newspaper. She lost.[7]
Why am I writing this warning to you right now, in 2007? After all, we have had a Congressional election giving control of the House and the Senate to Democrats. The new leaders are at work. Surely, Americans who have been worried about erosions of civil liberties, and the destruction of our system of checks and balances, can relax now: see, the system corrects itself. It is tempting to believe that the basic machinery of democracy still works fine and that any emergency threatening it has passed — or, worst case, can be corrected in the upcoming presidential election.
But the dangers are not gone; they are regrouping. In some ways they are rapidly gaining force. The big picture reveals that 10 classic pressures — pressures that have been used in various times and places in the past to close down pluralistic societies — were set in motion by the Bush administration to close down our own open society. These pressures have never been put in place before in this way in this nation.
A breather is unearned; we can't simply relax now. The laws that drive these pressures are still on the books. The people who have a vested interest in a less open society may be in a moment of formal political regrouping; but their funds are just as massive as before, their strategic thinking unchanged, and their strategy now is to regroup so that next time their majority will be permanent.[8]
All of us — Republicans, Democrats, Independents, American citizens — have little time to repeal the laws and roll back the forces that can bring about the end of the American system we have inherited from the Founders — a system that has protected our freedom for over 200 years.
I have written this warning because our country — the democracy our young patriots expect to inherit — is in the process of being altered forever. History has a great deal to teach us about what is happening right now — what has happened since 2001 and what could well unfold after the 2008 election. But fewer and fewer of us have read much about the history of the mid-twentieth century — or about the ways the Founders set up our freedoms to save us from the kinds of tyranny they knew could emerge in the future. High school students, college students, recent graduates, activists from all walks of life, have a sense that something overwhelming has been going on. But they have lacked a primer to brief them on these themes and put the pieces together, so it is hard for them to know how urgent the situation is, let alone what they need to do.
Americans expect to have freedom around us just as we expect to have air to breathe, so we have only limited understanding of the furnaces of repression that the Founders knew intimately. Few of us spend much time thinking about how "the system" they put in place protects our liberties. We spend even less time, considering how dictators in the past have broken down democracies or quelled pro-democracy uprisings. We take our American liberty for granted the way we take our natural resources for granted, seeing both, rather casually, as being magically self-replenishing. We have not noticed how vulnerable either resource is until very late in the game, when systems start to falter. We have been slow to learn that liberty, like nature, demands a relationship with us in order for it to continue to sustain us.
Most of us have only a faint understanding of how societies open up or close down, become supportive of freedom or ruled by fear, because this is not the kind of history that we feel, or that our educational system believes, is important for us to know. Another reason for our vagueness about how liberty lives or dies is that we have tended lately to subcontract out the tasks of the patriot: to let the professionals — lawyers, scholars, activists, politicians — worry about understanding the Constitution and protecting our rights. We think that "they" should manage our rights, the way we hire a professional to do our taxes; "they" should run the government, create policy, worry about whether democracy is up and running. We're busy.
But the Founders did not mean for powerful men and women far away from the citizens — for people with their own agendas, or for a class of professionals — to perform the patriots' tasks, or to protect freedom. They meant for us to do it: you, me, the American who delivers your mail, the one who teaches your kids.
I am one of the citizens who needed to relearn these lessons. Though I studied civics, our system of government was taught to me, as it was to you, as a fairly boring explication of a three-part civil bureaucracy, not as the mechanism of a thrilling, radical, and totally unprecedented experiment in human self-determination. My teachers explained that our three-part system was set up with "checks and balances," so that no one branch of government could seize too much power. Not so exciting: this sounded like "checks and balances" in a bureaucratic turf war. Our teachers failed to explain to us that the power that the Founders restrained in each branch of government is not abstract: it is the power to strip you and me of personal liberty.
So I needed to go back and read, more deeply than I had the first time around, histories of how patriots gave us our America out of the crucible of tyrants, as well as histories of how dictators came to power in the last century. I had to reread the stories of the making and the unmaking of freedom. The more I read these histories, the more disturbed I became.
I give you the lessons we can learn from them in this pamphlet form because of the crisis we face.
Like every American, I watched the events of September 11, 2001, with horror. Then, like many, I watched the reactions of the administration in power at first with concern, then with anxiety, and then, occasionally, with shock. I started feeling that there was something familiar about how events, at times, were unfolding.
Because of the dé vu I was starting to feel when I read the newspaper every day, I began to take a second look at how leaders in the past had cracked down on societies over which they had gained control; I looked with special attention at what had happened when a leader brought about a shift from a pluralistic, democratic society to a dictatorship.
I began to think of these examples as "historical echoes" — not proof that someone influential in the administration had studied the details of mid-twentieth-century fascism and totalitarianism, but certainly suggestive.
What was it about the image of a mob of young men dressed in identical shirts, shouting at poll workers outside of a voting center in Florida during the 2000 recount that looked familiar?[9] What resonated about the reports that Bush supporters in the South were holdings organized public events to burn CDs by the Dixie Chicks?[10] (CDs are actually quite hard to burn, and produce toxic fumes.) What seemed so familiar about an organized ideological group shaming an academic for saying something unpopular—and then pressuring the state government to get the university president to fire that professor?[11] What was so recognizable about reports that FBI agents were stopping peace activists at airports?[12] Why did the notion of being "greeted as liberators"[13] feel so familiar, and phrases such as "hiding in spider-holes"[14] sound so familiar?
These events may seem to have historical echoes because they actually are mirrored in history.
No one can deny the skill of fascists at forming public opinion. I can't prove that anyone in the Bush administration studied Joseph Goebbels. I am not trying to. All I am doing is noting echoes.
As you read you may notice other parallels — usually in the details of events. The Bush administration created a policy post-9/11 about liquids and air travel. Increased security restrictions led to airport security guards forcing some passengers to ingest liquids: A Long Island mother, for instance, was forced to drink from three bottles filled with her own breast milk prior to boarding a plane at JFK.[15] Other adult passengers have been forced to drink baby formula. In Benito Mussolini's era, one intimidation tactic was to force citizens to drink emetics and other liquids.[16] German SS men picked this up: they forced Wilhelm Sollmann, a Social Democrat leader, for instance, to drink castor oil and urine.[17] Of course baby formula is not an emetic. But a state agent — some agents are armed — forcing a citizen to ingest a liquid is a new scene in America.
In 2002 the Bush administration created and named the "Department of Homeland Security." White House spokespeople started to refer to the United States, unprecedentedly, as "the Homeland."[18] American Presidents have before now referred to the United States as "the nation" or "the Republic," and to the nation's internal policies as "domestic."
By 1930 Nazi propagandists referred to Germany not as "the nation" or "the Republic" — which it was — but rather as "the Heimat " — "the Homeland." Homeland is a word that memoirist Ernestine Bradley, who grew up in Nazi Germany, describes as saturated with nationalist power: "Heimat is a German word which has no satisfactory equivalent in other languages. It denotes the region where one has been born and remains rooted.... Longing to be in the Heimat causes the incurable disease of Heimweh."[19] Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, introducing Hitler at a Nuremberg rally, said, "Thanks to your leadership, Germany will be attainable as the Homeland — Homeland for all Germans in the world."[20] A Department of Domestic Security is simply a bureaucracy, capable of mistakes; a department protecting our "Homeland" has a different authority.
In 2001 the USA PATRIOT Act let the federal government compel doctors to give up confidential medical records without a warrant demonstrating probable cause. Your previously private interaction with your doctor is now subject to state scrutiny.[21] (Nazi law in the 1930s required German doctors to disclose citizens' previously private medical records to the State.)
In 2005 Newsweek reported that Guantámo prisoners had seen the Koran being flushed down toilets. Under pressure from the White House, the magazine ran a correction: It had not interviewed direct witnesses to the practice.[22] But human rights organizations did confirm accounts of similar abuses of the Koran.[23] (In 1938, the Gestapo forced Jews to scrub out the toilets with their sacred phylacteries, the tfillin.)[24]
Amnesty International reports that U.S. interrogators torment prisoners in Iraq by playing heavy metal at top volume into their cells night and day.[25] (In 1938, the Gestapo tormented imprisoned Austrian premier Kurt von Schuschnigg by keeping the radio on at top volume, night and day.)[26]
An Iraqi human rights group complained that, in 2004, U.S. forces seized the innocent wives of suspected insurgents and held the women hostage in order to pressure their husbands to turn themselves in.[27] (In Joseph Stalin's Russia, secret police took hostage the innocent wives of dissidents accused of "treason," to pressure their husbands to turn themselves in.)[28]
When the United States invaded Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney promised that we would be "greeted as liberators." (When the German army occupied the Rhineland, Nazi propaganda asserted that the troops would be welcomed as liberators.)
President Bush argued that the prisoners in Guantámo Bay could be treated harshly because they were not covered by the Geneva Conventions. (Nazis asserted that the troops invading Russia should treat the enemy especially brutally, because they were not covered by the Hague Conventions.)[29]
After 9/11, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney coined a new phrase: America was now on a "war footing."[30] Superficially, it was a stirring word choice. But if you thought about it, it was also kind of an odd word choice, because America was not actually at war. What is a "war footing"? (Nazi leaders explained, after the Reichstag fire, that Germany, which was not actually at war, was from then on a permanent "kriegsfusz" — literally, a "war footing.")
The Bush White House "embedded" reporters with U.S. military units in Iraq. Uncritical coverage of the war expanded considerably. (National Socialist propaganda officials embedded reporters and camera crews with their own armed forces: Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl was embedded with Nazi troops in Poland.[31] U.S. correspondent William Shirer drove with German units into occupied France.)[32]
The Bush administration unloads coffins of dead American soldiers from planes at night and has forbidden photographers to take pictures of the coffins.[33] (National Socialists unloaded the coffins of the German war dead at night.)
The White House announced, beginning in 2002, that there were terrorist "sleeper cells" scattered throughout the nation. A "sleeper cell," press reports explained, was a group of terrorists that had merged into ordinary American life, waiting, perhaps for years, for the signal to rise up and cause mayhem.
A wave of reporting asserted that the FBI had located a sleeper cell in Lodi, California. After an informant had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to spy on Muslims, the FBI detained a Muslim father and son, Umer Hayat, and his son, Hamid Hayat.[34] The two men explained that they had confirmed an imaginary sleeper cell in order to end a terrifying series of interrogations.[35]
Another much-publicized sleeper cell identified four Muslim men in Detroit. Attorney General John Ashcroft claimed that the men had had advance knowledge of 9/11;[36] federal authorities charged that they were part of a "sleeper cell plotting attacks against Americans overseas," as news reports put it.[37] The Justice Department heralded the arrests as one of its biggest hits in the War on Terror.
The phrase "sleeper cell" entered deeply into the American unconscious, even becoming the plot of a 2005 TV movie. But in 2006, Richard Convertino, the prosecutor of the Detroit case, was indicted on charges of trying to present false evidence at the trial, and concealing other evidence, in his attempt to back up the government's theory about the men. All charges were dropped against the men and the Justice Department quietly repudiated its own case.[38] But you probably didn't hear about that, and the creepy sleeper-cell narrative stayed in the atmosphere to trouble your dreams.
