NB: I am archiving this August 2, 2008 message on January 20, 2017 for historical reference. See "sent 1/20/17 Welcome to the United States of Emergency; Scahill: Blackwater Founder Erik Prince, the Brother of Betsy DeVos, Is Secretly Advising Trump" when it gets here.
You can skip down to the line in bold. Links may or may not still work. LS
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I am forwarding this article without comment except to say that I share
the sentiment of the concluding statement:
If the American people
allow their government to make criminal wars to deprive innocent
foreigners of their lives and liberties they do not deserve to enjoy
either at home. Larry
rense.com
Has America Become Fascist?
By Sherwood Ross
GlobalResearch.ca
8-1-8
http://www.rense.com/general82/deuh.htm
Thanks to Carolyn Baker of carolynbaker.net for pointing out this
article.
If it hasn't gone the way of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, it
sure is teetering on the brink. America is a nation in deepening
crisis, a nation whose leaders repeatedly plunge their citizens into,
and make them pay for, serial wars abroad, while stealing their
liberties at home. USA has become a country that trashes its citizens
(New Orleans), tortures its enemies(Abu Ghraib), threatens other
nations with nuclear fire (Iran), flouts international treaties (UN
Charter re Iraq), and spies on (FISA), and intimidates, its critics(No
Fly). Americans that can clearly see the totalitarian machinations of
Vladimir Putin in Russia and Hu Jintao in China are blind to the
fascism threatening to envelop them as well.
Webster's defines fascism as "a totalitarian governmental system led by
a dictator and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism, militarism, and
often racism." A comparison of 20th century fascist and communist
regimes with President Bush's USA indicates the machinery for a
full-blown totalitarian takeover is now in place, even if no coup has
occurred. As Naomi Wolf writes in "The End of America"(Chelsea Green)
the 2007 Defense Authorization Bill's Section 333 allows the president
"to declare martial law and take charge of the National Guard troops
without the permission of a governor when 'public order' has been lost"
and to "send the guard into our streets during a public health
emergency, terrorist attack or 'other condition.'"
The enabling crowbar was the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It gives
the president authority to set up his own system for bringing alien
combatants to trial while denying them protection of the Geneva
Conventions. "The president and his lawyers now claim the authority to
designate any American citizen he chooses as being an 'enemy
combatant,'" Wolf writes of power usurpation that characterized the
post-World War One epoch in Europe and Asia.
Thus, Congress has empowered Bush just as Germany's Reichstag empowered
Hitler, Wolf writes, recalling Hitler's boast, "Democracy will be
overthrown with the tools of democracy." Hitler's Interior Minister
issued Clause 2 that gave police the power to hold people in custody
indefinitely and without a court order, powers the U.S. Congress today
has conferred upon "The Decider" in the White House. Mussolini's used
the less grandiose "Il Duce" or "The Leader."
According to Michael Ratner, director of the Center For Constitutional
Rights, New York, "the president candesignate people enemy combatants
and detain them for whatever reason he wantsthere are no charges and
prisoners have no lawyers, no family visits, no court reviews, no
rights to anything, and no right to release until the mythical end to
the 'war on terror.'"
Wolf writes that dictators justify their usurpation of domestic
liberties by raising the alarm of "terrorist" threats. Stalin, for
example, used this very term in 1934 when he warned his public of a
world-wide conspiracy by capitalists to overthrow the Soviet state. If
there have been no mass arrests of native-born Americans it is only
because the president has not chosen to exercise this authority. If you
think it can't happen to you, recall that in September of 2003 the Army
arrested 36-year-old American-born Muslim chaplain James Yee, a West
Point graduate, allegedly for "espionage and possibly treason"---but
more likely for calling for better conditions for Gitmo inmates. Wolf
wrote:
"He was blindfolded; his ears were blocked; he was manacled and then
put into solitary confinement for 76 days; forbidden mail, television,
or anything to read except the Koran. His family was not allowed to
visit him. His lawyers were told he would face execution. (But)Within
six months, the U.S. government had dropped all criminal charges
against Yee." Yes, just as it has dropped charges against hundreds of
Guantanamo prisoners earlier, men labeled by former Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld as "the worst of the worst" but against the overwhelming
majority of whom the Bush regime apparently had no case whatever!
The treatment Yee got is typical of those who run afoul of the Bush
regime: torture first, trial afterif there is a trial. And since his
release, Yee has been denied his free speech right to discuss his
ordeal---gagged by the Pentagon. Perhaps most incredible, even if a
Guantanamo prisoner should be found innocent, the Pentagon says he
might not be released anyway. This echoes Stalin's practice of
re-arresting Gulag prisoners after they had done their time. At one
point, Stalin had eight million souls behind bars, even exceeding
President Bush, currently the world's Incarcerator-In-Chief.
