Game over — and game begun

September 27th, 2007

It’s been awhile since I gave you a rant — this is pretty close. I told you awhile back that I’d tabled a Constitutional rant … I was sniffing the air and alarmed; well, here it is, refined a bit … and the activity of the last weeks has solidified the stink of garbage and made it all too real. It’s time for a shift in how we do business — we have no choice.

I’m reading Jeff Toobin’s new book on the Supreme’s, “The Nine - Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.” It’s fascinating … and the details of a thirty-plus year design for radical takeover is scaring the hell out of me. It chronicles the rise of the Right Wing … in the judicial arena, that’s represented by The Federalists, self-righteous Neanderthals of the often-religious kind. You know how I feel about this — how dangerous this game has become, how critical each seat in the judicial body, how mindful we must be of the inside deals and politicking that has given us a conservative court even as the numbers show clearly that the American public is more liberal in its habits and concerns than ever before.

Judges, especially Supreme’s, are appointed to be apolitical … much like juries, they are tasked to follow the law while factoring in the sociological complexities of their times. If law is found wanting in regard to those complexities, then new laws are deemed appropriate. The Federalists are purists who believe that there should be no new factoring that wasn’t inherent in the actual document of the Constitution; therefore, it’s their duty to turn back the clock on laws made from “activist judges.” Two Federalist judges are the only clear victory George Bush has given his party; and that was a whopper of a victory.

The paradox is that these jurists THEMSELVES become activist in their turning back of the clock — the only law they pledge to support is anachronistic and hearkens back to a time when women didn’t vote and slaves were property — and vice versa. Their shot heard ’round the world happened in Bush/Cheney v. Gore, when politics most decisively won the day … and sent Justice Breyer into such a tailspin that he considered resigning from the highest court in the land. That was the beginning of the coup — the one we’ve been living under for seven long and hateful years. Most of you reading this knew it then, and know it now. We’ve been waiting for the rest of the nation to get a clue … and now that they have one, we’re stuck in a powerful loop of psyops, corporately-inspired MSM complicity, Executive defiance and Democratic dissembling that keeps us spinning — the Pubs are still in control.

The Republican cogs are still turning, and they’ll grind our bones if they can — bet on it. I’m tired of hearing that they mean well — THEY DON’T. The leadership of the Republican party does not mean well at all; in pursuit of power for powers sake, in desire to remake this nation in their own image, they mean to radicalize their agenda permanently and force feed it to the nation, if need be. The followers of the Republican message do not mean well, either — they are small and petty people, half-cooked in consciousness and tribal at best; I would suggest that they are only barely aware of their own internal bias and hatefulness, which leads them to project out on the “enemy” … and their leaders play their failings like a cheap fiddle. About 25% of the base is lost in their religious crackpottery, so there is no help there — only life itself can wear them down; the rest are at play, kept in the game by the “gotta win” message and fear-tapes that put them in defensive posture. They are old paradigm people in a world birthing a new paradigm … their days are numbered and that makes them even more merciless in their desire to prevail.

Today, the Republican body is demoralized and restless, wondering if it can get its wet dream of Hillary as the Blue candidate and give it another chance to win. Karl Rove, and now the Dubby himself, have crowned her Queen of Hearts, which you KNOW they wouldn’t do if they didn’t have a plan; they have no one to vote FOR, so they can’t WAIT to have their opportunity to parade the considerable Clinton-family-baggage for their base, unifying them and pulling them to the polls for an anti-Clinton vote. It’s already begun. Hil has enthusiastically taken the crown offered her and she’s running with it — she somehow parlayed ALL of the pundit shows last Sunday, an unthinkable fete in itself. Meanwhile, the Blue appears to be gobbling this bait whole with the help of MSM. What the HELL!! We’re getting steamrollered AGAIN by a clueless public and a witless party!

Did you know that Roberts received his appointment as a pay off for his assistance in busting the Florida Supreme’s that resulted in the election being passed to the High Court? Alito was selected for his entire career of radical conservatism, focused on chipping away at Roe. Think back on the Dem’s vetting of these people — how they thought them “reasonable” and took them at their word that they respected law, as it is currently written. You think they didn’t know the deal? They hadn’t heard the rumors? They weren’t aware of the implications? How hard did they try to block these candidates? They just rolled over … Feinstein comes to mind, beholden to her husbands military contracts — the female equivalent of Joe Lieberman.

This is where the rubber meets the road — this is where we’ve lost the game. The Dems have never been big on unity — now they’re not even big on integrity; one article below points out that Bush’s egregious and hypocritical string of veto’s are calculated to prove the Dems unable to lead … its working. Pelosi refuses to bring impeachment to the table because it’s “impractical” — the war could be stopped at any time if Pelosi or Reid refused to bring a funding bill to the floor but that wouldn’t be “patriotic” — who ARE these people? Pods?? They were sent to the Hill with a mandate in November of 2006 … and they’ve been tone deaf ever since! Blue Dogs aside, its clear that the lobbyists, and military industrial-complex, own these people … all of them … and thinks it owns us, as well.

On Anderson Coopers CNN newscast yesterday, Bill Clinton went after the Republicans about the MoveOn hypocrisy, showing some temper. The point … how the Pubs did a bait and switch … went unnoticed; the pundits grabbed that to discuss the possibility of the tandem Presidency the Clinton’s would brings to the nation, and how that would unify the Republicans to vote for whichever dismal candidate won the nod. We can’t discount this! We do so at our peril!

The energy is tricky out there, the situation complicated and difficult and this is not a pleasant post — but after yesterdays groveling Congressional bow to the power-mongers giving them free reign to attack Iran … and with only 22 Democratic Senators seeing the handwriting on the wall, BIG handwriting reading “Armageddon,” for cripes sake … who among us will stand in the way of darker deeds? Not a single Democratic candidate has spoken to our Constitutional woes, either [Chris Dodd’s the exception] — you think Hil would turn back the dial on unitary power? You better think again! The ACTUAL emergency in this nation is the one that began 7 years ago, and continues today — the slow strangling of Constitutional supremacy, illustrated by the Republican filibuster of habeaus corpus last week. The touchstone for civilized discourse and humanitarian equity, dismissed like a beggar in the streets. And that’s because these cretins and miscreants have found a BETTER WAY?