Sleeper cell was a term most Americans had never heard before. It is a phrase from Stalin's Russia, where propagandists said that imaginary cells, consisting of agents of "international capitalism" — that is, us — had been sent by the U.S. government to infiltrate Soviet society. These secret agents would pose as good Soviet comrades, living quietly among their neighbors, but just awaiting the day when, at a signal, they would all rise up to commit mayhem.[39]
When the 2006 terrorist plot against U.S.-bound planes was uncovered in London, an FBI official gave a much-quoted sound bite: "If this plot had actually occurred, the world would have stood still."[40] FBI guys don't usually speak in cadences of dark poetry. (Of his plans in 1940, Hitler said, "The world will hold its breath.")[41]
These echoes are worth noticing — but are not ultimately that important. What is important are the structural echoes you will see: the way dictators take over democracies or crush pro-democracy uprisings by invoking emergency decrees to close down civil liberties; creating military tribunals; and criminalizing dissent.
Those echoes are important.
So I read about Mussolini's Italy in the 1920s; Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany in the 1930s; I read about East Germany in the 1950s and Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and Chile in 1973, as well as about other Latin American dictatorships; I read about Communist China in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The countries I looked at were very different, of course, and the violent dictators had a broad range of ideologies. Stalin imposed totalitarianism over a communist state, itself built upon the ruins of a toppled monarchy. Mussolini and Hitler both came to power legally in the context of fragile parliamentary democracies. East Germany and Czechoslovakia were communist systems and China still is; and General Augusto Pinochet closed down Chile's young democracy in a classic Latin American military coup d'ét.
Violent dictators across the political spectrum all do the same key things. Control is control. In spite of this range of ideological differences, profound similarities in tactics leap off the pages. Each of these leaders used, and other violent dictators around the globe continue to borrow, the same moves to close down open societies or crush dissent.
There are ten steps that are taken in order to close down a democracy or crush a pro-democratic movement, whether by capitalists, communists, or right-wing fascists. These ten steps, together, are more than the sum of their parts. Once all ten have been put in place, each magnifies the power of the others and of the whole.
Impossible as it may seem, we are seeing each of these ten steps taking hold in the United States today.
But America is different! I can hear you saying.
There is no guarantee that America is different if Americans fail to take up the patriot's task.
At times in our own history our commitment to freedom has faltered. The Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 made it a crime for Americans to speak critically — to "bring into contempt or disrepute" — of then-President John Adams and other U.S. leaders. But Thomas Jefferson pardoned those convicted under these laws when he took office.
During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, effectively declaring martial law in several states: Close to 38,000 Americans were imprisoned by military authorities during the war — many for simply expressing their views. But when the war ended in 1865, the Supreme Court ruled that it had been unconstitutional for military tribunals to try civilians.
In 1918, labor leader Eugene Debs was arrested for giving a speech about the First Amendment; he got a ten-year jail sentence. Raids swept up hundreds of other activists.[42] But after World War I ended, the hysteria subsided.
During World War II, the Justice Department rounded up 110,000 innocent Japanese-Americans and imprisoned them in camps. When the war was over, these innocent Americans were released as well.
Anti-communist anxiety led the nation to tolerate the McCarthy hearings; but the pendulum swung back and Senator Joe McCarthy himself was condemned by his colleagues.
I am describing the movement of "the pendulum" — as in the American cliché" The pendulum always swings back." We are so familiar with, and so reliant upon, the pendulum. That is why you are so sure that "America is different." But the pendulum's working depends on unrestricted motion. In America, up until now, the basic checks and balances established by the Founders have functioned so well that the pendulum has always managed to swing back. Its very success has made us lazy. We trust it too much, without looking at what a pendulum requires in order to function: the stable framework that allows movement; space in which to move; that is, liberty.
The pendulum cannot work now as it has before. There are now two major differences between these past examples of the pendulum's motion and the situation we face today.
First, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda and writer Joe Conason have both noted, previous wars and emergencies have had endpoints. But President Bush has defined the current conflict with global terrorism as being open-ended. This is a permanent alteration of the constitutional landscape.
The other difference between these examples and today is that when prior dark times unfolded in America, we forbade torture, and the rule of law was intact. Legal torture, as you will see, acting in concert with the erosion of the rule of law, changes what is possible.
So, because I was looking at something unprecedented in our nation's history, I had to read the histories of many forms of state repression, including the most extreme.
I had to include Nazi Germany in my scrutiny of repressive governments. Many people are understandably emotionally overwhelmed when the term "Nazism" or the name "Hitler" is introduced into debate. As someone who lost relatives on both sides of my family in the Holocaust, I know this feeling. I also know that there is a kind of intellectual etiquette, an unwritten rule, that Nazism and Hitler should be treated as stand-alone categories.
But I believe this etiquette is actually keeping us from learning what we have to learn right now. I believe we honor the memory of the victims of Nazism with our willingness to face the lessons that history — even the most nightmarish history — can offer us about how to defend freedom.
In looking at other violent dictatorships, including Germany's, I am not comparing the United States in 2007 to Nazi Germany, or Bush to Hitler. The two nations and leaders inhabit different worlds. There will not be a coup in America like Mussolini's March on Rome or a dramatic massacre like Hitler's Night of the Long Knives. But certain threads are emerging that have connections to the past. I am calling your attention to important lessons from history about how fragile civil liberties are, and how quickly freedom can be lost. I ask you to quiet your understandable aversion long enough to walk with me through the material I have to show you.
The ten steps to dictatorship are basic.
In September 2006, military leaders staged a coup in Thailand, which had been a noisy democracy. In a matter of days, the coup leaders ticked through many of the ten steps, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense they did.
They deployed armed guards in residential neighborhoods, sent lawmakers home, shut down the free press, took over the state-run television, threatened critics with arrest, put new limits on travel, restricted protest, and discontinued the Parliamentary rule of law. Thailand was a police state within a matter of days.[43]
We are seeing each of the basic ten steps being put into place here in the United States today — more quietly, more gradually, and sometimes more elegantly; but each is underway.
My sense of alarm comes from the clear lessons from history that, once certain checks and balances are destroyed, and once certain institutions have been intimidated, the pressures that can turn an open society into a closed one turn into direct assaults; at that point events tend to occur very rapidly, and a point comes at which there is no easy turning back to the way it used to be.
The fascist shift does not progress like a diagonal line rising steadily across a chart. Rather, it progresses in a buildup of many acts assaulting democracy simultaneously, that then form a critical mass — what writer Malcolm Gladwell would call a "tipping point." The pressure from this set of assaults suddenly pushes the nation into a new and degraded reality. The turning points can be mapped as vertical lines — the point at which prisoners lost the right to habeas corpus, for instance, is one—which then plateau into the nation's new normal. The nation acclimates; then this process begins again at that greater level of suppression.
What got to be really scary in my reading was how predictable events become, once you are familiar with the blueprint. By the beginning of August, 2006, for instance, it seemed like a good bet that the Bush administration would soon move on from the detainee bill that it had been secretly preparing to seek Congressional authorization for creating a prison beyond the rule of law where torture could take place. This was accomplished by October of 2006.
In September of 2006, I thought that it was likely that some of the first prisoners to be tried in Guantanamo by the new military commission system would be white and English-speaking. Indeed, that happened by April of 2007. It also seemed probable that White House spokespeople would begin to use terms such as treason, espionage, subversion, and aiding the enemy to describe criticism, press scrutiny, dissent, and even simple departure from alignment with White House goals. From the blueprint, I thought it was unsurprising when the administration started to criminalize speech in new ways. This began to happen in earnest by May of 2007.
When the U.S. Attorney scandal came to light in March of 2007 and there was still little information, because I had been reading a biography of Goebbels, I remarked to a friend, "I bet the attorneys were in swing states." By the next week, it had been confirmed that most of them were in fact in swing states. All this supposition was not rocket science; it was simply that each of these is a classic move in the playbook of a fascist shift.
Everything changed in America in September of 2006, when Congress passed the Military Commissions Act.[44] This law created a new legal reality that heralds the end of America if we do not take action. Yet most Americans still do not understand what happened to them when that law passed.
This law gives the president — any president — the authority to establish a separate justice system for trying alien unlawful enemy combatants. It defines both "torture" and "materially support[ing] hostilities" broadly. The MCA justice system lacks the basic protections afforded defendants in our domestic system of laws, in our military justice system, or in the system of laws used to try war criminals — Nazi leaders got better civil liberty protection than alien enemy combatants, as did perpetrators of genocide like Slobodan Milosovic. And persons accused by the president (or his designees) of being alien unlawful enemy combatants are forbidden from invoking the Geneva Conventions, a treaty that represents the basic protections of justice common to all civilized nations. The United States has signed the Geneva Conventions and agreed to abide by them, and this repudiation is a radical departure from our traditions. Under the MCA, the government can used "coerced" interrogation to obtain evidence. Finally, and perhaps most damagingly, the MCA denies unlawful alien enemy combatants the right to challenge the legitimacy of their confinement or treatment. So, while the MCA provides all sorts of rules that the military is supposed to follow, it will be difficult, if not impossible to hold anyone accountable for breaking those rules.
But this is not all. The president and his lawyers now claim the authority to designate any American citizen he chooses as being an "enemy combatant"; and to define both "torture" and "material support" broadly. They claim the authority to give anyone in the executive branch the power to knock on your door, seize you on the street, or grab you as you are changing planes at Newark or Atlanta airports; blindfold you and put earphones on you; take you to a cell in a navy prison; keep you in complete isolation for months or even years; delay your trial again and again; and make it hard for you to communicate with your lawyer. The president claims the authority to direct agents to threaten you in interrogations and allow into your trial things you confessed to while you were being mistreated.
The president claims the authority to do any of those things to any American citizen now on his say-so alone. Let me repeat this: The president asserts that he can do this to you even if you have never committed a crime of any kind: "enemy combatant" is a status offense. Meaning that if the president says you are one, then you are.
Human rights groups raised the alarm early on about what this law might mean to the many innocent foreign detainees who had been swept up in the machinery of Afghan prisons and sent to Guantámo. Some Congressional leaders have warned us about what this law might do to our own soldiers, if they are taken as POWs. But most ordinary citizens did not understand what Congress had done — not to anonymous, possibly scary, brown people on a faraway island, but to them. Most Americans still do not understand.
Last September, concerned about the legal arguments being put forward by the Department of Justice, I called a friend who is a professor of Constitutional law.
"Does the administration assert that the president can define anyone he wants to as an 'enemy combatant'? Including U.S. citizens?" I asked.
"Yes," he replied.
"And does it argue that courts must defer to the government's assertions that someone should be held as an enemy combatant, even when it presents no direct evidence?"
"Yes," he replied.
"So doesn't that mean they are saying that now any of us for any reason he decides can be seized off the street and imprisoned in isolation for months and interrogated?"
"Yes," he said.
"So why isn't anyone saying that?"
"Some people are. But a lot of people probably think it would just sound crazy," he replied.[45]
To U. S. citizens in the year 2007, the very title of this book should be absurd. It is unthinkable to most of us that there could ever be an "end of America" in the metaphorical sense. But it is when memories are faint about coercive tactics that worked to control people in the past that people can be more easily controlled in the present.
When I say that the Bush administration has used tactics that echo certain tactics from the past, I am making a conservative argument. You will have to look at the echoes I note and decide for yourself what to make of them. We know that Karl Rove seeks the goal of a permanent majority. A permanent majority is easier to solidify for the future if democracy's traditional challenges to power are weakened or silenced.