Author Wolf says another danger flag is the creation of paramilitary
groups, "aggressive men who have no clear, accountable relationship to
the government or the party seeking power" Mussolini had the
blackshirts; Hitler the brownshirts; but whatever their dress, they
were thugs. Wolf says that Moycock, N.C.-based Blackwater Worldwide
stands ready "to deploy its unaccountable private army (35,000 men) in
the U.S.---in the aftermath of natural disasters, and also in cases of
'national emergency.'" With at least a half billion dollars in
government contracts, "Blackwater is the world's largest private
security force, works closely with Halliburton, and is available for
action outside the scrutiny of Congress," Wolf writes. The outfit raked
in $73 million for patrolling the streets of New Orleans after
Hurricane Katrina. And Blackwater subcontractor Red Tactica, recruits
former Chilean commandos," men described by one Chilean sociologist
that are "valued for their expertise in kidnapping, torturing and
killing defenseless civilians," Wolf wrote.
Besides creating such "security" forces, dictators create secret
prisons, as Bush has done, ranging from prison ships in the Indian
Ocean to dungeons in Poland, where they can hide them from Red Cross
scrutiny, as the CIA has done. "We should worry about the men held at
Guantanamo because history shows that stripping prisoners of their
rights is intoxicating not only to leaders but to functionaries at
every level of society," Wolf writes. "Gitmo" is also an interrogation
camp, an operation "that is completely and flatly illegal" and outlawed
by the Geneva Conventions in 1949, she points out. Stalin also employed
torture and in 1937 actually legalized its use in Soviet prisons. When
he received his infamous "albums" with the names of those to be
executed and imprisoned, next to some names he often wrote: "Beat!
Beat! Beat!" And only months after taking power, Hitler "established a
network of illegitimate prisons where torture took place" and where
guards could murder inmates with "no chance of being punished," Wolf
said. And like Stalin, The Decider has signaled his henchmen beatings
are now the American Way.
Dictators hold power by instilling fear in their citizens. Since 2000,
Wolf writes there has been "a sharp increase in U.S. citizen groups
that are being harassed and infiltrated by police and federal agents,
often in illegal ways." She pointed to a 2006 ACLU report that
California police had infiltrated antiwar protests, political rallies,
and other constitutionally protected gatherings and were secretly
investigating them, even though the California state constitution
forbids this. And prior to the 2004 Republican convention in New York,
police department detectives infiltrated groups planning peaceful
demonstrations. At the Federal level, Bush's apparatchiks are compiling
dossiers on law-abiding citizens. The Defense Department's Talon
program has created a database about peaceful antiwar and other groups
and activists. As Jen Nessel of the Center for Constitutional Rights
says, "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."
Bush regime actions' today recall how the Gestapo, NKVD, Stasi (East
German secret police) and Red China's Politburo "all requisitioned
private data such as medical, banking, and library records," Wolf
writes, because access to such private data "breaks down citizens'
sense of being able to act freely against those in power." And although
the Department of Homeland Security's TIPS scheme to get letter
carriers and meter readers, etc., to report suspicious activities was
met with derision and never funded, the ACLU noted it was merely
absorbed in the Pentagon's "black budget."
Privacy in America today as guaranteed by the Constitution is fast
becoming a memory. The New York Times reported the government in 2005
was monitoring your e-mail and telephone talk without legal warrants
and the following year the newspaper disclosed U.S. treasury officials,
with CIA help, "were reviewing millions of private bank transactions
without individual court-ordered warrants or subpoenas," Wolf pointed
out.
One method of intimidation is to limit a citizen's right to travel
freely. The Bush regime has created "watch"(75,000 names) and "no
fly"(45,000 names) lists that restrict individuals' air travel--and
those searched and/or stopped from flying can complain all they like
because it won't do them any good. Robert Johnson, an American citizen,
Wolf reports, described the humiliation factor of being strip searched
when he attempted to board an airplane: "I had to take off my pants. I
had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks. I was
treated like a criminal." This has now become a commonplace ordeal for
thousands of Americans. Even at the height of World War Two, such
invasions of personal rights would have been unthinkable.
Going back to Webster's definition of fascism, USA today is the world's
runaway leader in "militarism." Forty-three percent of all U.S. tax
dollars in 2007 went to feed the war machine, as the Pentagon believes
security depends on operating more than 700 military bases in 130
countries overseas in addition to 1,000 at home. Bush has escalated its
budget so that USA now spends nearly as much on arms as all the rest of
the world combined. Uncle Sam is also the No. 1 private arms peddler to
the world. By contrast, Iran, portrayed by the White House as a menace
to the Middle East, has an annual military budget that is 1/100th of
the Pentagon's outlay.
Perhaps it would be a good exercise for Americans to read how Hitler
emphasized nationalism and militarism. As he wrote in "Mein Kampf":
"Instead of everlasting struggle the world preaches cowardly pacifism,
and everlasting peaceThere is only one right in this world and this
right is one's own strength." As for "reconciliation, understanding,
world peace, the League of Nations, and international solidarity---we
destroy these ideas." Hitler called for delivering Germans "from the
hopeless confusion of international convictions" and educating them
"consciously and systematically to fanatical nationalism." Armed with
such views the fascist state thinks nothing of starting an aggressive
war based on lies. In 1939, Hitler claimed he was attacked by Poland,
igniting World War Two. Bush claimed that Iraq had nuclear and
biological weapons to destroy America when, in fact, it was the United
States that possessed those very weapons and it was Iraq that had none.