I’m beginning to worry that we can’t return to sanity unless we can get Gore to run — and I don’t say that lightly. I love Edwards and Kucinich, I like Richardson and Dodd, I’d like to see them get a fair shake for the candidacy but I don’t know if it can happen, with Fall already here and the primaries moved so far ahead. Money is still calling the tune, and Obama’s second, with a candidacy that seems increasingly lethargic — he also didn’t show to vote in either the MoveOn or Lieberman-Kyl bills, and I find that very disappointing. Both he and Edwards are taking shots at Hil, now, smelling their own blood in the water — I’d like to think it would help, I don’t want another Republican in the White House. “Center” is still in Red territory — and thirty years of backroom deals and conniving has put our Constitutional freedoms in the kind of serious jeopardy that few realize … if they actually did, they’d be in the streets. WHICH … I believe … is the only way we’re going to get this country back; and WHICH … as we twiddle our thumbs and pretend we’re not in a fascist dictatorship … will become ever more difficult and dangerous to do. My hero’s are in Burma, today — THAT is courage; and that is what we’ll need.

We need to put our heart where our mouth is — do you realize that the Internet is the last bastion of truth-telling in this nation? Olbermann and Stewart can’t be counted on to last forever! And how much activism have we dedicated to keeping the net free from attack? It’s just one more [yawn] click to make on one more e-petition. Our lethargy is killing us … literally and figuratively.

I will keep looking for the pony in the horseshit … some indication that Iran isn’t next; but with the exception of a complete economic meltdown in this nation … which is a real possibility … I can’t think of anything standing in the way of the Bush/Cheney ego and their push to dominate the globe. The old game is over — and a new one begun. The fates may be kind and we’ll avoid such a pass, but it won’t be because of anything WE do … nothing we do matters, at this point. We aren’t represented. Period. Not one of the top three Dem candidates will declare for a pullout from the Iraqi civil war … three million of us that participate with MoveOn just got censured by our own Congress for “poor taste and wingnuttery.” We need a new unifying position and we need it quickly. We’ve become a Banana Republic … and we need to behave as our neighbors to the South do when opposing a dictatorship — we need to find our feet and our picket signs and fill the streets.

Gore seems to be the only Big Dog with a vision I can live with and a sure ability to cream the opposition. He’s one of the few people in this nation that talks like a grown up — he captures our imagination. If he wins the Peace Prize, who could stop him? In a time of “closure” with the past, that would seal the deal and tally the books. He says he’s given up on politics and who could blame him, but I don’t see another e-brake out there that the Republic can grab to stop this massacre of a nation. Would he be a great president?

He’d be sane, and slow the cogs … he’d move the nation from glorifying what my son calls “The Great American Penis,” and allow it to look out toward a global community, awaiting our leadership and collaboration. Maybe that’s enough to work toward, considering how low on the moral food chain we’ve become. This much is clear — while we’ve been playing this noxious little game, the world has moved on and we are no longer the only superpower … when this is over, we may not even BE a superpower. At a time when the world desperately needed the highest interpretation of American principal, we took a little lapse into childishness; and from that, we may never recover.

Good. Then maybe we can turn our attention to fixing our bridges, educating our kids, and begin to lick our wounds at home. Maybe we can begin again. Maybe THAT’s the pony in the horseshit!

These are important reads — save them for the weekend if you don’t have time for them now. We’ve got to get realistic about what we’ve got if we’re going to be effective in any way; this country is going to implode from within eventually, and if we’re going to ride that wave we’ll need our wits about us. We need to start voting with our money — boycotting — making the sacrifices in this war against liberty that Bush won’t call for in his war against “evil doers.” It’s time to get smart and tough — past time.

Jude

BREAKING: Lieberman-Kyl’s Iran amendment passes
Think Progress
[open for further links]

By a vote 76-22, the Senate passed the Lieberman-Kyl amendment, which threatens to “combat, contain and [stop]” Iran via “military instruments.” Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) called the amendment “Cheney’s fondest pipe dream” and said it could “read as a backdoor method of gaining Congressional validation for military action.”

UPDATE: Before the vote today, changes were made to the original amendment, with paragraphs three and four taken out completely. This paragraph was also added at the end:

“Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated on September 16, 2007 that “I think that the administration believes at this point that continuing to try and deal with the Iranian threat, the Iranian challenge, through diplomatic and economic means is by the preferable approach. That the one we are using. We always say all options are on the table, but clearly, the diplomatic and economic approach is the one that we are pursuing.”

Read the full marked up amendment here.

UPDATE II: The roll call for the vote is here. The following senators voted against the amendment:

Biden (D-DE)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Byrd (D-WV)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Dodd (D-CT)
Feingold (D-WI)
Hagel (R-NE)
Harkin (D-IA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Leahy (D-VT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Lugar (R-IN)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Sanders (I-VT)
Tester (D-MT)
Webb (D-VA)
Wyden (D-OR)

Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL) didn’t vote.

Supreme Court to hear voter ID case
A GOP-backed Indiana law requires photo identification to be shown at the polls. In their appeal, Democrats say the policy discourages voters.
David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times
September 26, 2007

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to decide whether states can require voters to show government-issued photo identification before they cast a ballot.

The justices’ ruling, due by the end of June, could have a major effect on the 2008 presidential election and on congressional races in several states.

New photo ID laws in Indiana, Georgia and Arizona have been upheld in the last year, while a Missouri law was blocked from taking effect. By agreeing to hear an appeal from Indiana Democrats, the justices signaled that they wanted this legal dispute resolved before voters go to the polls next fall.

Since 2002, Republicans have championed photo IDs as a means to prevent fraudulent voting. Under the laws, a voter must show government-issued identification — such as a driver’s license or a passport — to prove to poll workers that he or she is indeed the person registered to vote.

Democrats, however, have strongly opposed the requirement, saying it tends to discourage people who usually vote Democratic. Tens of thousands of poor, elderly, disabled, homeless or foreign-born citizens do not have valid photo ID cards, Democrats say.

An AARP survey, for example, found that 3% of elderly registered voters in Indiana did not have a current driver’s license. Even if these people had cast ballots in the past and remained eligible voters, Democrats argue, they might be dissuaded from voting next year because of the photo ID requirement.

What’s more, Democrats say, it is exceedingly rare for would-be voters to adopt another person’s identity to cast a ballot. They contend that fraudulent voting is more likely among those who file absentee ballots by mail.

In defense of the laws, Republicans say states — including Indiana — offer free photo ID cards to any voter who needs one, so long as there are basic documents, such as a birth certificate, to establish identity.

