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Topic: A Review of Naomi Wolf's The End of America
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Michael Nenonen
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 6680
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posted 16 November 2007 06:39 AM
I'm going to submit this article for publication in The Republic, but since I want this book to receive the widest coverage possible as quickly as possible I'm going to post a copy of the article here. A Review of Naomi Wolf’s The End of America Michael Nenonen November 15 2007 Reading Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007), I realized the hour is later than I thought. Many of us have watched the Bush regime’s actions with a growing feeling of horror intertwined with a sense that somehow we’ve seen all of this before, but we aren’t sure where. We’re confused because what we’re seeing conflicts with unexamined and deeply held assumptions we have about American freedom. Wolf’s short but meticulously documented book shows that what is happening in America has indeed happened many times before, not in the United States but rather in places like Chile, Italy, Russia, and Germany. In each case, people couldn’t understand why they didn’t recognize where they were heading before they passed the point of no return. Wolf argues that the United States is undergoing a “fascist shift” from an authoritarian but still relatively open society to a totalitarian society. The techniques for forcing this shift have evolved over the last century and are now studied by aspiring tyrants the world over. These methods are even part of the formal curriculum in places like the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia, where thousands of Latin Americans have been trained by the United States government in the most savage techniques of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Fascists use ten basic strategies to shut down open societies. They invoke an external and internal threat in order to convince the population to grant their rulers extraordinary powers. They establish secret prisons that practice torture, prisons that are initially few in number and only incarcerate social pariahs, but that quickly multiply and soon imprison “opposition leaders, outspoken clergy, union leaders, well-known performers, publishers, and journalists.” They develop a paramilitary force that operates without legal restraint. They set up a system of intense domestic surveillance that gathers information for the purposes of intimidating and blackmailing citizens. They infiltrate, monitor, and disorganize citizens’ groups. They arbitrarily detain and release citizens, especially at borders. They target key individuals like civil servants, academics, and artists in order to ensure their complicity or silence. They take control of the press. They publicly equate dissent with treason. Finally, they suspend the rule of law. All of these strategies are being employed in America today, and I’ll deal with each in turn. The Bush administration and its supporters have consistently portrayed the security threat posed by international terrorists as a threat to the very survival of Western civilization in order to justify permanent war and to keep the American public in a state of panic and paranoia. The prisons at Guantanamo and God-knows how many CIA “Black Sites” torture their inmates, even though human rights organizations have demonstrated that the majority of at least Guantanamo’s inmates are innocent victims of mass arrests. The inmates are designated as “enemy combatants” who have no rights under international or American law. And there is nothing stopping American presidents from filling these prisons with American citizens. In an April 24 2007 article for the Huffington Post, Wolf writes that thanks to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, “the president has the power to call any US citizen an ‘enemy combatant’. He has the power to define what ‘enemy combatant means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define ‘enemy combatant’ any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly. Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial.” She points out that while currently Americans in such situations will be spared any torture except psychosis-inducing isolation and can look forward to eventual trials, these rights typically evaporate in the final stages of a fascist shift. Military contractors are the regime’s paramilitary force. Blackwater’s mercenaries, many of whom were trained by Latin America’s most horrific police states, have operated in Iraq outside of Iraqi, American, and military law, and have murdered uncounted innocent Iraqis with impunity. Domestically, Blackwater was contracted to provide hundreds of armed security guards in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and there’s evidence that they fired on civilians. Blackwater’s business plan calls for their use in future disasters and emergencies throughout the United States, and it’s supported by some of the biggest powerbrokers in America. American intelligence agencies are now bypassing court orders to wiretap citizens’ telephones, spy on their e-mails, and monitor their financial transactions, and the USA Patriot Act forces corporations, booksellers, librarians, and doctors to turn over previously confidential information about Americans to the state. Thousands of human rights, environmental, anti-war, and other citizens’ groups have been infiltrated by government agents, many of whom have clearly acted as agent provocateurs in order to undermine the groups’ solidarity and to legitimize police actions against them. America’s Transportation Security Administration maintains a terrorist watch list of tens of thousands of Americans who are now subjected to security searches and arbitrary detention at airports. The list includes people like Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy and respected constitutional scholar Walter F Murphy. US Attorneys, CIA agents, military lawyers, and other civil servants who’ve disagreed with the Bush administration have been threatened and