I won't insult Republicans by calling this goal a "permanent Republican majority," although Rove calls it by that name. Most Americans—Republican, Independent, or Democrat—are patriots and believe in the Founders' vision. I have to assume that one reason for this assault on democracy is to secure the "permanent majority" status of a far smaller group, or rather of several smaller groups, driven by motives of power and money: the great power represented by access to an executive that is driving an agenda unthreatened by the people's will and the vast amount of money that has begun to flow from a condition of uninterrupted domestic surveillance and open-ended foreign hostilities.
Are any of these terms legitimate for this discussion?
I have made a deliberate choice in using the terms fascist tactics and fascist shift when I describe some events in America now. I stand by my choice. I am not being heated or even rhetorical; I am being technical.
Americans tend to see democracy and fascism as all-or-nothing categories. But it isn't the case that there is a pure, static "democracy" in the white squares of a chessboard and a pure, static "fascism" in the black squares. Rather, there is a range of authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, and varieties of Fascist state, just as there are stronger and weaker democracies—and waxing and waning democracies. There are many shades of gray on the spectrum from an open to a closed society.
Totalitarianism, of course, is the blackest state. Mussolini adopted the term totalitarian to describe his own regime.[1] Political philosopher Hannah Arendt writes of the post-World War I era and the "undermining of parliamentary government," succeeded by "all sorts of new tyrannies, Fascist and semi-Fascist, one-party and military dictatorships," and culminating at last in "the seemingly firm establishment of totalitarian governments resting on mass support" in Russia and in Germany.
Arendt sees Germany and Italy as variations on the same model of totalitarianism. She defines totalitarianism as a mass movement with a leadership that requires "total domination of the individual." A totalitarian leader, in her view, faces no opposition—it has gone quiet—and he can unleash terror without himself being afraid.[2]
Fascism is a word on whose definition political scientists (and even fascists themselves) do not entirely agree. Though Mussolini coined this term (from the dual rods, or fasces, carried by officials in ancient Rome), some Nazis did not see the Italians as being tough enough to qualify as true fascists. Umberto Eco wrote of latter-day "Ur-Fascists" and other critics have described "neo- Fascists" or "subfascists" when they refer to more recent violent dictatorships that use state terror and other kinds of control to subordinate the population and crush democratic impulses—notably in Latin America.[3] The Columbia Encyclopedia defines fascism as a "philosophy of government that glorifies the state and nation and assigns to the state control over every aspect of national life.... Its essentially vague and emotional nature facilitates the development of unique national varieties, whose leaders often deny indignantly that they are fascists at all.[4]
Throughout this letter of warning, I will use the term fascist shift. It is a wording that describes a process. Both Italian and German fascisms came to power legally and incrementally in functioning democracies; both used legislation, cultural pressure, and baseless imprisonment and torture to progressively consolidate power. Both directed state terror to subordinate and control the individual, whether the individual supported the regime inwardly or not. Both were rabidly antidemocratic, not as a side sentiment but as the basis of their ideologies; and yet both aggressively used the law to pervert and subvert the law.
This process is what I mean when I refer to "fascist shift." Two aspects of most definitions of fascism are relevant here: Fascist refers to a militaristic system that is opposed to democracy and seeks, ideologically and practically, to crush it. And fascism uses state terror against the individual to do this. When I talk about a "fascist shift" in America, I am talking about an antidemocratic ideology that uses the threat of violence against the individual to subdue the institutions of civil society so that they in turn can be subordinated to the power of the state.
This fascist shift has proven compact, effective, and exportable, long after these two regimes met their end in World War II. If it is too emotionally overwhelming to think of Italy and Germany, you can consider the more recent fates of Indonesia, Nicaragua, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Guatemala, all of which suffered widespread state terror and the activation of many of the ten steps that I describe as leaders sought to subdue the people. A fascist shift brings about a violent dictatorship in a context where democracy could have taken the nation toward freedom.
Some critics responding to an essay I wrote laying out the spine of this argument were more comfortable with the term authoritarian than with fascist. A number of U.S. writers have used "authoritarian" to describe the Bush administration. Authoritarian, in contrast—the term Joe Conason uses, for example, in his prescient book It Can Happen Here—means that one branch of government has seized power from the others.[5] (The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as "favouring, encouraging, or enforcing strict obedience to authority, as opposed to individual freedom....")[6] Conason's argument is entirely right for where we are at this point: In July of 2007, America actually already has an executive who is disregarding the restraints of the two other branches of government.
But authoritarianism has many guises, and some are relatively livable for most people. For instance, you can have a military leadership in an authoritarian system, but you can have fairly independent courts and a fairly independent press. Indeed, people can see authoritarianism as rather attractive in what they understand to be a time of national emergency. Authoritarianism can be downright cozy compared to some alternatives. The grave danger in America is that events are not stopping here.
When I refer to other societies, I use the terms totalitarianism, fascism, and authoritarianism where they are appropriate.
State terror directed against the individual is the difference between a fairly stable American authoritarianism and the fascist shift I am writing to you about. Theorists such as Arendt and Zbigniew Brzezinski saw top-down terror to be at the heart of both Nazi and Soviet regimes. They argue that it was the overwhelming power of the secret police agencies such as the Gestapo and the KGB that led to the fear that blanketed these societies.[7] More recent historians focus on how populations in fascist or totalitarian systems adapt to fear through complicity: In this view, when a minority of citizens is terrorized and persecuted, a majority live out fairly normal lives by stifling dissent within themselves and going along quietly with the state's acts of violent repression. The authors of an oral history of Nazi Germany point out that, though it may sound shocking, fascist regimes can be "quite popular" for the people who are not being terrorized.[8]
Both perspectives are relevant here: Top-down edicts generate fear, but when citizens turn a blind eye to state-sanctioned atrocities committed against others, so long as they believe themselves to be safe, a fascist reality has fertile ground in which to take root.
America has flirted with fascism before. In the 1920s, a number of newspaper editors in the United States were impressed with the way that fascism coordinated with capitalism.[9] In the 1930s, when Americans were suffering from economic depression and labor unrest, some U.S. leaders looked at the apparent order that Mussolini and Hitler had imposed on their own previously chaotic, desperate nations, and wondered if a "strong man" approach would serve the nation better than our own battered system. As historian Myra MacPherson puts it, "In the thirties there was alarming support for Hitler [in America], with American-style brownshirts proliferating...."[10] Nineteen-thirties American fascism boasted many followers, nationally known demagogues, and even its own celebrities, such as aviator Charles Lindbergh, one of the most famous Americans of the day.
Some commentators of the era speculated that demagogues might spearhead an extreme patriotic movement such as those in Italy and Germany. In 1935, crusading journalist I. F. Stone compared Huey Long's dismantling of democracy in Louisiana to Hitler's legislation dissolving local self-government.
In 1939 author James Wechsler wrote, "There was genuine fear that a fascist movement had finally taken root in New York," where reactionary hooligans were staging anti-Semitic street fights modeled on the German youth actions.[11] Other U.S. intellectuals thought the time was right to develop an American fascist mystique themselves, and began to do so.
American interest in fascism was prevalent enough for popular writer Sinclair Lewis to satirize it in his 1935 classic, It Can't Happen Here. Lewis, as Conason eloquently notes, showed step by step the ways in which it—a fascist coup—could theoretically "happen here." Though many mocked Sinclair's premise in 1935, many others read his fable of warning and thought more seriously about the dangers that American fascism really represented. It was healthy for Americans at that time to imagine the worst that could unfold if the nation chose to follow the seductions of fascism any further.
"It's a free country," any American child will say, a comfortable assurance that this same American carries as he or she grows up. We scarcely consider that that sentence descends to that child from arguments for liberty that date back through generations of Enlightenment-era English and French philosophers, who were trying to work out what "a free country" could possibly look like-even as they themselves lived though or looked back on reigns of violently abusive and capricious monarchs.
We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults. But the Founders would have thought we were dangerously naï, not to mention lazy, in thinking of democracy in this way. This view-which we see as patriotic-is the very opposite of the view that they held. They would not have considered our attitude patriotic-or even American: The Founders thought, in contrast, that it was tyranny that was eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults, whereas democracy was difficult, personally exacting, and vanishingly fragile. The Founders did not see Americans as being special in any way: They saw America-that is, the process of liberty-as special.
In fact, the men who risked hanging to found our nation, and the women who risked their own lives to support this experiment in freedom, and who did what they could to advance it, were terrified of exactly what we call dictatorship. They called it "tyranny" or "despotism." It was the specter at their backs-and they all knew it-as Americans debated the Constitution and argued about the shape of the Bill of Rights.
The framing of the documents upon which the new national government rested did not take place as we were taught it did-in a sunny glow of confident assertiveness about freedom. That scenario is a Hallmark-card rewrite of the real mood of the era and the tenor that surrounded the discussions of the day. The mood as early Americans debated the proposed Constitution and the Bill of Rights was, rather, one of grave apprehension.
For the Founders shared with the rest of the people awaiting the outcome of their labors a dread of what nearly all of them-Federalist or anti-Federalist-saw as the real prospect of a tyrannical force rising up in America. This repressive force could take many forms: the form of a rapacious Congress oppressing the people; the form of an out-of-control executive; or even the form of the people themselves, cruelly oppressing a minority.[12] The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were set forth not as a flag flying merrily but as a bulwark: a set of barriers against what the Founders and their fellow countrymen and women saw as people's natural tendency to oppress others if their power is unchecked.
What recurred regularly in various arguments as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights took shape was the widespread fear of an unchecked executive.[13] It's not surprising that these patriots would so deeply fear a single man invested with too much power. They had just freed themselves from being subjugated to George III, an abusive, not to mention mentally ill, monarch.
The Founders had fled repressive societies themselves, or were children or grandchildren of those who had done so. The North American colonies were settled by people—Puritans, Quakers and others—who had fled countries in which they had been imprisoned and even tortured for such acts as assembling in groups to pray; or for attending certain churches; or for publishing pamphlets critical of the King or of Parliament. The Founders knew from their own experience how the Crown treated those who talked about democracy (that is, "sedition"). They knew about criminalized speech, arbitrary arrest, and even show trials. They had personally to reckon with the risk of state-sanctioned torture and murder: Each of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence could have been hanged if the colonies had lost the Revolutionary War.
When Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, the little book that helped start the big revolution, he risked being hanged by the British Crown for treason. Indeed, the Crown did charge Paine with sedition for having written another book, The Rights of Man. He was tried by a jury hand-chosen by the government that he had attacked-a jury sure to condemn him. The proceedings were a mockery of the rule of law. In spite of his lawyer's brilliant defense, as one witness put it, "the venal jury ... without waiting for any answer, or any summing up by the Judge, pronounced [Paine] guilty. Such an instance of infernal corruption is scarcely upon record." Paine's publisher was dragged off to prison in chains.[14]
Arbitrary arrest, state intimidation, and torture were the tactics of the tyrannical monarchs of eighteenth century Europe-tactics that the Founders sought to banish from American soil forever. The Founders' rebellion on this continent intended systematically to open a nation up to freedom-meaning, fundamentally, freedom from these evils.
In colleges with progressive curricula, the Founders are often portrayed as "dead white men," whose vision was imperfect, who denied women and the poor civil rights, and who defined an African slave in America as being three-fifths of a person; old guys in wigs who wrote documents that are now dusty in language that seems to us to be either arcane or to offer sentiments that are so obvious now they have become cliches (.... life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness....).