This issue has divided state legislators along partisan lines, and the same split has been apparent in the judicial rulings. The U.S. appeals court in Chicago upheld Indiana’s law on a 2-1 vote, with two Republican appointees in the majority and a Democratic jurist dissenting.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP and the Indiana Democratic Party filed appeals, arguing that the photo rule would act to deprive citizens of the right to vote — as poll taxes or literacy tests did before the 1960s.

On Monday, the Supreme Court justices met for the first time since returning from their summer recess. They spent the day sifting through more than 2,000 appeals. And on Tuesday morning, they announced they had agreed to take up 17 of them, including the photo ID case.

“There’s no right more important than the right to vote,” said Ken Falk, legal director for the ACLU of Indiana. “If recent history teaches us anything, it’s that each vote matters. We are hopeful that the Supreme Court will recognize this bedrock principle of our constitutional democracy.”

But Indiana Atty. Gen. Steve Carter said those challenging the law were exaggerating its effect. “Most telling of all, despite the hue and cry about the supposed burdens of this law,” he said, the lawyers who filed suit could not identify “a single actual voter who could or would not vote because of the voter ID law.”

The Republican drive against voter fraud is a legacy of former White House political director Karl Rove. He had highlighted reports of suspect voting and pressed Republican leaders to move aggressively to combat it.

The GOP was most effective in pointing to problems when it came to registering new voters. Some liberal organizations sponsored drives to register prospective voters, and they paid collectors to gather signature cards. Later investigations found these groups repeatedly signed up people who were not eligible to vote. Some were not citizens, were not residents of the area or were felons who had lost their right to vote.

However, there was far less evidence that such voter drives resulted in fraudulent balloting; usually, the ineligible registrants were wiped from the rolls beforehand. Indiana officials admitted during the lower court battle over the state’s new law that they could not point to an example of a voter who succeeded in casting a ballot by impersonating another Indiana voter.

The Democratic National Committee on Tuesday applauded the court’s decision to hear the Indiana case. “The Supreme Court will have an opportunity to right a wrong perpetrated by the GOP,” said Donna Brazile, chairwoman of the DNC Voting Rights Institute. “Unjust and highly restrictive voter ID laws,” she said, were part of “a reprehensible partisan scheme to suppress voter turnout.”

Republican National Committee officials did not issue a statement Tuesday, but they have stressed in the past that states such as Indiana were not preventing or deterring any eligible voter from casting a ballot.

The Indiana cases, Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board and Indiana Democratic Party vs. Rokita, will probably be heard in January.

‘A Coup Has Occurred’
Daniel Ellsberg, Consortium News
Text of a speech delivered September 20, 2007
September 26, 2007

Editor’s Note: Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, offered insights into the looming war with Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at an American University symposium on Sept. 20.

Below is an edited transcript of Ellsberg’s remarkable speech:

I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.

If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.

Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.

And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.

It’s a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …

This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.

Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.

Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in – and there’s no move to do this at this point – unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.

The Next Coup

Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.

The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world – in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.

There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.

I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution.

I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.

That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they weren’t found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.

It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president – elected or not – with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.

When I say this I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country – but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.

They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says “I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.”

It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.

Founders Had It Right

Now I’m appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right.

It’s not just “our way of doing things” – it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody including Americans. On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.

That brings me to the second point. This Executive Branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran which even by imperialist standards, standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the Executive Branch but most of the leaders in Congress. The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …

But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.

Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t, it doesn’t even make it unlikely.

That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress – Democrats and Republicans – and the public and the media, we have freed the White House – the president and the vice president – from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.

And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.

And the question is what then, what can we do about this? We are heading towards an insane operation. It is not certain. It is likely. … I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.

What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.

And … we will not succeed in moving Congress probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.

However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small perhaps – anyway not large – possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.

Restoring the Republic

Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.

Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9/11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little…

We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, “traitor,” “weak on terrorism” – names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.

How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.

I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the United States armed services.

And that oath is not to a Commander in Chief, which is not mentioned. It is not to a fuehrer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.

I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath which I eventually came to do.

I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada – who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war – is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously in upholding his oath.

The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. Everybody under him who understands what is going on and there are myriad, are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.

Congressional Courage

On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate – and frankly of the Republicans – that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be Speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.

I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.

Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.” Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?

I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read in the Washington Post who yesterday threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.

We need some way, and Ann Wright has one way, of sitting in, in Conyers office and getting arrested. Ray McGovern has been getting arrested, pushed out the other day for saying the simple words “swear him in” when it came to testimony.

I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from mad men in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.

And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves – they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relation with the president to the slightest degree.

That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.

When America Went Fascist
Chris Rowthorn, Smirking Chimp
Sep 25 2007

“Fascism: a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator”

~ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000

It is a truism in the blogosphere that one more terrorist attack will turn America into a fascist state. People speculate about what fascism in America will look like, or how they might fight it. Others boast that they plan to flee the country ahead of the coming fascist takeover of the United States. One cannot read these posts without a sense of bitter irony, because one thing is clear to those who are watching carefully:

The United States of America is already a fascist state.

The United States turned fascist on December 11, 2000. On that day, the Supreme Court essentially appointed George W. Bush president of the United States, stopping the recount of Florida votes, and, hence, the democratic process. The justices of the court then slipped away by night, ashamed of their role in murdering America’s great experiment in democratic rule.

The Supreme Court decision of December 11, 2000 is the modern American equivalent to German President Hindenburg’s swearing in of Hitler as chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. By swearing in Hitler as chancellor, Hindenburg set in motion a process which led to the Nazi dictatorship and World War II. In the case of the Nazis, the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933 was the catalyst they needed to cement their grip on power. In the case of Bush and his backers, the tragedy of September 11, 2001 was the catalyst they needed to complete their full takeover of the American government.

When one looks at present-day America and reads plaintive musings about if and when America will turn fascist, it is useful to ask oneself the following question: When do you think the average German realized that he or she was living under a fascist dictatorship? How about the Japanese or Italians of the same period? Do you think that Hitler, Mussolini or Tojo made a public announcement to the effect of, “Dear Citizens: Please be advised that you no longer have any rights or political power. We have taken control of the government. Opposition and resistance are futile and will be punished.”

The fact is, most of the “good” citizens of these countries clung desperately to the notion that it was business as usual long after constitutional government was dead and buried. Sure, they knew that their governments were a little further to the right than normal, but as long as they kept earning money and eating well, they ignored the grim realities of fascism.

