Fascism In 10 Easy Steps, a continuing series

First let me say, apologies to the thousands of readers out there who have been wondering where I have been. Wait, make that the 2 readers. Anyway, I have just been super busy at work and haven't had time to write.

Round three of “Fascist America In 10 Easy Steps” focuses our attention on the state of authority that we interact with on a local level. Without further delay, here is Step 3.

"Step 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". "

The idea of an increased security presence in America, indeed in the Western world is becoming not only accepted as necessary, it is being welcomed as a way to preserve the safety that we are taught to seek from the youngest ages. Obviously, a reckless pattern of living will likely shorten your life span considerably. However the degree to which we cling to our illusion of safety creates an environment that encourages us to accept whatever is presented to us in the name of “Safety” and “Security”. After observing what has transpired in this country in the last 20 or so years, and more pointedly since 9/11, it is has become much easier to imagine a scenario in which an increased military/police presence would be welcomed to help control what is deemed by those who have the most to gain to be a “dangerous situation”. It has become commonplace to see SWAT teams not only being used for extremely dangerous situations such as hostage crisis’, but in routine drug raids and even for unconfirmed suspicious activities. In addition, police forces around the country have become more militarized in a response to threats real and imagined. The US military routinely surpluses its old gear to police departments around the country. We are not just talking bullet proof vests here. We are talking about military weapons and vehicles. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens passively accept these changes as necessary to protect us from external threats, acting as if the threat would never be among us in the form of our own government, carrying out their goal of pacifying the population through police force. We act as though the government and the police are ordained by the God who founded this country and would never take advantage of the citizens, or even opportune situations. That is a naïve view of history. Acceptance of a military presence among us is acceptance of slavery. The Founding Fathers knew this, and that is why they listed garrisoned soldiers living among them as one of their many grievances to King George. I want to be sure to state that it is not my intention to imply that all police are the arm of the corrupt Government. It is my intention to state that the institution of police authority has made a gradual yet significant shift from protecting the citizens from each other to protecting the Establishment from the "threat" of active citizenship and that they have gradually amassed the tools they would need to suppress the citizenship outright.

Fascism in 10 Easy Steps, a continuing series

Here is round 2 of Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps

“Step 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.”

Impossible you say? Well for starters, check out this story featured on Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life (I know it’s long, but it is an amazing read, or you can order a CD of the episode). These are the stories that the government tries to keep from you. I want to know under what circumstances are the American People ok with detaining these people without charge, without evidence, without access to family, without reasonable access to legal representation and ultimately without conviction, more pointedly, without EXPLANATION! ?! If you read the transcript linked above, you will note that many of the detainees at Gitmo were sold to the CIA for bounties. No proof was needed to confirm the detainees status as either Taliban or Al Qeada. This is eerily reminiscent of the methods used in the Spanish Inquisition. And the path that we are going down may not seem dangerous now, as long as we are only jailing brown skinned Muslims. But what happens when national paranoia reaches a level that neighbors are encouraged to spy on each other, and turn each other in for suspected terrorist activities. Oh wait, we are already there? Can you spot a Terrorist?

It's All Fun And Games 'til Someone Dies

The unspeakable tragedy at Virginia Tech warrants and introspective look at America and…..whoa whoa whoa. Hang on just a second. Did I say “unspeakable”? Well what I meant was shamelessly exploited tragedy. And rather than jump on the train that is headed to debate tougher gun laws, campus security, what could have been done and who is at fault, I’d rather talk about this editorial that ran in the Rocky Mountain News. Why is it that when things like this happen, the Nation grieves and laments the state of our nation, while we facilitate these kinds of tragedies every day in Iraq and no one seems to shed a public tear. Take your time to read the editorial. Even if the math is flawed, there is no doubt that the tragedy of Blacksburg does not compare to what is happening in Iraq daily. If you ever needed a solid example of how callous America can be to the suffering of others, this is it. This is not to detract from what happened in VA. No one can doubt the suffering and anguish of the people affected. But take that suffering, that pain, and put yourself in the shoes of
these people. I know this sounds very bleeding heart, but the reality is that this stuff is happening and all we hear about daily is simply body counts and what the “leaders” of this nation and this war are arguing about. You don’t hear about the stories that cut to the heart of what we are really doing over there. There were likely many stories similar to these before March 2003 from people suffering under the rule of Saddam Hussein, but we didn’t seem to care about it then either. But when 32 people are murdered on our soil by one lunatic with a gun, suddenly out come the black mourning clothes. People are people, wherever they live, whatever religion they belong to, whatever flag they salute, whatever color of their skin. Hopefully the good that may come of this tragedy is a little awareness of the world around us. Hopefully, but the cynic in me doesn't think so.

Fascism in 10 fun and easy steps

It has been too long since my last post, sorry to all you out there who wait with baited breath for my every word to appear on your screen.
I ran across this article on Plastic.com and discovered a concise yet poignant missive on what has been happening to our country since September 11, 2001. I am going to do a series of posts on this article, commenting on each step one at a time. There isn’t a lot to add to what I consider a well written argument. So without further ado, let’s get down to business.
“Step 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.”

The reference to the Enabling Act is an important one. The similarity to the USA Patriot Act is striking, especially considering the timing in regards to how quickly they were both passed after a catastrophic event. The Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act both essentially gave the Executive branch open ended War Powers. Like the War on Drugs, the War on Terror has no discernible end. Unlike the Cold War, we are not fighting one specific ideology. Terror is a tactic used by groups that lack the resources to fight a direct war. It is also known as guerrilla warfare. How can we have an end to a tactic? And because the War on Terror will never end, neither will the emergency powers that were given to the Executive branch. Step 1 is complete, stay tuned for commentary on Step 2 -"Create a Gulag".