Here's what we're not taught: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. These men and the women who supported their work were walking further out into the unknown—betting on ordinary people's capacities—than anyone had ever walked in the history of the human race. You are not taught—and it is a disgrace that you aren't—that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.
You weren't taught that the way they brought the freest nation in the world into being was by reading passionately about fledgling democracies of the past; by positioning their imaginations directly against the violent repressions they had fled; and by carefully, delicately crafting a mechanism of checks and balances, and a bill of rights, that would protect these extreme manifestations of freedom. The Founders set out to prove that ordinary people could be entrusted with governing themselves in a state where no one could arbitrarily arrest them, lock them up, or torture them.
Living against the backdrop of violent repression, these men and women saw the democracy they were seeking to establish, and the checks and balances that protected it, as being in need of continual rededication against potential tyrants in America who would want to subjugate Americans.
Thomas Jefferson's initial reaction to the proposed Constitution was negative, for, as he wrote to James Madison, he feared the possibility of the rise of an American tyrant: "....Roman emperors, popes, German emperors, deys of the Ottoman dependencies, and Polish kings—all were elective in some sense." Indeed, historian Bernard Bailyn sees that "[T]he fear of power—the very heart of the original Revolutionary ideology—was an animating spirit behind all of [Jefferson's] thinking."[15]
Jefferson wasn't alone in the Revolutionary generation in fearing an American despot. After the publication of the proposed Constitution in 1787, critics shared his apprehension. They feared a president's treaty-making power, because they were worried he might make deals in secret. They worried about his power to make certain decisions without a two-thirds majority, because they feared he might do anything he wanted with that power. They argued that an American executive would not be immune to despotic temptations, just as an unchecked Congress would not be immune.[16]
The authors of The Federalist Papers—Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay—wrote that series of essays to help reassure their fellow Americans. They did so by explaining that the complex web of tensions they were proposing—these "checks and balances"—would prevent a person or a group united in "a common interest or passion" from depriving others of their rights. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay did not think that this web was self-sustaining. They thought that the delicate mechanism of the interdependent executive, legislative, and judiciary branches was only as reliable as the character of the people who were either protecting or abandoning it. They saw all people as corruptible and so set up the system to keep anyone from having unconfined power.[17]
It was a truism to the Revolutionary generation that if the fragile mechanism became unbalanced, American leaders too—of course—would revert to brutality. We are so removed from the tyranny that the nation's first patriots experienced personally that we have not only forgotten this crucial insight, we have even forgotten to consider how obvious it was to the fathers and mothers of our country.
The Founders never expected us to fall asleep or get lazy. They counted on us to keep the web of the precious system intact so that an American despot could never arise. They trusted us to cherish liberty as they did.
The price of liberty, the generation that debated and created the Constitution understood, is eternal vigilance.
There is also a reverse process that systematically closes down freedom.
Many Americans have an impressionistic sense that Mussolini and Hitler came to power through violence alone. But each came to power legally in a working democracy; each made use of the parliamentary system itself to subvert and reorder the rule of law; and each then, quickly, legally aggregated state power overwhelmingly in his own person. Both leaders were supported by sophisticated intellectuals and political theorists who made the case to the people that democratic processes weakened the nation in a time of crisis.
All dictators invoke an external threat; develop a paramilitary force; create a secret prison system; surveil ordinary citizens; arbitrarily detain and release them; harass citizens' groups; target writers, entertainers, and other key individuals for dissenting; intimidate the press; recast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage"; and eventually subvert the rule of law.
Unfortunately, while it is very difficult to sustain an open society, history shows that it is fairly simple to close one down.
The same ten steps have shut down democracies all over the world at many different times. And these steps are no secret: After all, Mussolini studied Lenin;[18] Hitler studied Mussolini;[19] Stalin studied Hitler;[20] Chinese communist leaders studied Stalin; and so on. Indeed the United States has helped develop a training center, the School of the Americas (now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), to train various procapitalist Latin American leaders in the theory and practice of violent dictatorship.[21]
Is the United States in 2007 parallel to Italy in 1922, Germany in 1933, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Chile in 1973, or China in 1989? No. But over the past six years we have been watching the United States move closer to becoming a more closed society.
It's easy to look around at America in 2007 and choose to believe that this warning is overheated: After all, we are for the most part doing what we have routinely done. We are going online into a vibrant Internet world; clicking through hundreds of TV channels; enjoying Hollywood films; reading best sellers that present views across the political spectrum. The courts are ruling, newspapers are publishing exposes, protest marches are being planned about the war; a presidential race is underway.
But there are plenty of examples of a shift into a dictatorial reality in which, for several years, while the basic institutions of freedom are targeted and rights are eroding, daily life still looks very normal.even, for many people, pleasant.
Americans tend to think of the shift to fascism in scary set pieces: the boots on the stairs, the knock in the middle of the night, the marching columns, the massive banners waving over city streets; a Leni Riefenstahl film all the time or an unrelieved scene of citizen terror with crematoria smoking in the distance. We are so used to seeing depictions of the most sensational aspects of totalitarian societies—the gulag, the death camps—that we don't pay much attention to the fact that there is often an incremental process that led those societies to become places where such things could happen.
The view that fascism looks from the start like a nationwide prison camp rather than a fairly normal society can be comforting when facing an argument like mine. It's natural to wish that the two realities were so categorically different that, of course, "It couldn't happen here."
But as would-be dictators consolidate power, if they are training their sights on a democracy, things proceed fairly routinely in many areas in the earliest years. In the beginning, the horror, as W. H. Auden put it, is usually elsewhere, taking place while other people are going about their normal daily round. Peasants in Italy celebrated their harvest festivals in 1919 in Naples when Mussolini's arditi were beating bloody the local communists in Milan.[22] Journalist Joseph Roth, the star columnist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, filed glitzy reports on urban style and nightlife, on architecture and the avant-garde; he and his colleagues dwelt on the latest fashions and described the trendiest watering holes. As Roth rebutted rising anti-Semitism in print, Hitler was consolidating power around himself.[23] Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of French literature who kept a diary throughout the rise and fall of the Third Reich, cared for his garden, did repairs on his car, chatted with his Nazi neighbors, went to the movies with his wife, even as he became increasingly aware of persecution, arrests, theft of property, and new discriminatory laws; even as he was certain of an inevitable catastrophe.[24] That's what people do.
The neon lights were flashing outside nightclubs in Vienna right through the Anschluss. British travelogues for Italy and Germany from the 1930s depict jolly fascists sharing a nice Marsala with the writers in an osteria. More recently, the day after the 2006 military coup in Thailand, tourists were posing for snapshots next to armed guards; sunbathers were still at the beach.[25] Most of the tourists didn't bother to go home even after martial law was declared. Such scenes show that contemporaries often experience a brighter picture of what is going on than what the history to be written in the future will reveal. It's as if societies continue to party upstairs while the foundations of the house crumble beneath them.
At first, Nazi Germany would not have looked, on the surface, so unrecognizable to us: Germans still, for a time, saw an independent judiciary; lawyers—even human rights lawyers; working journalists—even political satirists; criticism of Nazis in cabarets and theatre; and professors still teaching critical thinking. There were hundreds of newspapers of all political colors; there were feminist organizations, abortion rights activists, sex education institutes, even gay rights organizations. These kinds of civil society organizations would become "coordinated" with Nazi ideology or simply disemboweled—but as the shift was first taking place, things looked in many ways, superficially, like an open modern society.[26]
Even later in the game, violent dictatorships keep many of the trappings of a civil society. It is a point of pride to do so. What they do not have—and everyone who works in the press, the judiciary, the universities, the theater, the electoral system, and so on understands the rules about this—is freedom.
Americans don't get this at all, but other countries who have experienced dictatorships either near them or over them do get it: Journalists in Brazil and Argentina know exactly what the difference is between publishing a newspaper in freedom and publishing the same newspaper while looking over one's shoulder. The fact that we are unaware that a dictatorship can be incremental leaves us terribly vulnerable right now. Even educated American people think that if the press is publishing and Congress is legislating, all is well; but those things are often still happening right up to the point of no return in a closing democracy—and they keep happening, in neutered form, even after a violent dictatorship has been established.
A shift toward violent dictatorship does not need to look like people being fed into ovens; historically, it looked like that exactly once, and that was less than a decade after the Nazis gained power. A violent dictatorship almost never looks like that. At first, it can simply look like people weighing their words. At its turning point, it can simply look like a high-profile arrest for "treason" or a handful of arrests for "espionage"—even as tourists still flock to monuments and celebrities are still being photographed at clubs.
We are not in danger of a military coup. But homegrown American versions of the same steps that all dictators have advanced may yet create an America in which all our institutions are intact—but functioning weakly; in which citizens have in theory the right to dissent, and some may do so mutedly, but most are afraid to exercise that right robustly; in which the press is subdued, the opposition is pulling its punches, and people are worried about expressing their true opinions because it may cost them their jobs, or worse. This would not be Munich in 1938, but it would be an America with another kind of culture than the one we have taken as our birthright: a culture in which the pendulum still exists, but the people's will cannot move it more than slightly.
We still have time to turn back the tide. What we do not have is leisure. Movements of citizens on the left and right have both begun to build what is essentially a democracy movement in America: The American Freedom Agenda and the American Freedom Campaign are trying to awaken the nation to these dangers and turn citizens into those leading the charge to defend the nation. The AFA created a legislative package to repeal or modify restrictive laws and restore liberty. We must roll back the laws that are associated with the opening of the door into darkness.
If we fail to act, we could face an America in which we still have Friday night football games and Fourth of July fireworks,Wal-Mart and the Food Network and the Statue of Liberty—but an America in which people who publish classified documents might go to jail, and people who go to jail might not come out the same; an America with the same TV shows and video games and even the same schedule of elections—but one in which you can lose your job if you say to a colleague that you voted against the grain; an America that looks much the same on the surface—but in which we no longer have real freedom.
It could easily become an America that is quieter and more frightened. And a quiet, frightened American citizenry does mean the end of the America the Founders created.
For a little while, we still have the power to stop that from happening.
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.)
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.
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.
The Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Since then, our Western legal tradition has held that everyone deserves some kind of judicial process before being thrown into prison. This simple yet radical notion that you cannot be unaccountably imprisoned is the cornerstone of all democracy. We Americans expect that we can't be thrown into jail without hope of getting out. That faith is so essential a part of our liberty that we scarcely think about it.
This guarantee that you can't be randomly jailed is strengthened by the concept of habeas corpus. This is the law, dating from 1679, that undergirds our freedom as Americans. The phrase comes from the Latin; it is a writ "to have the body." Having the right to habeas corpus means that if they grab you and throw you in jail, you have the right to see the evidence against you, face your accusers, and have a hearing before an impartial judge or jury to establish whether you actually committed the crime of which you are accused. In short, it means that if you are innocent, there is hope that you can prove that you are, and hope that you can eventually get out. It means your innocence protects you.
Your innocence does not protect you in a dictatorship.
Just as habeas corpus, or some equivalent procedure, is the cornerstone of virtually every democracy, so a secret prison system without habeas corpus is the cornerstone of every dictatorship.
...
In the wording of the 2002 "torture memo,"—Bybee-Gonzales August 1, 2002 memo re: Standards of conduct for interrogation—torture is laboriously underdefined.[34]
(When you are looking at suggestions of a fascist shift in a democracy, intention is important; drafts and memos reveal what the regime seeks, if it could be unconstrained.)