fired. David Horowitz and his colleagues have mounted a well-funded nation-wide intimidation campaign that has university students spying on their professors and that has successfully coerced regents at State Universities to discipline or fire left-leaning professors like Ward Churchill. The regime’s supporters have organized campaigns to damage the careers of artists like the Dixie Chicks for criticism of the president and his policies. The administration has Fox News in its pocket, it has paid journalists for positive coverage, it has disseminated misinformation through the media, and it’s ferociously attacking critical journalists. Arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high. The Bush administration’s outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame was done in retaliation against her husband, Joseph Wilson, whose New York Times op-ed piece exposed lies that the Bush administration used to lead the nation to war. Worse than this, independent journalists appear to be marked for death by American forces in Iraq. In her Huffington Post article, Wolf writes, “The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC…In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.” The goal of these tactics, as she writes in The End of America, is to create “a new reality in which the truth can no longer be ascertained and no longer counts.” In recent years, prominent Republicans like Ann Coulter, Melanie Morgan, and William Kristol have accused liberal journalists of treason and espionage for publishing leaked material damaging to the administration, and in February 2007, Republican Congressman Don Young said “Congressmen who wilfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are sabateurs, and should be hanged.” This would be amusing, were it not for the Bush administration’s revival of the draconian 1917 Espionage Act after half a century’s slumber. And finally, the Bush administration shows contempt for the law. In The End of America, Wolf writes that Bush has used more signing statements than any previous president, and by doing so has relegated “Congress to an advisory role. This abuse lets the President choose what laws he wishes to enforce or not, overruling Congress and the people. So Americans are living under laws their representatives never passed. Signing statements put the president above the law.” He has also gutted the Posse Comitatus Act, which was created to prevent the president from maintaining a standing army for use against American citizens. Wolf writes that the 2007 Defence Authorization Bill lets the president “expand his power to declare martial law and take charge of the National Guard troops without the permission of the governor when ‘public order’ has been lost; he can send these troops out into our streets at his direction—overriding local law enforcement authorities—during a national disaster epidemic, serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or ‘other condition.’” On its own, this is an incredible expansion of presidential power, but when combined with the use of military contractors like Blackwater it gives the president almost dictatorial authority. Wolf shows that fascist shifts don’t happen overnight, but rather over a course of years during which the fascists’ plans unfold at an accelerating pace. Germany in 1933 was further along this path than it was in 1931, and Germany in 1935 was farther along than it was in 1933. Similarly, America in 2007 is farther along the path than it was in 2005, or will be in 2009, provided that a massive pro-democracy movement, complete with impeachment proceedings, doesn’t reverse the shift while there’s still time. A simple Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential election won’t do the job unless the institutional and legal environment created by the Bush administration is thoroughly dismantled. Regardless of whether the next president is a Republican or a Democrat, he or she will inherit a legacy of centralized power that a democracy simply can’t tolerate. Unfortunately, during the shift opposition politicians and activists still tend to perceive the world through a democratic frame of reference, and this prevents them from seeing that their opponents are no longer operating within this frame. As the opposition is tying its boxing gloves, the fascists are breaking out the machetes. Wolf’s work has its problems. She doesn't acknowledge that Black and Indigenous Americans have long lived under quasi-fascist rule, she doesn't examine the role that previous administrations have played in setting the stage for the Bush regime, and she doesn't acknowledge the roles played by corporatism, social dislocation and the radical Christian right in the rise of a fascist American zeitgeist. Despite this, The End of America needs to be read by as many people as possible. Wolf writes about America, but Canadians don’t have any cause for comfort. Canadian and American military forces are already deeply enmeshed. Thanks to NAFTA, we’re tied at the hip to the American economy, while the Security and Prosperity Partnership is integrating our countries’ security forces and harmonizing our no-fly lists. The Harper government is eager to kowtow to the Americans, even to the point of refusing to advocate for Canadian citizens on American death rows. The powerful think tanks and lobbying groups that influence our provincial and federal governments, such as the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, either can’t see the shift for what it is or they don’t care. More than all of this, however, is the simple reality that once the shift is complete the American government will act even more irrationally and belligerently than before, Canada has resources like oil and water the United States is going to need, and the Canadian border is less defensible than the French border was in 1940. Americans and Canadians have to fight back more fiercely than ever before, to organize and lobby and fill the streets with mass protests, to raise awareness and forge alliances with anyone opposed to totalitarianism regardless of whether they’re liberals, socialists, or conservatives. We have to take all the steps that have rescued dying democracies in the past, and to take them immediately, in the desperate hope that it isn’t already too late. [ 21 November 2007: Message edited by: Michael Nenonen ]