It’s easy to understand why: the “good” citizens weren’t members of officially scapegoated groups or political activists, and thus they never felt the iron first of fascism. It’s not like the government just suddenly started rounding up people at random and trucking them off to camps and executing them. No, it was only the “bad ones” who were carted off. It was the John Walker Lindhs, the Jose Padillas, the illegal immigrants and the Muslim Americans of their day who were carted off.

In fact, for the average citizen of Germany, Japan or Italy, it was only when the military adventures of their fascist governments started to go seriously awry did the reality dawn on them. Until then, if anything, they merely felt the stirrings of extreme patriotism and perhaps even satisfaction as their countries expanded outward. Indeed, for many, it was only when their countries lay in ashes did they fully understand what had happened. Only then could they see that a kind of cancer had run wild in their countries and come perilously close to destroying them.

In 2007, the average American is in exactly the same position as the typical German, Japanese or Italian citizen of the early to mid-1930s. Unless you happen to be a Muslim, a left-wing political activist, or a regular reader of left-wing political websites or journals, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s business as usual in the United States of America. You rise in the morning, read the morning paper, commute to work, get a paycheck, hit the ATM and watch the usual shows on television in the evening. Sure, we’re officially “at war” but other than a few news stories and the usual yellow ribbons and bumper stickers, this doesn’t really intrude into our realities.

But while all of us go about our lives like nothing has changed, the Constitution of the United States has been suspended, and with it, the democracy that it enshrines. Sure, Bush has never announced that he has suspended the Constitution. Rather, he has subjected it to a death by a thousand cuts. For, at last count, George W. Bush has appended 139 signing statements to laws passed by Congress, containing challenges to over 750 individual laws. These signing statements amount to 139 written declarations that George W. Bush and his allies consider themselves to be unconstrained by the law of the land and the will of the people. Or, to quote Mr. Bush: “(The Constitution) is just a goddamned piece of paper!”

On top of this, the Bush administration has repeatedly ignored subpoenas asking for information and directed aides not to comply with requests for information. And, more broadly, the Bush administration has made it clear that it will respond neither to the will of the people nor the will of Congress. Thus, in word and deed, the Bush administration is a dictatorship. And a country under the rule of a dictator is, at least by the definition at the start of this article, a fascist country.

Thus, in the last seven years, the United States has gone from a weak democracy, in which the people had weak but nominal control over their government, to a system where the government is under the control of “a unitary executive.” And, of course, “unitary executive” is how you say “fuhrer” in modern American English.

Of course, this is not news to those unfortunate Americans who are presently languishing in military prisons without access to lawyers or due process. But, for most Americans, it seems absurd or even hysterical to declare that we are living in a fascist state. Arguments about signing statements, unitary executive theory or past Supreme Court decisions are mere abstractions and gain little traction.

Perhaps this is because fascism is like pornography: it’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Indeed, the best way to distinguish pornography from art is not logical but aesthetic. Similarly, I would suggest that the best way to determine if a country is fascist is not intellectual at all, but aesthetic.

Fascism has a style, a language and a mood all its own. When enough of these outward signs of fascism are present, you can reasonably conclude that the country in question is fascist. For this reason, I have put together this short guide to some of the more obvious distinguishing features of fascism.

A Brief Guide to the Aesthetics of Fascism:

–Hypnotized by symbols: Whether it be the swastika of the Nazis, the rising sun of imperial Japan or the fasces of the Italian National Fascist Party, simple, visually striking and endlessly repeated symbols are the “look” of a fascist government. Check out any Bush speaking engagement, from his “mission accomplished” speech on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to the Republican National Convention, and you will see him surrounded by the Stars and Stripes. And where Nazi leaders wore swastika armbands, American fascists wear American flag pins on their lapels. Sinclair Lewis observed that, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” The symbols may be different, but if it looks like fascism, it’s probably fascism.

–Impoverished language: Umberto Eco wrote that, “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” George W. Bush’s tortured syntax is perfectly suited to speaking this language. In describing Newspeak, Orwell declared that words will be “not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be.” Bush’s speeches are peppered with words like freedom and democracy, when in fact, he means slavery and tyranny. Moreover, Bush is fond of accusing countries like Iran of illegally interfering in the affairs of other countries, much as Hitler accused other European countries of aggression as his armies overran the continent. The language may be different, but one fact is inescapable: if it sounds like fascism, it’s probably fascism.

–Mood of pervasive fear: In Bush’s America, people rightly believe that you may be subject to violence, harassment, arbitrary arrest or even torture if you challenge authority figures or speak out against the government. Since I started writing articles on political topics I have heard the comment repeated time and again: “You’re going to be put on a list.” Americans of all stripes live in fear of their government and few, if any, would dare question any authority figure, even if faced with the most blatant and unwarranted abuse of power. It is a sad fact that Americans are the only people in the developed world where citizens actively fear their own government. The tools of torture may have changed, but the essential fact remains: if it feels like fascism, it’s probably fascism.

–The nation as homeland: The exaltation of the nation state as a promised land is perhaps the most basic sign of a fascist state. Twenty years ago, it would have been unimaginable to refer to the United States as a “homeland.” The word would have stuck people as both antiquated and overtly totalitarian. Now, it is bandied about freely and we actually have a Department of Homeland Security. The strikingly fascist overtones of the word itself are troubling enough, but more troubling still is the thinking behind the word: America is an island in a hostile sea, surrounded by enemies who we must either vanquish or be vanquished by. Once again, if it sounds like fascism, it’s probably fascism.

At this point, it is clear that America is in the early stages of fascism; it hasn’t yet metastasized into the outright jackbooted fascism of Nazi Germany. But the country is poised like a boulder at the top of a slope, ready to roll into the abyss. In fact, it will take a miracle to keep this from happening. Consider the factors that could easily unleash outright fascism in the United States: the accelerating collapse of the US dollar; the follow-on effects from the subprime loan debacle; soaring energy prices (peak oil); catastrophic weather events caused by global warming; and, of course, the one thing that Bush’s entire foreign policy seems almost guaranteed to bring about: another large-scale terrorist attack on American soil. Any one of these by itself could trigger outright fascism. Combine two or more, and American fascism is 100% certain.