The "torture memo" also shows how far back this White House has sought to legalize abuse and how hard it has worked to do so. The memo is forty pages of densely worded legal argument in favor of allowing all kinds of horrific treatment of human beings. It concludes that:
...
Military tribunals are the enablers of a fascist shift.
Lenin responded to an assassination attempt by setting up secret military tribunals that bypassed the established court system." Mussolini set up military tribunals to dispense summary justice. Stalin used a revived system of secretive military tribunals that also bypassed the judiciary.
The Nazis also setup a tribunal system, "People's Courts," that bypassed the formal legal system. These courts had originally been established as "an emergency body set up to dispense summary justice on looters and murderers" in 1918. These "courts" were able to sentence those charged with "treason" and were characterized by "the absence of any right of appeal against their verdicts." The "will of the people" took the place of the rule of law.[70]
When the Nazis first came to power, not only was there still an independent judiciary in Germany-there were still judges outraged at SA and SS abuses of prisoners, and human rights lawyers who shared their outrage. Earlier, one of these independent lawyers had actually sought to prosecute the SS for prisoner abuse. It was at that point that the "People's Courts" went after the lawyers, the military tribunals were strengthened, and Hitler sought legislation that retroactively protected the SS from prosecution for acts of torture.[71] (The Bush administration seeks to shield interrogators from prosecution for war crimes.)
This too opened the door for what followed.
...
...
Mussolini, among the dictators of his era, practically invented the strategic use of thugs: As Parliament resisted involving Italy in World War I, pre-war, proto-Fascist thugs organized street violence, attacks on newspapers, street demonstrations, and other violence. Finally, when the thugs menaced members of the political leadership themselves, Parliament caved to their wishes.[17] (Hitler picked up this intimidation scenario as well, at one point lining the halls of the working Reichstag with Brownshirts.)
By the 1922 March on Rome, Mussolini's thugs were more sophisticated and better-trained: men dressed identically in black pants and black shirts, recruited from the ranks of World War I veterans and organized into networks by Mussolini's central command. These Arditi did the strategic work of smashing newspaper offices, torching farmhouses, beating workers, and sexually assaulting women in the countryside. They "softened up" the population so that people were scared to resist Mussolini's forces.
The violence of orchestrated gangs, just like their sophistication, tends to escalate over time as well. In Germany, after World War I, political parties allied themselves with armed, uniformed paramilitary groups. Their task was to march, harass members of opposing groups, and beat them—sometimes to kill them.
In 1920 the Party's paramilitary arm was founded and named the "Gymnastics and Sports Section." Their uniform was brown shirts, riding breeches, and boots. These paramilitaries roamed Munich's streets, assaulting their perceived enemies and harassing Jews. By 1921 the Free Corps, a right-wing group, was taken on board. The group was rechristened "the Storm Division," or SA, that same year. Hermann Goering led the SA by 1923. That year the storm troopers began creating a decade-long strategy of terror. These thugs would intimidate German citizens more and more directly and formally, evolving from a ragged assortment of civilians to a highly disciplined paramilitary arm of Nazi control.[18] By 1927, this thug caste was a force for the Party to direct overtly. Joseph Goebbels, now regional leader of Berlin, staged SA-led brawls in meeting-halls and in the streets. By 1929, Hitler, Goebbels, and the regional leaders of the party made a practice of hinting to the SA about what kind of violence was expected, and the SA would deliver. This strategy let the Nazi leadership remain free of legal responsibility for the violence, and it reassured middle-class law-abiding citizens that Hitler himself and his colleagues really were not to blame for this savagery.[18] The random bullies had become a parallel army.
In 1938, Nazi gangs were unleashed to wreak the chaos of Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass: they destroyed Jewish businesses and terrified German Jews. Joseph Weinberg was a twenty-four-year-old business student from Stuttgart whose mother had run a market stall: "The next morning I went to the Markthalle with my mother and sister," he recounted. "When we walked upstairs, all the doors were ripped out; all the food was smashed together and lying in the center of the store and the money and everything was taken away. All we had—butter, flour, herring, everything—was piled up there. My mother, of course, cried and...cried. There was nothing we could do."[20]
Thugs are the advance men of every dictatorial ascendancy, and thug violence is the advance work.
In our nation's past, police action in the United States that has directed violence at citizens has backfired: Southern Civil Rights protesters in the 1960s won more public support with every image of water hoses and snarling dogs trained against them. When members of the National Guard fired on student protesters at Kent State University in 1970, killing four and wounding nine, the image helped turn the tide against the Vietnam War. There has been state violence in the United States against protesters and voters before: The possibility of it exists here just as it does in any nation.
But our laws have driven such violence back again. And we haven't had members of a mercenary army on our streets since we won our independence.
...
Dictatorships use citizen surveillance in a clear way: to blackmail and coerce the people, especially critics. In the 1960s and 1970s. Edgar Hoover's FBI amassed files on the private lives of political, union, Civil Rights, anti-war, and other leaders, and blackmailed or harassed them. The FBI's Counter Intelligence Programs (COINTELPRO) actions against civil rights workers and the left in the 1960s included planting fake evidence on them, sending bogus letters accusing them of adultery to ruin their marriages (one fake letter called Dr. King an "evil, immoral beast" and suggested he kill himself), disclosing activists' sexually transmitted diseases, tapping their phones, getting activists fired from their jobs, distributing false articles that portrayed them as drug abusers, and planting negative articles about them in newspapers.[8]
...
The next time you meet with your antiwar group, I am afraid you have to ask yourself if everyone present really is who you think he or she is. Incredible as it sounds, you may well have undercover investigators hanging out with you. Dictatorships and would-be dictators routinely infiltrate legal citizen groups and report back to the group in power or seeking power. Historically, infiltrators are also directed to disrupt and harass such organizations. The goal: to make sure that it becomes too costly and nerve-wracking to act out as a citizen.
In Italy, Fascist spies infiltrated groups of trade unionists. In Stalin's Russia, spies reported on the activities of intellectuals and dissidents.[1] In Germany, National Socialist agents infiltrated groups of anti-Nazi students, Communists, and labor activists; these agents were busy, even attending cabarets where jazz and other "unGerman" music was being played, in order to denounce the musicians.[2] In the GDR, the Stasi infiltrated dissident groups of the usual targets. In Prague in 1968, infiltrators joined in with groups of writers, theatre workers, journalists, and intellectuals. In Chile, Pinochet's agents joined groups of prodemocracy students.[3] The Chinese Politburo sends state agents to infiltrate forbidden pro-democracy and banned religious groups.
Infiltration is not just an intelligence tool; like surveillance, it is also a psychological pressure point. When the state infiltrates citizen groups, people feel vulnerable about acting in accord with one another and so are less likely to risk the assertive collective behavior that democracy requires.
In dictatorships, infiltrators are joined by agents provocateurs at marches and rallies. These provocateurs don't just act and dress like the protesters: Their task is to provoke a violent situation or actually to commit a crime. One FBI infiltrator, Gary Thomas Rowe, for instance, warned his handler of an impending police attack on the Freedom Riders—then went ahead to participate energetically in the beatings that followed.[4] Provocateurs also serve a PR purpose: They set up protesters to look like lawless threats to society, thus providing would-be dictators with the rationale for declaring martial law as a means to "restore public order."
Sin 2000, there has been a sharp increase in U.S. citizen groups that are being harassed and infiltrated by police and federal agents, often in illegal ways. A 20006 ACLU report notes that police departments in California had infiltrated antiwar protests, political rallies, and other constitutionally protected gatherings and were secretly investigating them, even though the California state constitution forbids this.[5]
But that was just the beginning. A Defense Department program called Talon created a database of "anti-terror" information about peaceful U.S. citizen groups and activists.[6] Talon included details of antiwar groups' planning meetings in churches; a church service for peace in New York City; even details of the meetings of such all-American groups as Veterans for Peace. The Defense Department even had e-mails that had been forwarded to it by people who had pretended to be members of the groups.[7] Some of the groups were placed in this database with the rationale that while they weren't violent yet, they might become so. Jen Nessel of the Center for Constitutional Rights said, "We have absolutely moved over into a preventative detention model—you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you."[8]
Harassment is a more serious tactic. Before the Republican convention in New York in 2004, the police department's intelligence team sent detectives throughout the city to infiltrate groups planning to demonstrate peacefully at the convention. When the New York Civil Liberties Union asked to unseal the records of this undercover spying, lawyers for the city argued that the records should be kept secret, because the news media would "fixate upon and sensationalize them."[9]
It is in a fascist shift that the truth is recategorized as being unseemly—destructively inflammatory.
Today, if you are outspoken, you are increasingly likely to face other kinds of harassment, such as an IRS investigation: All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, was scrutinized by the IRS after a rector gave a sermon that characterized Jesus as antiwar. (A year after the 1917 Espionage Act was passed, Rev. Clarence Waldron was sentenced to prison for fifteen years for passing out a pamphlet that said that war was un-Christian.[10])
The IRS asked fort he California church's internal documents and e-mails in order to investigate if it had violated tax law.[11] Many conservative churches have helped Republicans: Two Ohio churches turned their facilities over to Republican groups, hosted Republican candidates, and were credited with turning out voters for Bush in 2004. But they were not investigated by the IRS.[12]
Harassment takes many forms: Peace activist Cindy Sheehan wore a T-shirt with the message, "2,245 Dead. How many more?" referring to the war in Iraq, in the gallery of the House of Representatives. Capitol Police arrested her and charged her with "unlawful conduct," which could have given her a year in prison. Beverly Young, a Republican congressman's wife, wore a T-shirt in the same place that read, "Support Our Troups"; she was asked to leave, but was not arrested or charged with a crime.[13]
On July 25, 2006, Jim Bensman, a coordinator with Heartwood, an environmental organization, was at a public meeting in Illinois convened by the Army Corps of Engineers to discuss proposed construction of a channel on a dam in the Mississippi River. Bensman advocated a standard solution to the problem under discussion: using explosives. Dams are typically destroyed with explosives, a point which the Corps of Engineers' own presentation at the meeting noted. News coverage of the meeting included the summary that Bensman "would like to see the dam blown up."
Less than a week later, Bensman got called by an FBI agent. The agent persuaded him that the call was for real by telling Bensman about items in his FBI file. The agent also told Bensman that he wanted to visit him at home. Bensman recalls: "I was thinking, 'I need to talk to an attorney'... and he said, 'Well, O.K., I will put you down as not cooperating.'"[14]
So Americans do need to watch what they say, watch what they do. Be careful how you phrase things. Don't leave your meeting's minutes lying around. Check your gut reaction when you are talking to people in your local group. Be mindful while your pursue your activism.
Have the number of a good lawyer handy.
But most important of all, lead your friends and community to unite in a grassroots movement to restore our nation's freedom.
Protest has been lively in our nation throughout most of our history because being free means that you can't be detained arbitrarily. We have also felt free in the security of our homes, believing that the state can't break in and go through our possessions.
All that is changing.
In 2002, I began to notice that almost every time I sought to board a domestic airline flight, I was called aside by the Transportation Security Administration and given a more thorough search. When this was happening on nine flights out of ten, I asked the officials about the special search. They told me that the search was due to the quadruple "S" that routinely came up on my boarding pass. There are several reasons why one might receive a quadruple "S" on one's boarding pass if one doesn't fit a terrorist profile: buying a ticket at the last minute, for instance, or paying in cash. But those circumstances didn't apply to me. I kept asking, but not getting real answers.
