The End of America

My most recent read was “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,” by Naomi Wolf. It’s a relatively short book, but highly thought-provoking. I strongly encourage you to check it out.

Wolf knows we are facing a major and imminent crisis in terms of preserving the constitutional democracy that so many of us have come to take for granted will always be here. She convincingly limns ten measures that based on her reading have historically been more or less a road map for the transformation of democratic government into tyranny. She does a good job of describing these despicable steps towards despotism, painfully familiar to those of us who don’t settle for the pathetic Chris and Tim (Matt!?!) and the like for our news.

I’d probably be a bit harsher than Wolf. She tends to meticulously document similarities of pattern and such, drawing parallels frequently involving Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin, and cameos for such as Pinochet and other US-supported Western Hemisphere thugs. Of course our country is festooned with flashing lights when it comes to this stuff - we are after all the comparison point for all of those above, but Wolf generall tends to cite examples and avoid name-calling (no matter how much it might seem warranted).

We may not yet be a truly fascist state, but that’s obviously Cheney’s goal, and he has been effective; we seem to click on all the tell-tale signs. He conspicuously has no interest in democracy as most of us understand it and expect our elected officials to pursue it. Add in ghb, who clearly never fulfilled his military obligation, gives every evidence of actually being a cowardly bully, hasn’t a properly patriotic bone in his body, sanctions torture, and actively avoided knowing of the details of possible 9-11 terrorism attacks, and you have two foul deviants clearly matching the definition of what we always called war criminals in the past and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Wolf’s ten-step program for the shut-down of freedom:

Invoke an internal and external threat;

Develop a paramilitary force;

Create a secret prison system;

Surveil ordinary citizens;

Arbitrarily detain and release ordinary citizens;

Harass citizen’s groups;

Target writers, entertainers, and other key individuals for dissenting;

Intimidate the press;

Recast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage”; and

Subvert the rule of law.

Now tell me: which of you here can deny that most if not all of the measures above have already been pursued by this administration? On off-chance you need help, Wolf has examples of every single one.

This is serious shit. I believe those who care must be giving serious thought from this point on as to how far they are prepared to go in terms of civil disobedience.

I’m a bit of a wimp in these things, I realize. I’m not going to be the first one out there prone in the street in front of the tank. But I will find my role.

Maybe full-out civil confrontation will not be needed. We can hope, like the Germans did in the ‘30’s. But you better damn well think on how long you are willing to hide behind your blinds and reassure yourself that it is “them” rather than you they are after. Clearly the list-making has been underway for some time now. Without warrants and with AT&T's enthusiastic (and highly profitable) assistance.

Wolf makes a strong case that the Founders expected regular citizens to be active players in the whole business. Those folks who knew about tyranny first-hand and came up (ever-so-painfully) with what was until recently the shining-star of governmental forms counted on us to be aggressive in our relationship to our government. I suspect they’d be sickened by our modern shopping/materialism mindset, television culture, and collectively blasé stance towards the erosion of what they fought so hard for.

Big shame on us.

Find yourself a copy of "The End of America."