I just came across an interesting read and video about Naomi Wolf through Digg.com. This article on Digg.com shines light on something called ‘The Cybersecurity Act of 2009′, designed to give major presidential power over private internet networks and communities to even further diminish every American’s privacy.
But it all goes a whole lot further..
Naomi Wolf, apparently one of the most active feminist writers of our time, explains the similarities between the worst fascist and communist in history and the path the United States of America is on right now. She ‘proves’ this by writing about the 10 steps to creating a fascist society:
1 Introduce an enemy causing domestic havok
Hitler ‘did’ this by setting the Reichstag on fire in 1933 and something similar happened on a sunny day in september, 2001. By creating such a major threat, says Wolf, you get attention and civilian agreement to proceed with the second step.
2 Create a new kind of prison to torture those involved in the attacks in Step 1
Because people want someone, anyone, to pay for the gruesome things they did, setting up such a prison (ie: Guantanamo Bay) is quite an easy task. Afterall: terrorists don’t need a fair trial, they just need to be tortured and killed for the greater good.
Bypassing the standard laws and courts of civil rights and humanitary decensy offers a chance to, in time, even put people there that oppose your ideas openly or just anyone else seemingly linked to anything evil.
As you might have guessed this has been done before: Hitler created the Volksgerichthof, or People’s Court, to bypass regular law and ‘punish’ those involved in the Reichstag Fire. Ofcourse this was done in secret, by torture and indefinit isolated confinement. Russia and Italy had these special tribunals as well (Russia had the KGB covering all things anti-fascist and Italy had the Legge di Difesa dello Stato), but these weren’t actually created after a certain incident, Stalin and Mussolini already had fascist control over their nations.
3 Form ´legal´ beat-em-up gangs to terrorize citizens
Wolf then suggests the next step is to put even more fear in the public by creating paramilitary organisations of scary men who have power to beat people up and get away with it. Where fascist Italy had their squadristi (or “Blackshirts”) and Germany the Sturmabteilung (or “Brownshirts”), Wolf says America’s use of contracted security forces/mercenaries (like Blackwater) can be placed in the same category. These contracted gunmen aren’t just currently active in the war against terror in Iraq, making headlines here and there: they also operate domistically if there’s need for some extra help… say… Hurricane Katrine in 2005:
4 Spy on thy neighbour: automated, domestic espionage
In the days of and prior to World War 2 there have been several ways of making sure governments knew everything about everyone. The most effective way was to use the fear, created in steps 1, 2 and 3, to make people spy on their very own neighbour and make them report any suspicious behaviour against the state. This way, the secrect police created sort of an automated espionage system, all they had to do was keeping up the fear! To do this Russia had the KGB, Italy had OVRA and Germany the Gestapo to make sure people were behaving the way they wanted them to and ofcourse to make sure and anti-fascist clubs were hunted down and properly discarded.
These days spying on citizens and much easier though! Phone taps, e-mail interception, browsing habbits (again: The Cybersecurity Act of 2009), library book flags and video surveillence through enhanced satellites. Wolf doesn’t really say the US of A is currently actively using this on every citizen, but it might be read this way. We all know the technology is there to do it! Read more about this here.
5 Infiltrate or thoroughly investigate anti-government groups
Ofcourse this step is related to the spying part in step 4, but this goes a bit further. Wolf doesn’t mention anything like this going on in the fascist states in history, but it can be assumed this was the case.
Infiltrating groups means just that: an investigation brought to light a database of attended anti-war meetings with and rallies by citizen groups. This database has been built by domestic defense specialists posing as anti-war fanatics, infiltrating the group as one of their own. Weirdest thing is not the fact that they’re supposedly doing this, it’s also made legal through a ‘new’ privacy law which makes things like these possible, as long as it’s in the interest of tracking ’suspicious’ and ‘terrorist’ activities…
“A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.” -Naomi Wolf
6 Scare people by investigating and arresting key opposition figures
Well it’s quite an easy step really. All you have to do is figure out who’s who in any organization opposing your rule and then make sure to investigate them properly and perhaps even arrest them on rediculous grounds. Over the passed decades and centuries, these kind of things happened a lot to human rights activists in Russia and China for example and I guess everyone knows about this. But Wolf easily compares it to the way America is using it’s Terrorist Watch List to keep an eye on any person intelligent enough to question certain things.
On this list are ofcourse dangerous criminals keep them from public transportation such as airplanes, but also men like Walter or James from around the corner.
I guess these people are supposed to be some kind of warning sign for all American citizens to behave properly…
7 Prohibit dangerous academics and artists from sharing their opinions
As artists usually have some or a lot of enthousiasts following them, it’s obvious these people would be a threat to our civilization. According to Wolf, the Bush administration has been specifically targeting academics who were critical of the administration, pressuring them to stop lecturing their opinions with threats of getting them fined or fired.
Ofcourse, not only non-political figures are possible targets. If you’re (in this case indirectly) working for the administration and don’t meet their standards, don’t think you’ll get away with it!
This seems to be quite the same situation as has been done in any fascist period in history. Joseph Goebbels, the grandmaster of propaganda, also ‘repositioned’ his faulty politician buddies and made sure punishment or proper warnings came to those academics bad-mouthing the Nazi movement.
8 Control the media
Ah! The critical step in any war on information. It has been done for thousands of years: propaganda and the control to make people hear only the things you want them to hear.
These days you hear about it in the form of governments blocking certain websites or keywords, because the internet is the biggest information medium ever. So it’s near impossible to control what we know, you’d think.
But Wolf talks about numerous attempts to shut critical people up by warning them with arrests following if they don’t comply.
“The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.” -Naomi Wolf
Read about other attrocities against journalists, bloggers and other random people sharing their opinions in public right here.
“In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.” -Naomi Wolf
9 Indoctrinate people by using big words for small things
Wolf says for being a true fascist state it’s important to make people believe a word like criticism actually means espionage. Also make sure incidents like politicians criticizing their governing administration are labeled as treason as much as you can, preferably making the news every now and then. This also adds to the fear you would want your citizens to be feeling.
The perfect example for this would be the word ‘Terrorism”. It’s rediculous how much this word is now leading a life of it’s own, as anything or anyone can be labeled terrorist these days.
“most Americans do not realise that since September of last year – when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 – the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.” -Naomi Wolf
10 Martial law
If you’ve reached this 10th and final step, you’ll be leading your brand new, fascist state. Apparently it’s become very easy for a US president to declare martial law in any situation.
In the passed couple of years, the Bush administration has step by step created and ‘enhanced’ laws that make it possible to throw in some domestic military law in case of natural disasters, disease outbreak, terrorist threats and so on. Having completed the previous steps, you now also have power to determine the meaning of the word terrorist, so that makes it even easier.
So what have we learned so far?
- Apparently women can be conspiracy theorists as well
- Keep reading articles like these on the internet and you’ll eventually believe it.
- Never question anyone’s authority!
What do you think? Is America on its way to become a fascist state?