This stepped-up search became so routine as I traveled that companions who were flying with me began to simply say, "I'll meet you at the gate," even before we got through the security line.
On yet another preboarding search, I asked yet again. The TSA agent searching me, a young woman, said pleasantly, "You're on the list."
"The list?" I asked. "What list?" Her supervisor abruptly ended our exchange, took over from her, and then moved me on.
Indeed, the TSA Administration does keep a "list." The American citizens on the list who do not fit a terrorist profile range from journalists and academics who have criticized the White House to activists and even political leaders who have also spoken out.
These TSA searches and releases would be trivial in a working democracy. In the 1960s, peace activists found it merely irksome to be trailed by FBI agents, and in the 1980s those who organized The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) on college campuses were even amused sometimes to find, on submitting a Freedom of Information Act request, that there was a file open on them. But once the first steps in a fascist shift are in place, being on "the list" is not really funny any more.
When you are physically detained by armed agents because of something that you said or wrote, it has an impact. On the one hand, during these heightened searches of my luggage, I knew I was a very small fish in a very big pond. On the other hand, you get it right away that the state is tracking your journeys, can redirect you physically, and can have armed men and women, who may or may not answer your questions, search and release you.
Our faith in nonarbitrary "safe" detention helps to make us Americans. When I was twenty, I joined a group of graduate students who traveled from Oxford to London to get arrested. We all went over to the American embassy: There we sat, self-consciously, on the chilly concrete steps, with our "U.S. OUT OF EL SALVADOR" banner unfurled on our knees. A police van arrived. Bored British police officers took us away. We were locked up for a few hours and then, of course, released.
"Silly season," one of the bobbies commented civilly as he signed the paperwork that let us go. I wasn't scared to speak out because I was in a democracy and the rule of law protected me.
That kind of experience of accountable detention and release is eroding in America. Activists are not being beaten. But they are being watched, and sometimes intimidatingly detained and released.
In America, people are not supposed to be detained because of their political beliefs. But Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy, the liberal senator from Massachusetts who is a thorn in the side of the Bush administration, was detained five times in East Coast airports in March, 2005. Democratic Congressman John Lewis of Georgia has also been subjected to extra security measures.[1]
On September 21, 2004, U.S. security officials diverted to Bangor, Maine, a United Airlines flight from London to Washington D.C. On board was Usef Islam, once known as the singer Cat Stevens. Customs and Border Protection agents questioned him on "national security grounds."[2] Most Americans associate Cat Stevens not with bomb-building in al-Qaeda training camps, but with slowdancing to "Wild World" in suburban rec rooms. Islam's detention helps "blur the line"— he is "one of us."
Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, American peace activists, tried to check in at the San Francisco airport for a trip to Boston in August 2002. Airport personnel who said that these middle-aged women were on the "master list" called the police and notified the FBI. At least twenty other peace activists are confirmed to be on the list: A 74-year-old Catholic nun who works for peace was detained in Milwaukee; Nancy Oden, a leader of the Green Party, was prevented from flying from Maine to Chicago.[3] Free speech advocates are on the list: King Downing of the ACLU was detained in the Boston airport in 2003.[4] David Fathi, also of the ACLU, was detained as well.[5] Scholars who defend the Constitution are on the list: in 2007, Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton, one of the nation's foremost Constitutional scholars, who had recently spoken critically of Bush's assault on the Constitution, was detained for being on a "watch list." A TSA official confirmed informally that it was probably because Murphy had criticized the President, and warned him that his luggage would be ransacked.[6]
In 2005, "Evo Morales"—which is the name of the President of Bolivia, who has criticized Bush—appeared on the list, beside President Morales' birthdate.[7] After Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, gave a speech at the United Nations criticizing Bush, Chavez's foreign minister, Nicolas Maduro, was detained at Kennedy Airport. When Maduro explained that he was Venezuela's foreign minister, he said that officers "threatened and shoved" him. According to President Chavez, the officers accused Maduro of participating in terrorist acts.[8] The chilling effect from this last example could be profound: Any staffer of any foreign government or international regulatory body can be detained.
Now, there are tens of thousands of people on the list.[9]
Where did the list come from? In 2003, President Bush had the intelligence agencies and the FBI create a "watch list" of people thought to have terrorist intentions or contacts. These agencies gave the list to the TSA and the commercial airlines. 60 Minutes got one copy of the list: It was 540 pages long. That list of people to be taken aside for extra screening had 75,000 names on it. The more stringent "no-fly list" had 45,000 names; before 9/11 there were just 16 names. The list is so secret that even Congresspeople have been prevented from looking at it. People on the list endure searches that can last for hours. One American citizen, Robert Johnson, described "the humiliation factor" of being strip-searched: "I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks. I was treated like a criminal." Donna Bucella, who was at that time head of the FBI program that oversaw the list, told 60 Minutes, "Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list."[10]
On December 6, 2006, Democrats in Congress tried to find out more about recent reports that the Department of Homeland Security "was using a scoring system" that rated the dangers posed by people crossing American borders. The Democrats were worried that these lists did not simply keep people from flying-they could keep them from getting jobs as well.
According to the New York Times, Vermont Senator Patrick J. Leahy said that "the program and broader government data-mining efforts could make it more difficult for innocent Americans to travel or to get a job — without giving them the chance to know why they were labeled a security risk."[11] So now there is not just the anxiety that you might be detained-you could also, if you are on certain secret lists, be turned down for a job and never know why.
Being on the list can get also get some people detained and tortured — although they are innocent.
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen, a software consultant, husband, and father — a North American yuppie. The United States detained Arar when he was changing planes at Kennedy Airport in 2002. He was "rendered" to Syria. Security forces there kept him in prison for over a year, beating him repeatedly with a heavy metal cable. The Canadian government pursued a two-year investigation and concluded that it had all been a terrible mistake — Arar actually had no ties to terrorists whatsoever. Canadians were so appalled by this miscarriage of justice that the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police resigned. After he was released with his government's help, Arar, emboldened perhaps by living in a working North American democracy, sued the U.S. government.
The Bush administration refused to concede that it had been wrong; refused to provide documents or witnesses to the Canadian investigators; and finally announced in January 2008 that they had "secret information" that justified keeping Arar on the list.[12]
So Arar, a North American citizen like you or me, has to live in fear, perhaps for the rest of his life (his CCR lawyer says he suffers from post-traumatic stress): Arar turns down offers to receive honors overseas, for whenever he travels — if he dares to — over borders, he fears being taken off the plane or train, shipped to another country and subjected to torture again.
Making it more difficult for people out of favor with the state to travel back and forth across borders is a classic part of the fascist playbook. As Nazi Germany closed down, borders tightened and families fleeing internment were traumatized by the uncertainties that they knew they faced at the borders. When reporter Timothy Garton Ash published essays that offended the Stasi, he was forbidden to re-enter the GDR. The United States has recently been refusing visas to various respected Muslim scholars from universities such as Oxford — scholars with no ties whatsoever to terrorists — because they have been critical of U.S. policy. This has happened before in America: in the 1950s the FBI confiscated the passports of intellectuals and journalists who had been critical of anticommunist witch hunts.[13]
William Shirer described the tension of airport searches of suspect individuals — reporters — in Berlin in 1938:
Are the cases we hear of Americans being caught up in detention, searches, and releases merely Homeland Security or TSA zealotry? Or are the stories effective PR about a new reality? Fascist propagandists target individuals, detain and release them, and then publicize the stories. Could all these — Bensman the fish defender and Cat Stevens the balladeer and the little elderly nun and the lady peace activists — be victims not of simple clumsiness but, rather, examples of the fact that perfectly ordinary Americans can now get entangled in the increasingly punitive apparatus of the state?
Could what happened to Maher Arar happen to a U.S. citizen? Chaplain James Yee was arrested and investigated on suspicion of "espionage and possibly treason" on September 10, 2003. It is not widely reported that he had also spoken up on behalf of better treatment for the detainees in Guantánamo. Military officials claimed that Yee had classified documents that included diagrams of cells at Guantánamo and lists of detainees. He was also said to have "ties to [radical Muslims in the U.S.]."
Chaplain Yee was taken to a navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and interrogated.[15] He was blindfolded; his ears were blocked; he was manacled and then put into solitary confinement for seventy-six days; forbidden mail, television, or anything to read except the Koran. His family was not allowed to visit him. He was demonized on TV, radio, and the Internet and accused of being an operative in "a supposed spy ring that aimed to pass secrets to al- Qaeda from suspected terrorists held at Guantánamo. ... Court papers said he would be charged with espionage, spying, aiding the enemy, mutiny or sedition, and disobeying an order." Chaplain Yee, born in New Jersey and raised a Lutheran before he converted to Islam, was baffled at the accusations. His lawyers were told he could face execution.Within six months, the U.S. government had dropped all criminal charges against Yee. But the government said it did so to avoid making its sensitive evidence public, not because Yee is innocent.
Yee was released — but charged with what looked like punitive "Mickey Mouse" charges: "adultery, lying to investigators and two counts of downloading porn." In the presence of his humiliated wife and his four-year-old daughter, military prosecutors compelled Navy Lt . Karyn Wallace to testify about their extramarital affair. The military rarely prosecutes adultery. The government never presented the evidence on which it based its first accusations against Yee. But after Yee was set free, he was placed "under a new Army order not to talk about his ordeal in any way that might be seen as critical to the military." If he says anything negative about what happened to him, he faces further prosecution.[16]
(In 2007, Lieutenant Colonel William H. Steele, who like Chaplain Yee has spoken up for a more humane situation for the detainees, would also find himself accused of "aiding the enemy," for various charges, and facing possible execution.[17])
So in Yee's case a United States citizen innocent of the initial charges was kept in solitary confinement, this time for 76 days. His name was destroyed, his family humiliated-and he can't talk about it or he will be arrested again.
On July 24, 2006, Chaplain Yee said he had been detained once again, this time at the Canadian border as he was trying to come home after a trip to Vancouver to see a performance. Yee was questioned for two hours.[18] You can imagine how that "Come with us" might have felt.
In Germany, by 1933, arbitrary arrest and release was common. On November, 27, 1938, two police officers came to Victor Klemperer's house to search for weapons. As they ransacked the possessions of the two middle-aged German Jews, Mrs. Klemperer made the mistake of asking them not to go through the linen cupboard with unwashed hands. Professor Klemperer was taken into custody and released: "[A]t four o'clock I was on the street with the curious feeling, free-but for how long?" (In 1941, Klemperer would spend eight days in prison for forgetting to close the curtains on his windows for the blackout.)
The charges against those taken into custody and then released were often vague and uncontestable. In a survey of German citizens who had lived through that era, 36 percent reported having been arrested, questioned, and released. A well-known Cologne priest who was outspoken about the Nazis was arrested and released repeatedly.[19] As the 1930s progressed hundreds of thousands of German citizens were arbitrarily detained and released. General Pinochet used this tactic too: Every so often the military would enter a slum, arrest people in random sweeps, keep them behind bars briefly, and then let them go. The only real reason was to intimidate the population.[20]
You've heard the phrase "unreasonable searches and seizures," and like so much about the Bill of Rights, in a time when democracy has been subcontracted out the lawyers and activists, it is hard for ordinary people to understand what the urgency of this could be. If you don't know the history of tyranny out of which our nation was formed, this arcane language, which no one puts in context for you, can almost sound like an unimportant scolding to "play fair"—like a parent insisting that your brother not go through your things without permission. What's the big deal about "unreasonable search and seizure"?
