American society is closing down. In “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,” scholar Naomi Wolf lists the 10 steps to a closed society and examines the similarities between Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and the Bush administration in the context of shutting down a society:
10. Manipulate a real or imagined threat: Stalin claimed that “sleeper cells” of capitalists were surrounding Soviet citizens. In the last six years, our leaders have claimed that “sleeper cells” of terrorists are surrounding Americans.
9. Create a secret prison system: How do Lenin’s secret prison system, Mussolini’s confino and Hitler’s study of Mussolini affect us? Why should we worry if brown people and Muslims are held and tortured in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and other secret prisons?
“I invite you to name a society that created a secret prison system outside the rule of law where torture takes place that didn’t sooner or later turn the abuse against its own citizens,” Wolf says.
When a democracy closes down, individuals with whom the mainstream public doesn’t identify are tortured first. Then the line between a real terrorist and a mere critic becomes blurred. It doesn’t matter whether you’re white or black, Republican or Democrat, or citizen or foreign national; the president can call anyone an “enemy combatant,” and the government can take you to prison, deny your right to a lawyer and torture you on the president’s say-so.
Andrew Meyer, a student at the University of Florida, was tasered by police after asking why President George W. Bush hasn’t been impeached at a lecture. This is scary because the University of Florida is answerable to the Board of Regents, which is answerable to the state legislature, which has close ties to Florida Governor Jeb Bush. In Nazi Germany, politician Joseph Goebbels pioneered the tactic of using state legislatures to put pressure on university boards of regents to control professors and students critical of Hitler.
8. Create a paramilitary force: Blackwater is a paramilitary corporation with close ties to the White House. The corporation has been in the news for allegedly massacring 17 Iraqi civilians.
But Blackwater is now on Main Street: Blackwater was invited by the Transportation Security Administration to patrol the streets of New Orleans and received orders from Bush to patrol the streets at any time during a “disaster”—which Bush can arbitrarily declare.
It doesn’t matter whether we have the essential institutions of a civil society if citizens are too intimidated to push back. Remember, Italy was a working democracy when Mussolini sent the blackshirt paramilitary to intimidate civilians.
7. Create a surveillance apparatus aimed at ordinary citizens: In East Germany, only 10 percent of the people had a stasi file, but everyone thought they had one. This worked, states Wolf, because the state doesn’t need to watch everyone if we all think that we’re being watched.
Eight hundred thousand American citizens (including staffers from the American Civil Liberties Union, members of the anti-war group Code Pink, decorated war heroes against the Iraq invasion, professors at Columbia University, UC Berkeley, Harvard and UCLA and scholar Richard Murphy at Princeton University) are on Bush’s Watch List and are not allowed to leave the country. Wolf is on the Watch List, and her e-mail and text messages are monitored by the state.
Twenty thousand American citizens are added to the Watch List each month. In February 2008, these citizens will have to apply to the state to leave the country.
6. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens: That’s why we now have interrogation rooms at airports, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
5. Infiltrate citizens’ groups: Police officers and FBI agents in Seattle spy on peaceful environmental groups without reason and put them under house arrest without due process.
4. Target individuals: Stalin targeted key individuals like newspaper editors to make examples of them in the third Moscow show trial. Homeland Security now seizes CBS journalists in Iraq and tortures them in U.S.-run prisons. David Horowitz’s book “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” blacklists individual professors to intimidate all professors critical of the state.
3. Recast criticism as espionage: The Espionage Act is now used to round up anti-war critics, journalists and outspoken clergy members without warrants.
2. Recast critics as traitors: Witness the words “anti-American,” “traitors” and “pro-terrorists.”
1. Subvert the rule of law: Due to the Defense Authorization Act, the president now has the power to declare anyone an “enemy combatant” and lock us in a 10-by-12 foot navy brig cell for three years without access to a lawyer.
A closing society, argues Wolf, still holds elections; they’re just corrupt. There is still a judiciary; it’s just not free. There are still academics; they just watch what they say. There are still newspapers; they just know how far they can go. Go to americanfreedomcampaign.org to find out what to do.
Nathan Tumazi is a third-year international studies major. He can be reached at ntumazi@uci.edu.
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