From: Vancouver | Registered: Aug 2004
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M. Spector
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8273
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posted 16 November 2007 09:22 AM
Has anyone read They Thought They Were Free? quote: "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it."This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
[ 16 November 2007: Message edited by: M. Spector ]
From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005
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kropotkin1951
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Babbler # 2732
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posted 16 November 2007 09:49 AM
I will have to put that on my must read list. Her Beauty Myth was a great, well written book. I am in the middle of reading Shock and Awe and it is a fearsome book.If I was younger and still into the parenting role (I'm into the grand parent thing now)I would probably advocate for naming a daughter Naomi so they always had more than one great role model. Edited becaue I can't spelll. [ 16 November 2007: Message edited by: kropotkin1951 ]
From: North of Manifest Destiny | Registered: Jun 2002
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Michael Nenonen
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 6680
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posted 17 November 2007 11:00 AM
Yes, I guess you're right, Geneva. The ability of the Executive to snatch Americans off the street and put them in secret prisons, institutionalized torture, the gutting of Posse Comitatus, the rapid growth of unaccountable paramilitary forces used on domestic soil, the scapegoating and demonizing a religious community, permanent war, widespread infiltration of citizens' groups, intense domestic surveillance, resurrection of the Espionage Act, Congressmen and influential Republicans equating dissent with treason, the bullying of civil servants and academics into silence or out of jobs, the Republican use of the same emotionally charged terms used by former fascists in their propaganda, none of that really signifies anything so long as we have some democratic pageantry to watch on TV.Geneva, Wolf's argument isn't that the USA is a fascist state at this point in time. She's arguing that the institutional changes we've seen in the last seven years, when viewed together rather than in isolation from one another, indicate that the US is in the transition phase from being an authoritarian society to becoming a fascist society. She isn't saying that American democracy is dead, only that it's dying, and she's urging Americans to use what remains of their democratic power to stop the shift. As for the Democratic debate (or train wreck, given the corporate moderation and packaging of the event), remember that the trappings of democracy are often maintained in fascist regimes in order to maintain the illusion of freedom. The presence of elections means nothing if the elections themselves aren't protected from political interference. We know that Karl Rove was involved in gerrymandering congressional districts in states like Texas, and it's very likely that the black-box voting machines in a number of key ridings were tampered with to ensure Bush's victory in the last presidential election. There's also evidence of Republican intimidation of the electorate. Wolf writes, "In Florida in 2000, as the disputed vote was recounted, angry mobs of young men--later identified as Republican political staffers, though they refused at the time to give their names--materialized in politically critical settings around the state, all dressed similarly, in chinos and white shirts. While the ballots were being counted and distributed in one office, one group made it clear to the officials behind the glass that they could see who was doing what. Some groups of aggressive young men also congregated menacingly outside voting booths in districts in which there is a majority of African-American voters. In some cases they prevented black voters from voting at all." These are classic brownshirt tactics. [ 17 November 2007: Message edited by: Michael Nenonen ]
From: Vancouver | Registered: Aug 2004
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Michael Nenonen
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 6680
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posted 20 November 2007 05:19 PM
Mudman: Well, to take an obvious example, let's look at the USA circa 1999. As corrupt and imperial and intrusive as the Clinton administration was, it simply can't compare to the Bush regime. There was no state of permanent war being rationalized by the demonization of a racial and ethnic "other", Blackwater and military contractors weren't operating on American streets or conducting unaccountable mercenary actions in a country occupied by American forces, Posse Commitatas was still in place, we have no evidence that CIA Black Sites were in widespread operation or that there was a gulag at Guantanamo, although torture was being used by the CIA it wasn't being publicly promoted as a legitimate instrument of state security, the Executive wasn't spying on Americans' e-mails and telephones without a warrant, domestic surveillance was far more restrained, there's no evidence that the Clinton administration was paying journalists for favourable coverage, academics weren't being spied on by their students, there was no campaign to silence dissident academics by pressuring the regents of state universities, scientists and civil servants weren't being fired en masse for political reasons, Fox News wasn't devoted to kissing the president's ass, and the president wasn't subverting the law with hundreds of signing statements. The notion that Wolf's ten points apply to every country simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Bush administration has radically altered the institutional environment that Americans exist within.
