[Peace-discuss] Mean Streets (2) (David Sirota on Populism, too)
E. Wayne Johnson
ewj at pigs.ag
Mon Apr 27 13:53:49 CDT 2009
That pretty much summarizes some of my opinions, Dave. I agree with you.
***
Naomi Wolf (not Klein) - Ten Steps to Fascism and closing down an open
society
(from "The End of America")
*1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy*
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old
trick.
*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.
*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.
*4. Set up an internal surveillance system*
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in
communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on
ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours.
*5. Harass citizens' groups*
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and
harass citizens' groups.
*6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release*
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D
Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China
Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe
pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested
and released many times.
*7. Target key individuals *
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they
don't toe the line.
*8. Control the press*
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s,
Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s,
China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators
target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more
open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and
worse in societies that have been closed already.... When citizens can't
tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability
bit by bit.
*9. Dissent equals treason*
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing
society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly
criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy"
and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times,
ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of
classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress
called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators
and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as
Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating
the Espionage Act is execution....Most Americans surely do not get this
yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every
closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests
- usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything
goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV
and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real
dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before
those arrests is where we are now.
*10. Suspend the rule of law*
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new
powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency
- which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send
Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared
in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the
question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times
editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in
Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy
have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection,
the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in
response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or
any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which
was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for
domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the
bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also
violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as
they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the
founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of
militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive
executive or faction.
*****
*Of course, the United States is not vulnerable* to the violent, total
closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or
Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too
resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind
of scenario like that.
unionyes wrote:
> Fascism is primarily ( along with many other characteristics ) the
> merger of the corporate sector and the state...
> ie. " The Corporate State " to quote Mussolini.
>
> Which one could make a good arguement that this is what has happened
> here in the U.S. .over the last thirty years and in particular the
> last 10-12 months.
>
> One common objective of every Fascist state, is the destruction of
> independent Labor Unions and the substitution of corporate government
> controlled organizations that are called " unions " or " worker's
> associations " etc. where the members have no control of the
> organization and are in fact controlled or at least sanctioned by this
> organization for the benefit of the employers and / or the governmnet.
>
> Again, a good arguement could be made that this above
> scenario describes many so called " unions " in the U.S. at the
> current time.
>
> Now that I am thinking about it, one could also describe another
> aspect of Fascism that exists currently in the U.S.....
> A one party state !
> That is, the two major parties ( who have tremendous advantages over
> the small parties in terms of their ability to control 99.9 % of
> elected offices ) who are both funded by corporate money and control
> who gets to participate in television debates and in effect prevents
> any third party from receiving national televion exposure because of
> the astronomical cost of television commercials, and the refusal 99%
> of the time by the corporate media to allow free coverage of third
> party candidates ( except when they dispariage them ) on the PUBLIC
> airwaves they control.
>
> David J.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* E. Wayne Johnson <mailto:ewj at pigs.ag>
> *To:* C. G. Estabrook <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>
> *Cc:* 'peace-discuss' <mailto:peace-discuss at anti-war.net> ; LAURIE
> SOLOMON <mailto:LAURIE at ADVANCENET.NET>
> *Sent:* Monday, April 27, 2009 12:45 PM
> *Subject:* Re: [Peace-discuss] Mean Streets (2) (David Sirota on
> Populism, too)
>
> I don't trust Krugman any more than I trust Obama and Bernanke.
>
> Pareto, Amoroso, Gini, and Mussolini had more in common than just
> being Italian.
>
> They knew what they meant when they said Proudly that they were
> Fascists. They were good statisticians too, innovative in the
> math tools they created, rather than innovative in the Mark Twain
> judgment of statisticians. Amoroso's biography of Pareto
> considers Pareto as a sort of Fascist God, and Gini wrote a book
> called something like "The Scientific Basis for Fascism", but
> later became discouraged about Fascism because its authoritarian
> hand interfered with his work.
>
> Orwell on the other hand offers a more ambiguous observation that
> does indeed illustrate the problems of connotation:
> /
> ^ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#cite_note-orwell1944-51>
> The word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In
> conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in
> print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social
> Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922
> Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek,
> homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology,
> women, dogs and I do not know what else... almost any English
> person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. – George
> Orwell, What is Fascism?. 1944.[52]/
>
> Orwellian confusion aside, there are useful definitions of fascism ---
> (1). A political regime, usually totalitarian, ideologically
> based on centralized government, government control of business,
> repression of criticism or opposition, a leader cult and exalting
> the state and/or
> religion above individual rights. Originally only applied
> (usually capitalized) to Benito Mussolini's Italy.
> (2). By vague analogy, any system of strong autocracy or
> oligarchy usually to the extent of bending and breaking the law,
> race-baiting and violence against largely unarmed populations
>
> >From my point of view, the Clinton-Bush-Obama administration is
> rather strongly committed to definition (1), and one major theme
> for Mr. Obama is to accelerate the process.
>
> Let's hang around and see what happens next.
>
> C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> I think he's often quite good -- e.g., today's column:
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27krugman.html?_r=1&em
>>
>> Obama's 100 Daze has had produced two principal things: the
>> restoration of Wall Street wealth and dead people in AfPak.
>> Krugman describes the former.
>>
>> --CGE
>>
>> E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
>>> One might wonder how much Krugman's Nobel Prize cost and where
>>> the money to buy it came from but on the other hand part of it
>>> is sort of easy to guess and we might not want to know the gory
>>> and sordid details of every event. That could be too much
>>> information.
>>>
>>> Paul Krugman is certainly an easy guy to dislike, as everyone
>>> agrees.
>>>> Ben Bernanke's maiden Congressional testimony as chairman of
>>>> the Federal Reserve was, everyone agrees, superb. He didn't put
>>>> a foot wrong on monetary or fiscal policy.
>>
>>
>
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