Naomi Wolf has grown more and more afraid as America stumbles toward the next presidential election in November.
A noted feminist and author of half a dozen books and scores of essays, Wolf spoke to an enthusiastic audience April 2 at Oakland University. The topic, The Death of America: Letters to a Young Patriot, drew mostly positive comments, but one student in attendance questioned Wolf's assertion that the 10 steps fascist regimes take in order to deprive citizens of their rights have happened, to some degree, in the U.S. She knows incidents designed to disrupt citizens' lives often happen close to democratic elections, so the next few months will be tense.
Wolf explained she wrote her book for an older friend and a younger friend, the older being the child of Holocaust survivors. Over and over again, as they discussed current political events, the woman said, "They did this in Germany. They did this in Germany."
"I thought it was extreme, and I ignored it," Wolf said. "She took a stack of books, and she made me read them. And I realized she wasn't talking about the later years. She was talking about the early years."
Regimes use similar tactics
From 1930-32, Germany was still a parliamentary democracy, Wolf explained, with celebrities and gay rights and abortion rights, an active human rights organization, everything that signals a free society. Then a small group of power-hungry people began to "use the law to subvert the law," she said, "bit by bit by bit, chipping away at the structures of freedom and opening the door for the nightmare to come in."
Wolf began reading about other despotic regimes - Mussolini in Italy, Stalin in Russia, Pinochet in Chile and more. More and more, she could the "blueprint" these dictators followed, beginning with Mussolini, and enhanced over time. She also identified themes, words and phrases people in power, on both the political right and left, used to frighten citizens and ease them into giving up their rights in incremental ways. And she saw those steps underway in the U.S.
With her assistant marrying a young man whose mother escaped Viet Nam to raise her child in liberty, Wolf decided to write her book for him, as a guide to what's happening and what to do about it.
The first step: Terror
"The first step a would-be dictator takes is to invoke a terrifying internal and external threat," Wolf said. "Often it's a real threat, which the dictator escalates."
As an example, she cited a frighteningly familiar phrase used by Stalin to terrify Russian citizens in the 1930s: "sleeper cells." She pointed out that, although a terrorist threat existed during the 1990s, those words were not common until the Bush administration. Stalin completely fabricted his "sleeper cells," which were pockets of militant capitalists who had lived in Soviet society for years and would rise up at a given signal to create mayhem. The same tactic was used by Pinochet in 1970s Chile, as he spread word that armed insurgents had a plan to rise up and assassinate him to create chaos.
"Pinochet showed caches of insurgents' weapons," Wolf pointed out. "You saw on the news caches of weapons Iraqis were allegedly going to use." She added a recent scare that involved an alleged aggression against a U.S. war ship, a recorded incident which the Associated Press discovered may not have been all it seemed. "Someone at the AP noticed there was no ambientsound on the audio tape...no noise of waves or wind...and the Pentagon backed off the story."
A source high up in the Pentagon confirmed to Wolf that the government runs "info ops," staging news stories to sway public opinion.
The second step: Secret prisons, torture
The second step for hopeful dictators involves "establishing a secret prison system, outside the law, where torture takes place," Wolf said, noting that many regular citizens can't get "worked up" about the torture of people they have been told are terrorists. In a "closing society," she said, the state's focus shifts from toturing "enemies" to identifying people on the fringes of society - opposition leaders, clergy, journalists, labor leaders - as potential targets for torture. "There's a mission creep," she said. "The state begins to torture people closer and closer to the middle."
President Bush now has the power to declare anyone in the country an "enemy combatant," she noted. This allows the government to arrest someone and detain them for months, with limited access to family and legal counsel. "You don't have to have done anything. They can lock you up in a ten-by-ten cell in a Navy brig, in solitary confinement," she said, adding that isolation is known to cause serious psychological effects in otherwise healthy people. Wolf offered $150,000 to anyone in the audience to name a society that tolerated torture and didn't eventually turn that on its own citizens. It's a reward she's never had to fork over, after dozens of presentations.