We must realize that the full machinery of outright fascism is already in place. Private security firms like Blackwater are ready and willing to serve as the new Blackshirts. Patriot Act II has been written and provides the full “legal” framework for completely revoking the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and establishing martial law. The Pentagon has established Northcom to organize military operations in the United States and Canada. The Posse Comitatus Act has been gutted to allow the National Guard to serve in police actions all across the country. And detention centers have been built across the land and plans have been laid to intern millions of Americans.

History teaches that there is a point of no return in the evolution of a fascist state. Once that line is crossed, there is no turning back until the country lies in ashes and millions lie dead both inside and outside the country. If you don’t think it could happen in the United States of America, then you don’t remember how easily Americans let themselves be robbed of their precious civil liberties in the aftermath of 9-11.

Thus, a presidential candidate who does not make restoration of constitutional government the centerpiece of his or her campaign should not even be considered. The first and most pressing order of business must be to repeal the Patriot Act in its entirety. Provisions that Democratic lawmakers deem essential to national security can be restored on a piece-by-piece basis as parts of other legislation. The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspended habeas corpus, must be repealed. The Department of Homeland Security must be downsized and brought under full and transparent civilian control.

In the longer term, meaningful campaign finance reform and public funding for elections must be enacted in order to put political power back into the hands of the people and to take it out of the hands of the Pentagon and allied industries. Because ultimately, it is the military-industrial complex, working with the electoral support of right-wing religious fundamentalists, that is behind American fascism.

A final note:

The least discussed news story of recent history appeared in the New York Times on February 4, 2006:

“The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary…KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space.”

Since it seems unlikely that cruise ships loaded with illegal immigrants are likely to wash up on American shores any time soon, one has to wonder what they mean by “new programs that require additional detention space”.

For the love of God, IS THIS AMERICA?

The Attack on MoveOn.org and Other Dangerous ‘Fingerprints’
Naomi Wolf, HuffPo
September 24, 2007

Yeah, I didn’t like the wording of the ad either. But the attack on MoveOn.org by the Senate last week is not an aberration but is part of a dangerous — and accelerating — trend of echoes from the past.

Students of history know that the National Socialists in Germany, before they came to power, made multiple assaults on democracy by pushing for laws and that expanded penalties for opponents’ speaking out against certain subjects. What they — and then Stalin, who studied Hitler — perfected was the identification of a `third rail’ of untouchable subjects that one could never approach critically without facing escalating penalties — job loss, personal attacks, or, just a little later, criminal charges. These subjects were the war, the party itself, and the military. Making these subjects sacred and untouchable allowed National Socialists to commit any number of crimes by explaining that the abusive actions were taken in the name of the off-limits-to-criticism ideals.

Then once they came to power, they developed an ever-expanding network of laws criminalizing ever expanding minor actions critical of the state or of the military or the paramilitary forces; they developed broad definitions of `treason’ and of what it meant to `impugn the honor of the nation’ — so that soon it became a crime against the state, defined as an assault on patriotism and a form of treason, to listen to the BBC or to speak up for an imprisoned Jew or communist.

The precedent set last week, of the U.S. Senate saying that we in America face possible state censure for what can be ANY criticism of the military — on the basis that such criticism can `impugn the honor’ of the military — is dangerous in the extreme if you know your history.

First of all, and I say this with tremendous admiration for the men and women of the U.S. military, this is a ‘duh’ moment if you have read anything about closing societies of the past: in a closing society the leaders will ALWAYS send trusted, admired military personnel to make its case to the population and to apparently legitimize the power grab: Pinochet secured his coup by terrifying citizens about a plan to assassinate military leaders and then sent military leaders to speak to citizens, asking them not to defend Allende. The list of would-be dictators who utilize trusted military men and women for these advance PR purposes is quite long.

The fact is that military leaders in our own and other countries can and do sometimes lie to the people to advance the interests of what are sometimes corrupt leaders. This is not a personal attack but an acknowledgment of history — witness the Vietnam war. Had Colin Powell been called to account for lying to us and the UN about the WMD, nearly four thousand Americans might be alive today; but had this benchmark of state censure for American speech preceded his testimony, even more voices would have been stilled. The Founders placed in Congress the ability to oversee the military precisely because they knew that when pressed by a corrupt executive, any standing army, even an American one, even a standing army made up of nothing but decent men, can be directed to any purpose — purposes not necessarily in the people’s interest.

In my book, End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, I have written about the blueprint for fascism, and about the fact that there are 10 classic steps to closing down a democracy. When I was researching the book, the general principles that leapt off the pages of history, about how leaders crush an open civil society, were alarming enough. Knowing ‘the blueprint’ was even more shocking as I looked around at what was unfolding in America, because it was so predictive. From reading German history, which shows how a ‘fascist shift’ is engineered by expanding the definition of ‘terrorist’ increasingly to include citizens that look more like you and me (a tactic imitated by Stalin, the East German Stasi, the Chinese Politburo and now the Egyptians, who are referencing the Patriot Act as they round up opposition leaders and put them in jail) one could tell in fall of 2006, when laws were passed to make Animal Liberation-type action against property a form of ‘terrorism,’ that environmentalists would start to be targeted and tried as terrorists — which actually happened by March of the next year.

From reading history, one could predict with absolute certainty that within two years of citizens accepting laws that permit the suspension of habeas corpus and the abuse of prisoners by the State, that the State would start to hurt people at home. (I challenge readers to name a single society that has created a network of secret prisons where torture takes place — that then did NOT eventually use force against dissidents, opposition leaders and other members of civil society at home).

So those predictive elements of ‘the blueprint’ are bad enough. But these are still generalizations — you can intellectualize them away. What really set me aback profoundly, though — actually setting my hair on end at times — was what I have come to call ‘historical fingerprints.’ These are the moments when the small details of events in fascist crackdowns of the past are so directly echoed by small details — signature details — of events in the present that it is very hard to avoid the hypothesis that someone influential in this administration has rather brilliantly studied history — not just the politics and tactics of fascism but its culture and imagery and language — and is reusing what has been shown to work.

The National Socialists introduced the term ‘Heimat’ — Homeland. The Bush administration introduced the term ‘Homeland,’ as in ‘Homeland Security,’ to take the place of the more neutral ‘Domestic’ or ‘Internal.’

Stalin coined the hyped notion of what he called ’sleepers’ or ’sleeper cells’ — these were purported to be secret terrorist agents of global capitalism who would pretend to be good Soviet citizens, perhaps for years, but who would rise up at a signal to wreak mass havoc on Soviet society. By 2002 the White House introduced the term ’sleeper cells,’ which was not in common usage in America.