The FBI accused Brandon Mayfield, another ordinary yuppie—an American lawyer from Portland, Oregon—of supporting terrorism. They asserted that it was his fingerprints on evidence from the bombings in Madrid. Agents secretly broke into his home and seized his computer. Mayfield, a convert to Islam, has a wife and children. You can imagine the feeling of coming home with your kids to find that strangers have broken in and been through your—and their—possessions.
You probably heard the saturation news coverage that implied that Mayfield was involved with terrorism. It turned out that Mayfield was innocent. But even when the Spanish government protested that his fingerprints did not match the prints from the bombings, the United States—again—refused to acknowledge the mistake and jailed Mayfield for two weeks in 2004, including time in solitary confinement and the prison's mental ward.[22] The charges were eventually dropped. (In November 2006 the U.S. government agreeed to pay Mayfield two million dollars to settle a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the USA PATRIOT act which the FBI had used to obtain his personal records.[23])
Most of us don't fully understand the details of the debate over the Bush administration's efforts to avoid getting a legal warrant for each time that it reads our e-mails, opens our mail, and listens in on our phone calls—or enters our homes unbeknownst to us. President Bush wants to get, effectively, a "blanket warrant" to do these things. Many of us might think that "a blanket warrant" sounds reasonable, even efficient, in a time of war.
The Founders knew how scary a blanket warrant was, in war or peace. The Fourth Amendment specifically rejects vague general warrants.
Why? Because colonial Americans knew firsthand how abusively authorities could use the power of a blanket warrant to break into their homes and seize their private papers. General warrants had let officers of the British crown violate the privacy of colonial American homes and businesses again and again. The British Crown taxed everything from stoves to soap to papers, from candles to glass to, of course, tea. At that time, customs agents of the Crown would violently break into people's homes, rip up their trunks and cabinets, loot their papers, and haul off their goods—even if they weren't hiding anything that they should have paid taxes on.
Colonial pamphleteers in 1754 warned of the danger of these agents having the power to destroy doors, break open locks, bolts, and chains, and invade people's bedrooms and cellars armed with no more than a general warrant. A general warrant meant that these agents could go wherever they wanted without having to show a magistrate that there was a reason for their suspicion that a certain person was breaking the law. It meant that no one's home was ever truly private or safe.[24] Because of these violations of their homes, drafters of the Constitution created the Fourth Amendment.
It is tyrants and dictators who send agents to break into people's homes and offices, to seize their papers, and destroy their goods.
If there is a march for, say, the Constitution, we expect to be able to get on a bus, or take the subway, and join our assembled fellow citizens. Every pro-democracy movement depends on people being willing and able to march as a mass; the sheer numbers of citizens is one of a budding or threatened democracy's most potent weapons. It is masses of people united who brought down the Berlin Wall; stood up to Chinese tanks; and overwhelmed a dictator in the Philippines. Massed citizens ended Jim Crow laws and brought the war in Vietnam to a close. It is so simple a tool, but so powerful.
That is why a dictatorship restricts the movements and assembly of its citizens—usually through municipal ordinances and curfews: Mussolini's arditi, for instance, warned Italian citizens to stay indoors during the fascists' mass rallies. In Mexico, police shot at and wounded student protesters in 1982.[26] Suppression of protests habituates citizens to the idea that the state has the right to direct their movements and to disperse large groups or to keep them from gathering in the first place.
In America, citizens are supposed to have the right "peaceably to assemble." But in 2004, during the Republican National Convention, New York City officials denied demonstrators access to the Great Lawn in Central Park. Mayor Michel Bloomberg's administration denied that politics had played a role in banning the demonstration. But the National Council of Arab Americans and the ANSWER Coalition, an antiwar group, brought suit. E-mails revealed that while Bloomberg's aides gave the rationale of "security" for denying the permit, the true reasons were political: "It is very important that we do not permit any big or political events for the period between Aug. 23 and Sept 6, 2004," read one Parks Department e-mail.[27]
In New York, that wasn't the end of the pressure against free assembly. In August of 2006, the New York Police Department sought new rules that made it illegal for groups of more than 35 people to gather for sidewalk marches without a permit. The NYCLU pointed out that this proposal would have restricted a wide range of citizens' daily group activities, such as school field trips and funeral processions: "A couple jaywalking or a family riding bicycles without stopping at every red light would be subject to arrest for parading without a permit," the NYCLU wrote in an op-ed in the Times.[28]
For now, U.S. citizens can still assemble, march, and make their voices heard. You must ally with the many Independents and Republicans around you who love their country and cherish these rights—don't just talk to your like-minded friends. We must practice our rights now while our voices can still carry—raising them together in defense of freedom.
All dictators or would-be dictators strategically target key individuals. Job loss or career setbacks are the first kind of pressures these people are likely to face.
...
Whether driven by Mussolini or by Goebbels, by Pinochet or by China's Politburo, it's always the same tactic: The state leans on university administrators, who lean on professors and students.
Italian Fascists leaned on university rectors to scrutinize the politics of those whom they oversaw: The rector of Milan's Catholic University actively informed on politically anti-Fascist students to the secret police. If you were either a student or a professor in Mussolini's Italy, expressing unpopular views could get you fired-or even arrested and sent to internal exile. By 1927, if you wanted to secure welfare benefits or get a job or a promotion, citizens, including academics, faced a political litmus test.[10]
Germany emulated the tactic: From the early 1930s, professional purges led so many Jewish and "communist" academics and scientists to emigrate that this led to a major brain drain. By 1933, about 2,000 of the nation's premier artists and writers had fled as well." The Nazi periodical The Nettle depicted this emigration as "a triumph for the German nation."
The National Socialist German Students' League was set up in 1926. It sought to get independent professors fired and to direct the universities' resources toward Nazi goals rather than toward pure research. By 1933, Propaganda Minister Goebbels set in motion one of these purges: "By the beginning of the academic year 1933-34, 313 full professors had been dismissed .... By 1934, some 1600 out of 5000 university teachers had been forced out of their jobs .... Very quickly, newly Nazified Education Ministries made political criteria central not only for appointments but also for teaching and research:"' On May 10, 1933, pro-Nazi students also orchestrated a series of book burnings-events designed to look "spontaneous" but actually directed behind the scenes by Goebbels.'
This pressure on students and academics worked in Chile in the early 1970s as well. Chilean students had been among the few who still dared to march, hold meetings, pass out flyers, and create posters attacking Pinochet after his military coup. But Pinochet purged nonaligned academics and university administrators and put his own military officers in those positions. He closed down whole departments, gutted some university programs, and moved others to new locations. He made it clear that student life was now under new management: that of his cronies. It was obvious to Chilean academics that they had to support the Junta or give up their careers."
Students and academics are always democracy's foot soldiers: Czech students helped bring about the Prague Spring democracy movement. Students in Shanghai and Beijing led the democracy movement in 1989: It was Chinese art students who set up the statue of Lady Liberty in Tiananmen Square.
...
In all dictatorships, targeting the free press begins with political pressure—loud, angry campaigns for the news to be represented in a way that supports the group that seeks dominance. Attacks escalate to smears, designed to shame members of the press personally; then editors face pressure to fire journalists who are not parroting the party line. A caste of journalists and editors who support the regime develops, whether out of conviction, a wish for advancement, or fear.
Such regimes promote false news in a systematic campaign of disinformation, even as they go after independent voices.
America is still a fairly open society in which assertions can be independently verified and a thriving Internet community can tear apart false allegations. Even in the United States, though, opinion is being penalized, and false news is being disseminated which disorients the public.
...
...
If you don't know anything about the 1917 Espionage Act, it sounds kind of salutary. In 1917, the nation was at war; of course we need to root out spies during wartime. But its history is sinister.
In the nineteen-teens, a wave of left-wing activism swept the nation. Many of the activists working for better conditions and higher wages were also against the nation's entry into the war. So as the country prepared for war, President Woodrow Wilson's communications machine issued a wave of propaganda to whip up war fervor. Congress quickly passed the 1917 Espionage and Trading with the Enemy Act, which criminalized antiwar remarks. Hundreds of American citizens were prosecuted for objecting to military recruitment or for speaking or writing things that could remotely be interpreted as dissent from the government's line. Citizens' meetings were raided by government spies and there were sweeping arrests without warrants. It was against the law under the 1917 Espionage Act to mail an antiwar opinion or even to advocate for a referendum on whether or not the United States should enter the war. Officials of the post office leaked files on antiwar "traitors" to newspapers.
Sentences were severe: A Kansas City man got ten years in prison for having written a letter to a newspaper. A mother of four criticized the war and got five years in jail. Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate, tried to challenge the Act in 1918, invoking the First Amendment. Debs was found guilty and was sentenced to ten years."
The Palmer Raids were the culmination of these events. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer used the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act to gather information on 260,000 citizens; the raids arrested 10,000 citizens as well as immigrants in 1919. The mass arrests were warrantless and the authorities created fake documents to deport whom they could. Teachers, librarians, and working men and women were jailed. Scores in Connecticut alone were "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death in futile efforts to extract confessions." But in spite of all these arrests and imprisonments, evidence to support Palmer's accusations of a revolutionary network never surfaced."
The pendulum swung back: a group of patriotic lawyers, led by future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, issued a report calling the raids and arrests "utterly illegal." Palmer's power waned. Nonetheless, the fear remained. After the Palmer raids, many Americans were scared to subscribe to certain journals; teachers policed what they said in the classroom; editors weighed ) their words. Dissent was muted for a decade.
...
In March 2007, a scandal erupted in which eight — later, nine — U.S. attorneys were abruptly fired, perhaps with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez's knowledge. Internal Justice Department e-mails indicated that they had been targeted as being insufficiently loyal to White House policies.
New Mexico's U.S. attorney David Iglesias received an intimidating phone call from a Republican official who was upset that Iglesias hadn't prosecuted a Democratic voter registration group. Iglesias thought that there had been insufficient evidence to warrant prosecution.
In the Congressional uproar that followed, e-mails showed that while only eight prosecutors had actually been ousted, the e-mails had discussed the possibility of purging all of the U.S. attorneys. The e-mails stated that in this eventuality, the department should stay resolute in the face of inevitable blowback.
...
So it turns out we really are at war — a long war, a global war, a war for our civilization.
It is a war to save our democracy.
Each one of us needs to enlist. We have no one to spare.
We need citizens from across the political spectrum to carry forward the Founders' banner together. Everyone can see this movement as expressing his or her most cherished values and will frame the effort according to his or her own subculture and language. Progressives may see this "American awakening" as a liberation or, at the least, as a campaign, while conservatives may well see the same movement as "conservative" in the truest sense — a return to a stewardship of the Founders' vision. Surely "liberty" as the Founders understood it—.eighteenth-century Enlightenment liberty—is the grounding of both classical conservative and classical liberal American values.
These diverse American citizens may even, in this movement, truly encounter their counterparts across the political spectrum and learn to talk to each other once again directly, as neighbors, interlocutors, and fellow patriots.
New surveillance technologies mean that today's patriots have some housekeeping to do before they can move forward effectively. This is not glamorous, but it is important to address.
