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The official site of Mark Frankenberg, Music Composer/Producer and author of Just Say NO to Fascism: a Fable In support and defense of the Constitution of the United States of America Advocating Peace and Public Safety |
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Fascism is the vehicle of Corporate Dictatorship. It's that simple.
What happens to your freedom when you "punch in" at work?
Fascism is GOVERNMENT OF, FOR, and BY CORPORATIONS. |
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The Nazis ("National Socialists") embodied many fascist traits, and were largely a product of corporatism: Fascism is Corporate Feudalism.
The 14 Defining
Characteristics Of Fascism 1. Powerful and Continuing
Nationalism See a Flash Video by Eric
Blumrich, narrated by radio host Mike Malloy HERE or HERE. Another concise outline of
these 14 points can be found HERE.
As
difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to
look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in
the United States by the Bush administration. Because Americans
like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that
it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many
other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our
system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has
been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of
professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise
the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they
are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about
European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security
- remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the
alarm bells it might have. It is my argument that, beneath our
very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested
tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing
to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe
Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further
along than we realise. Conason eloquently warned of the danger of
American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at
the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the
potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US. 1. Invoke a terrifying internal and
external enemy After
we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock.
Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was
passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said
that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a
"war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate"
intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of
crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as
during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second
world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned.
But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes,
is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum
was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as
open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe
itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no
defined end." Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like,
secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of
a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events
(one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he
noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the
Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany
by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with
an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be
based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy
of world Jewry", on myth. It is not that global Islamist
terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather
that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different
in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist
attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a
grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we
are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it.
Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our
freedoms. 2. Create a gulag Once you have got
everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the
rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at
Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where
torture
takes place. At first, the people who are sent there are
seen by
citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or
"criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison
system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the
prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members,
labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there
as well. This process took place in fascist shifts or
anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s
and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is
standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a
pro-democracy uprising. With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused,
and
kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process
of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in
Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the
secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to
incarcerate people who have been seized off the street. Gulags in
history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive,
ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts,
photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and
guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and
those we can't investigate adequately. But Americans still assume
this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with
whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative
pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin
Niemöller,
who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the
Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the
rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them,
too. By
the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners
due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and
Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up
the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners
were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being
charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually,
the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the
regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology
when making decisions. 3. Develop a thug caste When
leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an
open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to
terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside
beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies
throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in
a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need
thugs who are free from prosecution. The years following 9/11
have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush
administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the
US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of
dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and
abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of
involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on
Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq
by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these
contractors are immune from prosecution Yes, but that is in Iraq,
you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of
Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security
guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill
interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed
civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that
episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing
scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on
crisis and emergency management at home in US cities. Thugs in
America? 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. Say there are
protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not
rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station
"to restore public order". 4. Set up an internal surveillance system In
Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in
communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on
ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The
Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance
to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched. In
2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New
York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones,
read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it
became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state
scrutiny. In closed societies, this surveillance is
cast as being
about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile
and inhibit their activism and dissent. 5. Harass citizens' groups The
fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass
citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose
minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being
investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got
Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law,
have been left alone. Other harassment is more serious: the
American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary
American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated
by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen
peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in
its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret
Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of
Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations
engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track
"potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen
activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as
animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist"
slowly expands to include the opposition. 6. Engage in arbitrary detention and
release This
scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof
and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes:
the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy
activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released
many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of
dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once
you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list. In 2004,
America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had
a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse
if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two
middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator
Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's
president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens. Professor
Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the
foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the
classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former
marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March
1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on
the Terrorist Watch list". "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban
a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline
employee. "I
explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in
September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the
web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the
constitution." "That'll do it," the man said. Anti-war
marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential
terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people"
tend to expand ever deeper into civil life. James Yee, a US
citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused
of
mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military
before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and
released several times. He is still of interest. Brandon
Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified
as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his
computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him,
he is still on the list. It is a standard practice of fascist
societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off. 7. Target key individuals Threaten
civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe
the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who
did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged
academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so
does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy
students and professors. Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so
those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with
professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term,
ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most
vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that
fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the
Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7
1933. Bush supporters in state legislatures in
several states put
pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics
who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants,
the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer
who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration
official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees
pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to
boycott them. Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in
a
closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the
security clearance she needed in order to do her job. Most
recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks
like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil
service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that
eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow. 8. Control the press Italy
in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s,
Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s,
China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators
target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in
more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest
them and worse in societies that have been closed already. The
Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at
an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco,
has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an
anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint
against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical
infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of
Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller
critical of the Bush administration. Other reporters and writers
have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a
New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a
false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in
Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of
retaliation that ended her career. Prosecution and job loss are
nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists
seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. 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. While westerners may question the
accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of
reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. 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. Over time in
closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false
documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back
up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The
yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers. You won't
have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you
can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a
steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is
a White House directing a stream of false information that is so
relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth.
In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying.
When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their
demands for accountability bit by bit. 9. Dissent equals treason Cast
dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing
society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly
criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy"
and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times,
ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of
classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress
called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing
commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some
commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one
penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution. Conason is
right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also
important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor
of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact,
executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917
Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer
Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping
roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved,
suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the
historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for
a decade. In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were
"enemies of
the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar
democracy "November traitors". And here is where the circle
closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year
- when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed 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. (Prolonged
isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise
mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation
cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the
newest,
most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.) We
US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights
activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush
administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get
around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a
status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We
have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look
like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're
going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR. Most Americans
surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even
though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there
are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy
and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there
are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil
society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If
you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now. 10. Suspend the rule of law The
John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new
powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency
- which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send
Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared
in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens. Even
as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question
of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised
about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that
laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in
the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now
use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural
disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other
condition'." Critics see this as a clear violation of the
Posse
Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from
using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator
Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal
martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our
system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a
monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of
concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of
an oppressive executive or faction. Of course, the United States is not
vulnerable
to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed
Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners.
Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary
too independent, for any kind of scenario like that. Rather, as other critics are noting, our
experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion. It
is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile
of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal
on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria
in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in
1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere -
while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are
sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns
away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster." As Americans turn away
quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol,
the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has
changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic
traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in
a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end,
on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the
president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US
citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone. That
means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these
still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way
under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to
think about the "what ifs". What if, in a year and a half, there
is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can
declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any
party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis
has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are
no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani
- because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will
through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic
negotiation and compromise. What if the publisher of a major US
newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort
seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10
years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day?
Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would
suddenly be very polite. Right now, only a handful of patriots
are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff
at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for
representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme
Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent
conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the
banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small,
disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that
of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure
on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by
real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world. We
need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going
down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a
different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different
moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was
before - and this is the way it is now. "The accumulation of all
powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is
the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the
choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight
for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry. · Naomi Wolf's The End of
America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by
Chelsea Green in September. |
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