Joseph Goebbels pioneered the ‘embedding’ of reporters with military troops as a way to support favorable coverage; William Shirer was embedded with German troops in the invasion of France and Nazi filmmaker Leni von Riefenstahl was embedded with German troops in Poland.

Early on, Hitler sought legislation that retroactively protected the SS from war crimes. This was a major step to opening the door to the violence against German citizens that followed. The Bush administration has sought to shield its violent interrogators retrospectively from being charged with war crimes.

Lenin set up military tribunals that bypassed the judiciary. Mussolini imitated this and did the same. Stalin imitated Mussolini and set up secretive military tribunals that bypassed the established judiciary. The National Socialists created the ‘People’s Courts’ that bypassed the legitimate judiciary. These courts stripped prisoners of habeas corpus and were characterized by prisoners having no right of appeal.

Stalin pioneered the use of sleep deprivation, extremes of hot and cold, standing (or ’stress’) positions, psychological humiliation, the use of dogs, and a separate facility to punish uncooperative prisoners in the Gulag with prolonged isolation. Guantanamo and U.S.-held Iraqi prisons reproduce the same tactics. (By the way, after a few days in a ’standing position,’ which you recall Donald Rumsfeld supported, innocent prisoners in the Gulag would ’sign anything.’)

Nazi propaganda claimed that Jews hid from arrest in ‘mouseholes.’ When the scene of Saddam Hussein’s capture was presented to the world, talking points, widely picked up by the media, introduced, again, a term that was generally unfamiliar in the U.S.: Hussein had been hiding in what they called a ’spider-hole.’

German troops tormented the imprisoned leader of Austria, Kurt von Schuschnigg, by blasting popular music into his cell day and night; U.S. interrogators do the same with rock and roll in U.S.-held Iraqi prisons.

National Socialists shaved the beards of Jews in streets and in the early days of the secret SA prisons, as a form of psychological humiliation. Incredibly, unbelievably, a U.S. spokesman gave an interview recently in The Washington Post about a detention center he oversees in Iraq — where, he seemed to be saying, prisoners could be kept indefinitely at his discretion, a set of guidelines I am struggling to distinguish from those that formally define a gulag or a concentration camp. He proudly told the reporter that moderate Muslim prisoners had forcibly attacked and shaved the beards of more radical Muslims. Here is how he described the incident:

==We had a compound of moderates for the first time overtake . . . extremists. It’s never happened before. Found them, identified them, threw them up against the fence and shaved their frickin’ beards off of them. . . . I mean, that is historic.

This would be an act of mass prisoner violence that, if this story is indeed true, would surely have been prevented by U.S. troops unless it was seen as acceptable. Human Rights groups have also reported that prisoners in U.S. custody have had their beards forcibly shaved as part of their humiliation in U.S. held prisons.

The Chinese Politburo calls the secret surveillance file that keeps track of the work and private life of every Chinese citizen an ‘iron triangle.’ Bush referred to his former key group of advisers as the ‘iron triangle.’

When the WMD argument ran dry, the White House argued that we had to invade Iraq, a country that was not at war against us, because, the administration claimed, Iraq was a staging-ground for Muslim terrorists to attack us, and because Saddam had massacred ethnic minorities like the Kurds. National Socialists told the German people that the country had to invade Czechoslovakia, a country which was not at war with Germany, because, they argued, it was a staging-ground for Bolshevik terrorists to attack Germany, and the Czechs were butchering ethnic minorities, the Slovaks, Germans, Magyars and Poles.

A U.S. government spokesman, in the wake of the foiled sneaker-bomb plot from London, gave a sound bite that was widely picked up — and one that was unusual, for a government bureaucrat, it its use of dark poetry: if this had gone forward, he said, the world would have stood still. Hitler said of his military plans in 1940-41, that ‘When “Barbarossa” begins, the world will hold its breath.’

Take a look at Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, especially the plane descent. Then take a look at the ‘Mission Accomplished’ photo-op.

Finally, we are seeing fingerprints in the way that our government is conducting surveillance on its own citizens. Consider, for example, the following passage in a recent Washington Post article:

Zakariya Reed, a Toledo firefighter, said in an interview that he has been detained at least seven times at the Michigan border since fall 2006. Twice, he said, he was questioned by border officials about ‘politically charged’ opinion pieces he had published in his local newspaper. The essays were critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East, he said. Once, during a secondary interview, he said, ‘they had them printed out on the table in front of me.’

Readers of U.S. war correspondent William Shirer’s Berlin Diary know that this was a tactic perfected by National Socialists to intimidate critics and newspaper reporters: Nazi press officials would interrogate Shirer — while displaying copies of personal telegrams that he had sent to his newspaper editor on the desk between the two men and they spoke.

These echoes of the past are truly disturbing and, as mentioned, are part of a larger fascist shift in this country. The good news is that a revolution is brewing fast. A coalition of organizations including Amnesty International USA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Human Rights Watch — representing nearly five million Americans — has formed to fight back against government assaults on our Constitution and our liberties. It is called the American Freedom Campaign and I urge you all visit the AFC site to learn more and to join the movement to save our democracy.

Naomi Wolf’s Call to Patriots — Today’s Echoes of Goebbels, and the Fragility of Liberty
BuzzFlash Interview
Tue, 09/25/2007

Democracies take nurturing. They’re easy to pull down. The Founders understood that. It’s a very dangerous time.

~ Naomi Wolf, Author, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

We owe a great debt to Naomi Wolf, who cut her teeth in writing about a new generation of Feminist thinking, for writing this wake up call to America.

In interviewing Wolf, we could hear one of her children in the background. And in many ways, young people were on her mind when she penned “The End of America,” because she is profoundly concerned that they may lose the gift of democracy and live under a dictatorship.

After conversing with Wolf, we saw her on “The Colbert Report” and marveled at how she shifted so effortlessly into expertly handling the ironic parries of Colbert. But her message was the same as it was with us, in a dialogue that proceeded in a much more somber tone: we are on the verge of crossing the threshold into tyranny.

Wolf structures her book into identifying 10 usurpations of democracy that are underway. When combined with the other assaults on our Constitutional checks and balances, we agree with Wolf that we are on the precipice of seeing this great experiment in Constitutional democracy disappear as our Bill of Rights is steadily eroded.