From: Vancouver | Registered: Aug 2004
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Geneva
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Babbler # 3808
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posted 23 November 2007 01:37 AM
well, that rhetorical tactic rarely works: saying if you disagree with someone near my position, ERGO you must hold the farthest opposite extremeuh, no FM, I have dogged D.Frum on HIS wacky forecasts, too (some people just have too much self-regard to predict carefully) ex. his prediction in January 2000 that Bill Bradley and John McCain would be the 2 US prez candidates; his notion that Newt "could choose a career at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue"; Frum,'s semi-prediction in May 1997 that the fed election then "may prove to be the last election of a united Canada" given the rising tide (sic) of Quebec sovereignists, etc etc bref, Why do I think mainstream centre-left voters and readers avoid and shun (and they do) paranoid, exaggerated, one-sided and generally unbalanced analyses like those of Ms Klein? Because they look at the United States and see for themselves a flawed, difficult, sometimes troubled place, OK, but that one that is also a magnet for creative talent (viz. Montreal's Klein), fully capable of righting itself without hysterical jeremiads, and actually at bottom pretty healthy. The End of America?? baloney ... save it for The Nation and its 12, sorry 14, readers [ 23 November 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]
From: um, well | Registered: Feb 2003
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Frustrated Mess
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8312
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posted 23 November 2007 03:06 AM
quote: well, that rhetorical tactic rarely works: saying if you disagree with someone near my position, ERGO you must hold the farthest opposite extreme
But that is your tactic, Geneva. You disagree with Klein, without having read her (and your comment above suggsts strongly you haven't read her), and then you dismiss her with ad hominem attacks such as "whacky". That is intellectually lazy.I think Frum is a moron, but at least I have read him. At least Ms. Wolf can provide a compelling argument for her views not ripped from the op-ed of some corporate media rag. [ 23 November 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]
From: doom without the gloom | Registered: Feb 2005
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Michael Nenonen
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Babbler # 6680
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posted 23 November 2007 06:21 AM
Geneva, it seems disingenuous to label Wolf's conclusions as "paranoid" and "whacky" without addressing the arguments that she uses to support those conclusions. One of Wolf's central points is that, unlike those of us who are descendents of colonizers and who were born and raised in North America, America's founding fathers did not see democracy as being the normal state of civilized humanity, but rather tyranny. They viewed democracy as being inherently fragile...a perspective that, I suspect, you would call "paranoid." If the last century has demonstrated anything, it's that they were correct. And remember that it's not just Naomi Wolf who's making this argument. People like Bertram Gross, Chris Hedges, and even Al Gore have all expressed concerns about America's increasing vulnerability to fascism. Remember, also, that simply taking the middle-of-the-road position on any given issue is hardly a sure-fire strategy for ensuring accuracy. Again, the last century has often demonstrated that entire nations can easily fall prey to self-destructive delusions. In such situations, "centrism" simply perpetuates the delusions. On a related note, imagine that three people are arguing about what 2 plus 2 adds up to. One person says they add up to 8, the second says they add up to 6, and the third says they add up to 4. The centrist position of 6 is just as inaccurate as the extreme of 8; the correct answer is the "extreme" of 4. [ 23 November 2007: Message edited by: Michael Nenonen ]
From: Vancouver | Registered: Aug 2004
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DonnyBGood
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Babbler # 4850
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posted 25 November 2007 04:47 AM
The problem with calling fascists fascists is that they always deny it. In fact they enjoy truth speakers because in an environment of lies and propaganda the Truth seems absurd.What is interesting in this is ssking why America needs to become a fascist state. What are the socio-economic forces demanding that the civil liberties be curtailed? I think that the main problem is the representative democratic process itself. In the US the debates and issues of both major parties have been little more than parlour games. American law makers have done nothing creative in 75 years. Democrats and Republicans have failed to put the interests of the piublic ahead of their partisan interests. On any given day Americans have no comprehension of what their elected representatives are actually doing for them, what issues are being debated. When the issues are presented they are so mindless and obtuse that no one buys in. Citizens almost uniformly vote on style and reaction not policy. Canadians are in many respects no different and Harper exploits that with war mongering and fake issues quickly dropped when they drop off the polling radar. Behind thw scenes secret agencies do all the dirty work and have been doing it for centuries. Now we are becoming more and more aware of it. Will people be satisfied with the smoke and mirrors of a dysfunctional representative democracy or will they demand control and a reigning in of the repressive and long hidden fascist engine that has been the real power for an age?