Before I wrote this book, I asked an accountant to comb my tax returns, my employer records, and so on, and to identify anything that could be used against me or distorted. This process of turning an "opposition research" eye on oneself or one's organization before speaking out will have to become more common. If we are under surveillance as a nation, citizens are freer if they have disclosed their secrets to loved ones and gone over their records with a critical eye. Those in the public eye who are afraid to be forceful in opposition because of a secret they want to keep had better talk to their families or their constituencies, or their lawyers and accountants, painful as that may be in the short term. You can't fight this fight in earnest unless there is nothing left with which to blackmail you.
Some Americans, especially civil servants and members of the military, risk losing their jobs if they take up the patriot's task and speak out, or they may even risk prosecution.
Most of the rest of us? We must be willing to experience personal smears, and possibly the exposure of our secrets. Having accepted that, we all need to act and speak with courage and passion: parents, teenagers, union members, corporate leaders; the principled men and women of the military; the men and women of the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service who did not commit their lives to advance values that are un-American; those of the police forces and the National Guard who did not sign up for duty in order to suppress American rights. We need the powerful conservative Christian movement—who may recall that their own hero was a political prisoner seized by a powerful state, convicted without a trial, and tortured by military who were just doing their jobs—and we need the powerful environmental movement. We need to hold house parties, set up town halls, convene our neighbors, pass out users' guides to the Constitution, overwhelm our representatives and the Presidential candidates with demands for them to restore the rule of law.
Finally, we must stand up directly to confront those who have committed crimes against the Constitution—and hold them accountable, as the Founders trusted us to do.
Yesterday afternoon, I saw something amazing. I was trying to walk across Sixth Avenue with my little boy. But we had to pause, because dozens of colorfully dressed bicyclists—men and women and children of all races and ages—were streaming across the avenue.
It was an event organized by Critical Mass, the bike-riders' group; their goal was to show the power and benefit of tens of thousands of bike riders using city streets. I knew about this group because the Bloomberg administration had used similar Critical Mass bike rallies as a pretext to pass new laws to restrict citizens' assembly.
There were so many of them. My son and I waited, transfixed, but the numbers did not diminish: Thousands of Americans, no two of them alike, sped past us, exulting in freedom—and simply enjoying the sunshine of the day.
The power of all these Americans—moving separately yet in unison—seemed to me like the opposite of the power of the frightened and frightening masses I had been studying.
How mighty this current of citizens seemed to be once they had chosen a direction.
Bullies are cowards: Time and again, when people have awakened to danger and risen together to confront those who have sought to oppress them, citizens in their thousands have crumbled walls and broken open massive prisons. In our own nation, in times of eclipse, patriots have become rebels again and said: "No; the nation is not going down, not on my watch."
When that happens, there is no power that can hold these patriots back.
I hope this emboldens you.
Yours,
Naomi
New York City
July 14, 2007
I am grateful to John Brockman, Katinka Matson, Max Brockman, and Russel Winberger for their insights about the manuscript; ...
1. ^Mark Mazzetti, "C.I.A.Worker Says Message on Torture Got Her Fired," New York Times, July 22, 2006, A11.
2. ^R. Jeffrey Smith, "On Prosecuting Detainees: Draft Bill Waives Due Process for Enemy Combatants," Washington Post, July 28, 2006, A23.
3. ^"The Court Under Siege," Editorial, New York Times, July 29, 2006, A12.
4. ^Walter Dellinger, Editorial, "A Slip of the Pen," New York Times, July 31, 2006, A17.
5. ^Jesse Mckinley, "Blogger Jailed After Defying Court Orders," New York Times, August 2, 2006, A15.
6. ^Adam Liptak, "Government Wins Access to Reporter Phone Records," New York Times, August 2, 2006, A12.
7. ^"Strong-Arming the Vote". Editorial, New York Times, August 3, 2006, A20.
8. ^Howard Fineman, "Rove Unleashed," Newsweek, December 6, 2004. Available at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6597631/site/newsweek/.
9. ^Dana Canedy, and Dexter Filkins. "Counting the Vote: Miami-Dade County: A Wild Day in Miami,With an End to Recounting, and Democrats' Going to Court," New York Times, November 23, 2000, A31.
10. ^Nigel Williamson, "Free the Dixie Three," The Guardian, August 22, 2003. Available at: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1026475,00.html.
11. ^Kirk Johnson, "Colorado U. Chancellor Advises Firing Author of Sept. 11 Essay," New York Times, June 27, 2006, A11.
12. ^"ACLU Uncovers FBI Surveillance of Maine Peace Activists," ACLU Press Release, October 25, 2006. Available at: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/spyfiles/27180prs20061025.html.
13. ^Transcript for September 14, NBC News, Meet the Press, Sunday, September 7, 2003. Available at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3080244/.
14. ^"'We Got Him,' and Then a Call by American and Iraqi Officials for Reconciliation". Excerpts from a news conference, as recorded by Federal Document Clearing House, Inc., New York Times, December 15, 2003. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/15/politics/.
15. ^"JFK Airport Security Forces Woman to Drink Own Breast Milk," USA Today/Associated Press, August 12, 2002. Available at: http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2002/2002-08-09-jfk-security.htm.
16. ^Max Gallo, Mussolini's Italy: Twenty Years of the Fascist Era, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Macmillan, 1973, 117.
17. ^Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 341.
18. ^James Bovard, "Moral High Ground Not Won on Battlefield," USA Today, October 8, 2002. Available at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2002-10-08-oplede_x.htm.
19. ^Ernestine Bradley, The Way Home: A German Childhood, an American Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), 80.
20. ^Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Documentary, Synapse Films, 1935.
21. ^Reid J. Epstein, "University Warns Students of Patriot Act Disclosures: Government Can Get Medical Records," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 17, 2004. Available at: http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=285173; see also "Reform the Patriot Act," ACLU. Available at: http://action.aclu.org/reformthepatriotact/215.html; Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 144.45.
22. ^Howard Kurtz, "Newsweek Apologizes: Inaccurate Report on Koran Led to Riots", Washington Post, May 16, 2005, A1.
23. ^Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray. Guantámo: What the World Should Know (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Press, 2004), 60.
24. ^William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934.1941 (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1941), 89.
25. ^"Sesame Street Breaks Iraqi POWs: Heavy Metal Music and Popular American Children's Songs Are Being Used by US Interrogators to Break the Will of Their Captives in Iraq," BBC News, May 20, 2003. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3042907.stm.
26. ^Shirer, Berlin Diary, 89
27. ^"How U.S. Used Iraqi Wives for 'Leverage': Suspected Insurgents' Spouses Jailed to Force Husbands to Surrender," Associated Press, January 27, 2006. Available at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11061831/.
28. ^Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, trans. Colleen Taylor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 269.
29. ^Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: Harper Perennial, 1962, 1971), 267, 374.
30. ^Vice President's Remarks at the Pentagon Observance of September 11th. Office of the Vice President, September 11, 2006. Available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060911.html; see also Dr. Condoleezza Rice.s Opening Remarks to Commission on Terrorist Attacks, Office of the Press Secretary, April 8, 2004. Available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040408.html.
31. ^Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 187.
32. ^Shirer, Berlin Diary, 324.344.
33. ^Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson, Rita Leistner, Philip Jones Griffiths, and Phillip Robertson, Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Press, 2005), p. ii.
34. ^Randal C. Archibold and Jeff Kearns, .Prosecution Sees Setback at Terror Trail in California,. New York Times, April 10, 2006, A20.
35. ^.California Father in Terror Case Released,. USA Today, August 26, 2006. Available at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08- 25-calif-terror_x.htm.
36. ^Philip Shenon and Don Van Natta Jr., .A Nation Challenged: The Investigation; U.S. Says 3 Detainees May Be Tied to Hijackings,. New York Times, November 1, 2001, A1.
37. ^Archibold and Kearns, ibid.
38. ^Eric Lichtblau, .Ex-Prosecutor in Terror Inquiry Is Indicted,. New York Times, March 30, 2006, A18.
39. ^Medvedev, Let History Judge, 341, 354.
40. ^Jennifer Quinn, .British Foil Plan to Wreak Terror and Kill Thousands Over the Atlantic,. Associated Press, printed in The Seattle Times, August 10, 2006. Available at: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003188108_londonplot10.html
41. ^Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: HarperCollins, 1962, 1991), 266.67, 374.
42. ^Myra MacPherson, All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Scribner, 2006), 56.
43. ^Thomas Fuller, .Thai Junta Imposes Curbs on News Media,. International Herald Tribune/New York Times, September, 22, 2006, A13; .Wider Ban on Political Activities.. Associated Press/New York Times, September 25, 2005, A3; .Thai Junta Revokes Ousted Prime Minister.s Diplomatic Passport,. New York Times, January 11, 2006, A13.
44. ^.President Bush Signs Military Commissions Act of 2006,. Office of the Press Secretary, October 16, 2006. Available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061017-1.html.
45. ^Author interview, October 10, 2006.
1. ^R. J. B. Bosworth, "Mussolini's Italy: Life Under Dictatorship", 1915-1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 215.
2. ^Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), xxiii, xxvi, xxx.
3. ^Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, "The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism" (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 28.
18. ^Denis Mack Smith, "Benito Mussolini: A Biography" (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 21.
19. ^Richard J. Evans, "The Third Reich in Power" (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), 621, 632.
20. ^Robert C. Tucker, "Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928 - 1941" (New York: W.W. Norton and Company), 275.
21. ^Dana Priest, "U.S. Instructed Latins on Executions, Torture: Manuals Used 1982-91, Pentagon Reveals" Wahsington Post, September 21, 1996, Al.
25. ^http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/travel/08journeys.html
(26 total)
3. ^http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060905-4.html
14. ^Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 284-87.
15. ^Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 293-298.
17. ^Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 274.
18. ^Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph Des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Documentary, Synapse Films, 1935.
19. ^Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 293, 298.
20. ^Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 310, 313-14, 332.
27. ^http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/05/terror/main1683852.shtml
(31 total)
6. ^http://hrw.org/reports/2005/egypt0205/index.htm
14. ^http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5751355
25. ^http://cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/14/hamdi/
28. ^http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2037444.stm
30. ^http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070312/klein
31. ^http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6682846
36. ^http://www.law.whittier.edu/pdfs/cstudents/wlr-v27n1-anderson-abstract.pdf
54. ^http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/64.1/br_1.html
61. ^http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/10/040510fa_fact
65. ^http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6212843.stm
5. ^http://www.aclunc.org/issues/government_surveillance/the_state_of_surveillance.shtml
10. ^http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041212/NEWS/412120306/1013
13. ^http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/31/sheehan.arrest/
4. ^http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/18765prs20041110.html
6. ^http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/04/another-enemy-of-people.html
7. ^http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/05/60minutes/main2066624.shtml
9. ^http://www.aclu-wa.org/detail.cfm?id=274
15. ^http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/09/20/chaplain.arrest
16. ^http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-05-16-yee-cover_x.htm
22. ^http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5053007
10. ^Stanley Fish, "Conspiracy Theories 101", New York Times, July 23, 2006, 4:13.
(29 total)
Abdual-Ahad, Ghaith, Kael Alford, Thorne Andersen, and Rita Leistner. Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2005.
Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.
Ash, Timothy Garton. The File: A Personal History. New York: Random House, 1997.
Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Reprint. Edward Mendelson (ed.). New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
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