Careful to document her thesis with parallels to the rise of fascism in other times, Wolf speaks with a sincere and highly credible sense of urgency. She lays out the roadmap to authoritarian rule — and we are being driven down that road without most Americans even realizing it.

What she asks of us is simple: to awaken to the danger before it is too late, if it isn’t already.
* * *

BuzzFlash: Naomi, you’ve written The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot and A Citizen’s Call to Action. Why did you specifically address this to young people?

Naomi Wolf: I know an actual, real young patriot named Chris Le. He is a 28-year-old activist. As I describe in the Introduction to the book, two things were happening at once in my life. A mentor of mine, who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, kept saying to me: You’ve got to read the histories, you’ve got to read the histories, you’ve got to read the histories. There are echoes. I kept thinking, that’s crazy, but she was so adamant that she basically sat me down and made me read the histories of her parents’ experience, basically. I then went on and read about six other classic cases of societies closing down democracies or democratic uprisings being crushed. Then I understood why she was so insistent that I study and write about this.

At about the same time, I went to the wedding of this young patriot, Chris Le, who is typical of the best of his generation in that he’s idealistic, he’s committed, he wants a better America. He’s extremely worried about the themes I write about in the book.

But like most young people, he wasn’t given a tutorial in what democracy is in a very clear way. He was certainly not given a tutorial in mid-twentieth century history of the closing down of democracies. When I was at their wedding, and I realized these horrible scary storm clouds were brewing, and these signs were so clear, that there were threats from the past that we need to remind people of in the future in a very clear, accessible way, I decided the best thing that I could do for him and his wife and other people who may not be scholars was to write this kind of primer in a super-clear accessible way that reminds us all about how democracies are crushed. It basically shows that there’s a blueprint for doing it, and the blueprint was developed early in the last century, but the tyrants all over the world replicate it.

The Founders totally believed and foresaw that an American despot or tyrant could oppress the American people, and that the greatest threat was not a foreign power. The book is meant as a very immediate reminder and guide to what freedom is, and how our system was set up to protect us in a very personal way. We’ve become so accustomed to our democracy that we really don’t understand how easy it is to close down a democracy, once certain checks and balances are dismantled, and certain pieces are set in motion.

BuzzFlash: You have outlined ten steps to dismantling a democracy, which the Founders of our country also recognized as threats. How did you come to pick those ten?

Naomi Wolf: Basically they leapt out as a pattern in the reading I was doing. I read about these different times of crisis, specifically the Twenties in Italy, the Thirties in Germany, the Fifties in East Germany, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, 1973 in the coup in Chile, and the late Eighties/early Nineties which saw the crushing in China of the pro-democracy movement.

What jumps up when you read those histories is that essentially, the practice of crushing an open society was essentially invented by Mussolini. It was then developed and elaborated on by the other great tyrants of the twentieth century, and then they studied each other. Hitler studied Stalin. Both of them studied Mussolini. Subsequently, the other dictators all over the world go back and look at what works.

The School for the Americas, basically teach it — this blueprint was passed on to any number of would-be Latin American dictators and military leaders. Tyrants all over the world take the same ten steps. And it really is like a blueprint.

I start the book saying, in Thailand this coup took a week. This is what they did — boom, boom, boom. It’s like they had a shopping list, and, really, they did, because, by now, people who want to crush a democracy know what to do. The people who live in a democracy don’t know what these ten steps are. Otherwise, we would absolutely be thronging the streets right now. We might realize that we’re in a state of crisis rather than just shopping online and watching “America’s Top Model.”

But how did those ten steps arrive on my list? Various writers on fascism try to identify what the key steps are. Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco, and Robert O. Paxton have all written about the elements of the totalitarian or fascist mind. All the writers look at different things, and they don’t all correspond to my list, although Eco’s list had some of the same elements. It just seemed very clear to me from my reading that you see these ten things again and again and again, such that you know what’s going to happen. It’s so predictable; it’s so well-established.

Here’s one. Categorically, in every closing society, someone who wants to crush democracy will establish a military tribunal system which parallels or is outside of the established judiciary. Once you create a prison system outside of the rule of law — I call it a secret prison system, unaccountable, not transparent, where people get disappeared, where people get tortured — can you name a society that did that that did not eventually have fascist rule?

As I was writing the book, someone sent me documentation of the expansion of the definition of terrorists to apply to activists. It was so clear that the definition of terrorist in every fascist shift expands to include more and more, to reach closer to the heart of civil society. You start to see the expansion of the term traitor, treason, espionage. Look at the censure by the Senate of an ad — the notion that criticism is unpatriotic and bordering on treason. Stalin and Goebbels both developed that tactic. You start to see the broader and broader use of accusations of treason and espionage, like the calls we heard after the SWIFT banking story broke to try citizens under the 1917 Espionage Act — an Act which, most Americans do not realize, was used at the end of the teens in this country to round up and arrest thousands of people like you and me; some were beaten in prison. Eugene Debs got a ten-year sentence under the Espionage Act for a speech about the First Amendment. The White House led a drumbeat of voices calling for the trial of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller for “treason” when he published the SWIFT banking stories. The penalty for treason in this country can be execution.

Sure enough, if you go back to history, you find that Nikolai Bukharin, the publisher of Izvestia, was tried in the third Moscow show trial and was in fact executed for treason. So these things are like part of a game plan, part of a blueprint. And there are so many parallels I found, which I point out in the book, that it is very hard to avoid the hypothesis that someone brilliant in this administration studied history and is replaying elements, language, and tactics from violently closing societies that worked in the past.

I really saw the same tendencies happening again and again in the reading I did about how open societies dismantled parliamentary democracies and constitutions, and how they were crushing pro-democracy uprisings.

BuzzFlash: Hannah Arendt wrote about the “banality of evil,” and the reality is that sometimes we find ourselves in a situation where we simply can’t see what is happening to us. One analogy to what is happening to our Constitution being dismantled and the encroachment upon our civil liberties is the idea of a frog being boiled in water. The frog doesn’t realize, until it’s too late, that the temperature just keeps rising.

To the average person, is it just too much to comprehend, too much to think about, it’s not what we’re concentrating on, so in the end we’re the frogs being boiled? We’re busy entertaining ourselves, or working, or being with our families, or going out and having a drink. It’s only people like yourself, or people who really follow this, who are aware that we’re being boiled.

Naomi Wolf: This is the desperately urgent question, and you’re right to ask it. Let me address it on three levels.