The remaining steps Wolf cited included:
3. Develop a paramilitary force, not answerable to the people. Wolf cited Blackwater, a paramilitary force with its own fleet and ties to the White House. "Blackwater had first boots on the ground in New Orleans...their business plan calls for increased deployment in the U.S. in natural disasters. And the President alone has the power to declare a public emergencies." In 1920s Italy, she said, the "black shirts" were ordered by Mussolini to violently squash opposition, including journalists, so that his take-over of Rome was done with little resistance. "Of all the things in place right now, I think Blackwater scares me the most," Wolf said.
4. Create surveillance apparatus to watch citizens. Wolf said when she was writing her book, 45,000 people were on the government's terror "watch list." Today, there are 775,000, with 20,000 new names being added every month. Wolf's name is on that list, as evidenced by the amount of trouble she has boarding an airplane, thanks to a triple high security stamp she has seen on her boarding passes. Also on the list: two elderly women who publish a magazine called "Wartimes," the head of "Code Pink" an anti-war protest group, a decorated Vietnam war veteran and his 15-year-old son and Senator Ted Kennedy, among many others. Wolf note major airports have detention cells, and when people leave an airplane after an international flight and before they enter customs, they are not formally "in" the U.S., Wolf warned.
5. Infiltrate citizen groups. Wolf said the American Civil Liberties Union currently has dozens of lawsuits involving antiwar and environmental groups that have been infiltrated.
6. Arbitrarily detain and release people who oppose the state. Wolf cited the case of a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay prison who was arrested on suspicion of espionage, held for nearly 80 days and then released, with an honorable discharge.
7. Target key individuals. Bill Maher, the Dixie Chicks and other prominent figures have lost their high profile jobs or been publicly condemned for expressions of opposition to the war or the Bush administration. Conservative Clear Channel radio banned the Dixie Chicks CD from its 1200 stations; Wolf likened burning parties for the Dixie Chicks CD to Hitler's burning of books deemed a threat to his rule.
8. Restrict the press. Journalists in the U.S. already face smears and retribution for reporting stories that have involved "classified" materials, Wolf said. She cited the Espionage Act, last used in World War I to round up thousands of people to keep antiwar protests down. The prosecution of Eugene Debs, who spent time in prison for expressing his opposition to World War I, silenced dissent in the U.S. for the next decade, Wolf said.
9. Recast criticism as espionage and dissent as treason. Current efforts by conservative pundits and lawmakers to call opposition to the war unpatriotic and treasonous or to accuse peace activists of not supporting American soldiers. Wolf said laws already in the works would make it a crime to advocate force against the state, which is away to criminalize not only speech, but thought. One pundit went so far as to say she would have no problem if a New York Times editor who published a story about the government monitoring international financial transactions were tried for treason and executed.
10. Subvert the rule of law to make it easier to declare marital law. There's a kind of hangover effect in society, Wolf said, after a government leader takes a previously unthinkable action. "That's where we are right now," she said. "The Bush administration has written laws saying the executive branch can do anything at all...with signing statements." The recent refusal of two Bush administration officials to even respond to Congressional subpoenas of White House staffers, Wolf said, means the coup has already taken place.
"In a closing society, you still have elections, you still have newspapers. What you don't have is freedom," Wolf said.
Where's the threat?
While a number of questions at the end of her presentation indicated support for her positions, one student wondered, if the threat was so imminent, why the "brown shirts" weren't standing in the back of the room. He said he saw no restrictions on civil rights and portrayed Wolf as an extremist. However, she welcomed the conversation and encouraged those who booed the student to listen to what he had to say, because it provide an opportunity for an exchange of ideas.
When Wolf published her book, she took all of her financial records to her accountant. She was prepared for an audit and wasn't disappointed. The IRS has begun investigating her, as well as others involved in a non-profit advocacy organization, The American Freedom Campaign.
"A democracy closes down in steps," she said. "You have tipping points, and there is a point where democracy can no longer heal democracy. In Germany, it happened in six months."
"Before you panic, there is hope and there is good news," she added. "History also shows when people wake up, there is no power on earth that can stop them.
