A lot of you who are active in this tribe have probably already read it, but I have just finished--and been greatly inspired by--"The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot." Naomi Wolf is an excellent writer, researcher, and analyst--not a declared Green, but perhaps she should be: I haven't found anyone who articulates better exactly what's wrong with the present regime, and she does not let the Democrats off the hook for the role they've played in enabling it.
Rather than conclude that America has fallen prey to fascism entirely, she identifies the Bush Administrations misdeeds as part of a "fascist shift," and identifies the ten steps that fascist and other dictatorships have used to consolidate power. Almost everything that the Bushies have done echoes steps taken by Nazis in Germany, Fascists in Italy (strangely no mention of Franco's Spain), Stalin's Soviet Union, Pinochet's junta in Chile, Cold-War Czechoslovakia, China during and after Mao, and some less obvious dictatorships mostly aided and abetted by the US.
Of course, American history is not without its fascistic tendencies, from John Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts to the Palmer Raids to the McCarthy reign of terror. The difference is that our history is that every time the Federal government has tightened the vise, people have worked successfully to regain freedoms and add more. Wolf worries that the proverbial pendulum might stop swinging, and people will not have the resources to fight for their liberties through democratic or other means. Furthermore, most will assume that they don't have to fight for their liberties, because the trappings of democracy will still be there, the security state will keep us safe from them evil terrorists, and we'll still have the entertainment we crave, so everything will still seem normal--until your peacenik brother-in-law is arbitrarily arrested in the middle of the night.
Here's a column by Wolf in the Guardian with a summary of the points in her book: www.guardian.co.uk/usa/stor...7,00.html
Rather than conclude that America has fallen prey to fascism entirely, she identifies the Bush Administrations misdeeds as part of a "fascist shift," and identifies the ten steps that fascist and other dictatorships have used to consolidate power. Almost everything that the Bushies have done echoes steps taken by Nazis in Germany, Fascists in Italy (strangely no mention of Franco's Spain), Stalin's Soviet Union, Pinochet's junta in Chile, Cold-War Czechoslovakia, China during and after Mao, and some less obvious dictatorships mostly aided and abetted by the US.
Of course, American history is not without its fascistic tendencies, from John Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts to the Palmer Raids to the McCarthy reign of terror. The difference is that our history is that every time the Federal government has tightened the vise, people have worked successfully to regain freedoms and add more. Wolf worries that the proverbial pendulum might stop swinging, and people will not have the resources to fight for their liberties through democratic or other means. Furthermore, most will assume that they don't have to fight for their liberties, because the trappings of democracy will still be there, the security state will keep us safe from them evil terrorists, and we'll still have the entertainment we crave, so everything will still seem normal--until your peacenik brother-in-law is arbitrarily arrested in the middle of the night.
Here's a column by Wolf in the Guardian with a summary of the points in her book: www.guardian.co.uk/usa/stor...7,00.html
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Houston
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