First, I deliberately wrote the book in the most accessible possible way, really based on Tom Paine’s prose style. The pamphleteers of the Revolution were really deliberately trying to write in a way that ordinary people — farmers, small shopkeepers, people without an elaborate higher education, people who are not aristocrats — could understand. It was urgent that the ordinary colonist or the ordinary American got it — the kind of threat that was posed by George III — what it meant to have blanket warrants, what liberty meant, what the arguments for liberty were. You know, before Common Sense, most people in the Colonies were not persuaded that they needed a revolution. The American experiment at the time pushed human beings further out into a completely untested model of government. So his very transparent, accessible prose style let people realize for themselves, or think through for themselves, that they deserved liberty and that they needed to act on behalf of liberty.

You and I are in the same position — and everyone on the Internet. We have to switch our model of leadership and return it to the Revolutionary American model of citizen leaders. The Congress is not going to save us. The mainstream media is not going to save us. The pundits are not going to save us. The U.N. is not going to save us. The European Union is not going to save us. There is not a force on earth that can save us, except for our own talking to each other, clearly and urgently, to explain and convey the nature of this threat, and then for us to take radical action NOW. So that’s why I wrote it this way.

Our strategy has to be that thousands, and we hope soon millions, of other citizens who are persuaded by the argument will speak to each other and then mobilize in a hurry to confront these abuses. It depends on citizens acting as journalists, citizens acting as advocates, citizens acting as leaders and revolutionaries to mobilize one another. So that’s A.

B is, you’re absolutely right about the incremental nature of this kind of shift. That’s why I spend so much time looking at the early years of earlier such shifts. Americans tend to think that the closing down of a modern parliamentary society happens in some giant, dramatic explosion. But it doesn’t. In a democracy as sophisticated or resilient as ours had been, it’s going to be closed down incrementally.

If you go back to Berlin in 1931, it wouldn’t have looked so unrecognizable to us. There was a Parliament that was meeting there. There was a constitution. There were abortion rights organizations, human rights lawyers and activists. There were gay rights organizations. There was modern art. People were doing what we’re doing. People were going to the movies. They kept living — and that’s why I draw on diaries and memoirs and personal accounts. People were doing what we’re doing. They were shopping. They were leading their lives, even as the catastrophe was tightening and tightening around them.

There are scenes in the books I cite that are exactly the same as the scene that played out in the University of Florida last week when the kid was tasered for asking a question and everyone sat still as he was dragged out. That scene was described by Count Kessler, by Victor Klemperer, in memoirs of Germany form 1931-1933. And people then were saying what we are saying: surely this can’t get worse; people will come to their senses.

Historians such as Richard Evans point out that, at that point, if the people of Germany had arisen and confronted the abusers of parliamentary process and of the Constitution, the horrors could have been averted. By the way, I am not looking at Germany to make an analogy of any kind about outcomes. I am Jewish and do not take that issue lightly. What I am doing, and I think we honor the victims of the Holocaust by doing so, is looking at how there are threads that recur in the early years of a fascist shift, and lessons we have to learn in time. What we really have to realize is that in a modern democracy, the shift to a closed society doesn’t happen overnight.

And it doesn’t happen even in a clear line on a graph that’s left to right diagonally. It happens in what Malcolm Gladwell would call tipping points. You can chart it, and there may be pressure, pressure, multiple assaults, and, then, a key event that would be like a vertical line on that chart. And then you’re looking at another reality.

The really important thing to understand, which is why I walk the reader so carefully through the way democracies really curve down, is democracies can reach a point of no return. And it’s sudden when that happens. And it’s disorienting. There’s a point at which democracy can no longer heal democracy. People have got to understand that. People need to realize that the day we made it legal, essentially, for the state to torture people, that was one of those vertical lines on the chart. We’re now in a place where it is legal, the White House has claimed, to knock on your door or my door, and say: You are an enemy combatant. Come with us. Then there is what Jose Padilla went through, in three years of solitary confinement — making it difficult to see a lawyer, making it difficult to see his family.

I’m not saying he’s a good guy. But I’m saying the White House is taking the position that the President — and any future president — can say: You, Naomi, you, peruser of BuzzFlash — you’re an enemy combatant. And the President gets to decide what that means. The President gets to decide to hold you. The first time that someone is called an enemy combatant that you and I identify with — that’s going to be another one of these vertical lines, after which you are not going to be having this conversation, because I’m not that brave. The tasering of this student was another vertical line, because, believe me, if they are tasering voting groups in Florida in a disputed 2008 election, dissent will close down pretty quickly. People are just not that brave when they start to get physically hurt.

And that’s how society is closed down. Suddenly, there’s news of someone getting arrested. Or someone being taken. Someone getting a ten-year sentence under the Espionage Act for publishing something in the Wall Street Journal.

And the next day, there are still newspapers. There’s still online shopping. There are still so many aspects of normal society. But what there isn’t is freedom, because people are scared. And that’s why we need to wake up now, because, believe it or not, the President has the power to do that. The President — any president, President Thompson, President Giuliani, President Obama — any president now has the power to make it easier to declare martial law and to declare a state of emergency. The president gets to decide what that is. That is not what the Founders envisioned.

People who are fighting overseas for democracy understand better than we do that we are witnessing the clasic danger signs. They know how dangerous it is to have a leader relegate for himself or herself the power to do that — to seize people and to militarize civil society. Or to declare a state of public emergency or to make it easier to define a threat to public order. Those are classic signposts that other democracy activists around the world recognize as flashing warning lights.

The third point is simply that you’re absolutely right about our psychology. We’ve been so blessed and so spoiled, in a way, by over 200 years of strong democracy, even taking into account the serious moments like the McCarthy era, that we expect the pendulum will always swing back, because the checks and balances have always been in place. I’ve explained in the book why this is different now — why the pendulum isn’t as free as it used to be, why we can’t rely on it, a point Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda made first.

The trouble is that we’re so used to a democratic mindset and we’re so reliant on freedom, that we, A, don’t recognize the dangers, and B, we don’t realize what it takes to resist them. When I talk about these threats, people tend to answer before they’ve thought it through, or before they’ve read the book, with the correctives of democracy. Well, the ACLU will sue them. Or we’ll just vote the guys out. “Vote the bums out.” After you’ve read the book, you’ll realize that you cannot rely on democracy to heal democracy, as you could if our democracy was strong, and checks and balances were in place.

So it is a radical shift in conscio