Bush nonetheless started a seemingly endless war that has by some
estimates to date killed more than 1 million Iraqis, wounded perhaps 2
million more, forced a like number from their homes, ravished their
country and its economy, touched off a civil war, forced 1 million
Iraqis into foreign exile, and killed and wounded 35,000 American
troops. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the Iraq war
"illegal" but Bush, like Hitler, cares nothing for international
treaties, even if those the U.S. has signed under our Constitution are
the supreme law of the land. He has made a mockery to the anti-nuclear
treaty, causing former President Carter to charge his own country has
become the leader in nuclear proliferation. What's more, Bush has spent
about $50 billion on germ warfare "defense" with no known significant
foreign threat to USA.
Americans may think that Webster's view that fascism is often
accompanied by racism doesn't fit them. Indeed, USA's strides to
eliminate racism based on color in the last century are a societal
marvel. But racism against African Americans has largely been replaced
with the foolhardy notion that Americans are better than everybody else
in the world and have the authority to set right any ruler they believe
is in error. This view of their own superiority echoes Hitler's "master
race" view of the German people or the Tokyo militarists' view in 1940
that a superior Japan was destined to rule "the eight corners of the
world." In this sense, America is very "racist" indeed and the
"aggressive nationalism" highlighted by Webster's is apparent in the
rhetoric of its public officials and the conduct of its foreign affairs.
Yet another characteristic of the fascist state is its leader's use of
arbitrary power. Note how Bush evades the will of Congress by tacking
on "signing statements" to laws he doesn't like, thus refusing to
enforce them, putting himself above the will of Congress and the
American people. Note how his aides refuse to respond to Congressional
subpoenas to testify. Yet another example is how the Justice
Department's own internal investigators found Bush's appointees filled
nonpolitical posts with party hacks and then lied about what they had
done. "Civil Service Laws Were Breached in Filling Nonpolitical Jobs"
said a New York Times reported July 29th. It should be remembered
Hitler followed a like policy when he purged Jews from their government
posts. When tyrants rule, merit is ever subservient to loyalty.
Of course, Bush has not flung thousands of Americans into prison to
torture and murder them as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin did, but he
has the power to do so, making the latter half of 2008 a time of danger
for Americans. Wolf writes, "At a point in both Mussolini's and
Hitler's takeovers, citizens witnessed a stunning series of quickly
escalating pronunciamentos or faits accomplis. After each leader made
his bids for power beyond what the Italian parliament and the German
Reichstag allowed him, each abruptly started to claim all kinds of new
rights that were extra-parliamentary; the right unilaterally to go to
war, to annex territory, to veto existing laws, or to overrule the
judiciary," etc.
To repeat the question, "Is America fascist?" the answer is that the
machinery is in place for a totalitarian takeover at the direction of a
tyrant. While it is true that the U.S. is not a one-party state (some
will dispute this owing to the many similarities of the two major
parties) like fascist Italy and Germany, and it does have free
elections, for the first time in its history in 2000 and 2004 an
ominous cloud of doubt has hung over the authenticity of the popular
vote and a vast segment of the voting public today does not trust the
election machinery to record their vote as they intend. There are no
mass arrests and executions in the thousands and millions that typified
the regimes of Hitler and Stalin (Stalin had 681,000 people executed in
1937-8 "Great Terror" alone); free speech still exists (under Stalin, a
person could be imprisoned for making a Stalin joke); and the
government has not put its leaden hand on business as Putin has done
although crony capitalism in the selection of defense contractors is
rampant. These vital distinctions set America apart from the
totalitarian society. Yet, with each passing day in its "War on Terror"
the Bush regime tightens its hold on the machinery to establish
totalitarian rule here.
Americans need to keep in mind that worse than anything President Bush
has inflicted upon its own citizenry is what its wars of aggression
have inflicted on innocent humanity abroad. A million dead Iraqis can't
give a damn by what terminology you describe the United States. If the
American people allow their government to make criminal wars to deprive
innocent foreigners of their lives and liberties they do not deserve to
enjoy either at home.
--------------
Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based writer who has worked as a reporter for
the Chicago Daily News, a columnist for wire services, a news director
for a large civil rights organization, and as a publicist for colleges,
labor unions and entrepreneurial start-ups. Reach him at
<mailto:sherwoodr1@yahoo.com>sherwoodr1@yahoo.com Phone:
305-205-8281. The writer is indebted to Naomi Wolf for her book, "The
End of America." Ms. Wolf is cofounder of The Woodhull Institute for
Ethical Leadership, New York, an organization that teaches young women
how to assume leadership roles.)