From: Toronto | Registered: Jan 2004
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Geneva
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Babbler # 3808
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posted 25 November 2007 10:42 AM
quote: Originally posted by Michael Nenonen: Geneva, it seems disingenuous to label Wolf's conclusions as "paranoid" and "whacky" without addressing the arguments that she uses to support those conclusions. One of Wolf's central points is that, unlike those of us who are descendents of colonizers and who were born and raised in North America, America's founding fathers did not see democracy as being the normal state of civilized humanity, but rather tyranny. They viewed democracy as being inherently fragile...a perspective that, I suspect, you would call "paranoid." If the last century has demonstrated anything, it's that they were correct. [ 23 November 2007: Message edited by: Michael Nenonen ]
sure it's fragile; a long way from there, that is, a fear of weakening civic participation and institutions, which Jefferson or Washington alrready warned about, to fascism -- the imposition of a single party/mass opinion, and single unquestioned leader -- which, one more time, is nowhere on the horizon in the America of 2008 at the moment, dozens of people from everywhere are running serious campaigns for President and represent loads of opinions on everything from immigration (find the consensus opinion between Tom Tancredo and Bill Richardson! ), gun control, Iraq, Afghanistan, deficit spending, the climate change issue, social security, et alia some threats to civil liberties? certainly some serious cleavages on the danger posed by terrorism? yes but, a real danger of a single party /opinion group / security agenda gaining control of the nation? uh no, chances of that = zilch in this context, using a loaded word like fascism just devalues the currency [ 25 November 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]
From: um, well | Registered: Feb 2003
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Frustrated Mess
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8312
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posted 25 November 2007 01:04 PM
quote: but, a real danger of a single party /opinion group / security agenda gaining control of the nation?uh no, chances of that = zilch
But see Geneva, you confuse the trappings and appearance of process with process. You think a few, very loud voices equates with many voices. It is as though a shop window has been arranged to merchandise democracy and you think the merchandising and real democracy are the same thing. They are not.You should really read the book. Your comments betray your ignorance of her arguments. ETA: And by the way, fascism descends. It isn't just there one day although it might seem as such. [ 25 November 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]
From: doom without the gloom | Registered: Feb 2005
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Geneva
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Babbler # 3808
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posted 26 November 2007 12:57 AM
just to clarify, and thread drift alert!, we have shifted from Naomi Wolf to Naomi Klein, and maybe need a new thread; but THIS is what I have been referring to, which largely echoes Wolf's comemnts about the US trending "fascist", which, yes, I qualify readily as wacky and unfounded: http://tinyurl.com/24ng4kex. : Point 2: well, Guantanamo is hardly hidden or unchallenged, including at the Supreme Court level, and top top US officials up to and including Colin Powell, for crying out loud, loudly call for its abolition; not the stuff of an authoritarian one-party State Point 3: Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. my goodness: "scary" people! ooooh, eeeek, a mouse!! can you IMAGINE the hilarity that this kind of ginger middle-class code words would prompt in old-school -- Democratic Party -- machine-politics ward pols from Chicago or Brooklyn?? You want scary , sweetheart? come on down to the 9th ward on election night!! boo! as for Points 4-10, let's not prolong the examination but yes, the word wacky is correct for lazily invoking a big word like "fascism " in connecton with this causal series; Naomi K. has apparently spent far too much time in an upper-middle-class liberal cocoon, and the damage is irreparable ... [ 26 November 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]
From: um, well | Registered: Feb 2003
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Geneva
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3808
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posted 26 November 2007 02:05 AM
quote: Originally posted by Frustrated Mess: But see Geneva, you confuse the trappings and appearance of process with process. You think a few, very loud voices equates with many voices. It is as though a shop window has been arranged to merchandise democracy and you think the merchandising and real democracy are the same thing. They are not. [ 25 November 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]
well, we disagree. The US presidential election offers a range of views, not enough for sure, but it is wrong to minimize the differences among major candidates, hardly a mark of fascist-State unanimity: Examples: Immigration Tom Tancredo: total freeze on immigration, build more walls; Bill Richardson: amnesty, regularization, family unification. Iraq Richardson: immediate and total withdrawal. McCain: extend the surge, indefinite engagement. Taxes Several Democrats: rescind all recent tax cuts. Several Republicans: extend and make permanent all recent tax cuts. etc etc. Nothing superficial about these political differences, and if these options are not enough, make loud noises with a 3rd-party candidate, as has happened in 50 per cent of modern US elections, going back to super-liberal Progressive Henry Wallace, through George Wallace, reformer John Anderson, Ross Perot, rebel Ralph Nader, and now probably independent Bloomberg -- and no one knows who else. To call this diversity of choice near-fascist or "fascist" is just wrong, and rhetorical overkill that backfires entirely. The problem really is, the US voting public largely rejects the views and policies the 2 Naomis above propose (viz. 2004 election). So, formulate theose ideasbetter and campaign better, rather than withdrawing into fantasy worlds of political Good vs Evil. . [ 26 November 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]
From: um, well | Registered: Feb 2003
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