For some reason the little darlin's book is a best seller & nary a coward in this country is got the balls to write a review.............
Naomi Wolf believes the end of America is near, and that only young people can restore the Founders’ vision.
By Rob Anderson
February 9, 2008
Feminist, author, and critic Naomi Wolf. (Photo courtesy Chelsea Green Publishing)
Oh, no. It's a horrific abyss! But I am invoking a positive vision, the Founders’ vision. I really do believe that the Founder’s vision, this great 18th century ideal of liberty, is the same kind of seed of hope for justice and equality that transmuted itself in the abolition movement, and that renewed itself in the anti-child labor movement and the movement for women’s rights and the anti-war movement. It is all the same vision. It is always hopeful, and I think we need that again.
What was your goal in calling the book The End of America? It's controversial, at least.
Well, I don’t mean the end of the landmass. I mean the end of the idea of America. When America ends it will be a nation, but it [will be] a nation more like Pakistan and Morocco than like France and Britain. It is an America that is no longer like the America that the Founders set out to build. It is an America without liberty, essentially.
Do you think that the end of the idea of America has already come, or is it yet to come?
The news changes that answer everyday. If we fight back, we save America. If we don’t fight back, the end has already come. On paper, a coup has already taken place. It has been activated fully on the ground.
Tomorrow the president has the power to declare martial law without alerting Congress, to federalize the National Guard, to postpone elections, and to put enemy combatants in solitary confinement for three years for no reason. They could do the same to me. If the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (Senate Bill 1959) passes, this conversation will be a criminal act.
So is that why you decided to write the book now?
It was actually last summer that I began to become very uncomfortably aware that I was seeing a lot of echoes of a time that I know in my bones because I'm Jewish. People are burning things. People are derailing academic careers because of their ideals. People are using phrases like “homeland” and embedding journalists.
I have a friend who is a Holocaust survivor’s daughter. She kept telling me when we discussed news events that they had done similar things in Germany. Of course, she didn’t mean the later years, she meant the early years of 1930 to 1933, when Germany was still a parliamentary democracy. There was a small group of people who were legally putting pressure on a democratic system to subvert the rule of law. And they did so with the consent of a parliament that was not a Nazi parliament. So she forced me to read a bunch of histories. When I did, I realized that I couldn’t ignore the fact that there are basically ten things that a “would-be dictator” always does in seeking to crush a democracy. [Invoke an external and internal threat; establish secret prisons; develop a paramilitary force; surveil ordinary citizens; infiltrate citizens' groups; arbitrarily detain and release citizens; target key individuals; restrict the press; cast criticism as "espionage" and dissent as "treason"; and subvert the rule of law.] Those are the same ten things for would-be dictators on the left or the right, the same ten things in the seven countries and eras I studied.
So have these ten steps already occurred in the United States today?
They have already happened.
They have already been set in motion. The string hasn’t been pulled, which is the turning point in every closing society when two or three of the steps are ramped up simultaneously and democracy can’t heal itself. For instance, if tomorrow half the journalists at the Washington Post were prosecuted under the Espionage Act, and Greg Palast was named an enemy combatant and put on a navy brig, and Blackwater was called out to help the TSA vet people on the watch list at Newark [airport]—that would be one kind of escalation.
And all of these are legally possible right now. This is how Stalin did it, Hitler did it, and Mussolini did it. These are very dangerous times.
Do you think this could realistically happen, though? Could the United States devolve into a totalitarian state without an uprising?
It is happening. People at Blackwater are studying protests in midtown Manhattan because their business plan calls for them to expand into domestic security.
They built a new presence in Illinois. They are trying to build a new presence in San Diego. The prosecution of journalists is at an all time high in the United States.
I am on the watch list. Every time I take a plane, I get called aside and get an extra searching. When I went to speak at a conference in Massachusetts a few weeks ago, the keynote, an environmentalist, was late because the TSA agents had physically taken him off the plane. When I was in Australia,
I interviewed the former head of Greenpeace International who said she was held for five hours at LAX. They wouldn’t let her have a lawyer. She asked why she was being detained. They said, "This isn’t detention. Detention is when we take you to the cells out back and lock you up."
There are interrogation cells in U.S. airports. People are dying in custody of Taser wounds, while the state is saying they got tangled up in their handcuffs. These are the kind of the things you hear in a police state. Students are being Tasered for asking questions. Two-hundred and fifty people have died from Tasering.
It seems like most of these authoritarian actions are tied very much to the Bush administration. Could all of your concerns dissipate once a new president is elected?
No, absolutely not. That is, respectively, very naïve. And we have to snap ourselves out of that wishful thinking. Just like the assumption that we are going to have a free and accountable election is very naïve, given the historical record.
History shows that anyone can be tempted, that anyone can become a monster if they have the power to lock up the opposition. Democracy is hard and imprisoning the opposition is easy.
Your argument is very easy to caricature. Some might say it's a bit farfetched.
It is actually quite difficult to caricature it if I can have three or four sentences, because the examples are so powerful and irrefutable.
I am not saying rhetorically that these people are Nazis. I am saying very technically that in 1933, Goebbel purged the Civil Service. In April of 2006, the U.S. attorneys were purged. In Goebbel’s time, they embedded journalists. We embed journalists. They unload the coffins at night. We unload the coffins at night. They had a constitutional parliament that passed the Enabling Acts [of 1933] that allowed the state to spy on people, to open their mail, to open their telegrams. So do we. They gutted their constitution because they were told they would be unpatriotic if they didn’t in the wake of a terrorist attack.
You can draw your own conclusions, but I am sticking to the facts. It’s such a mass of evidence that I have been pleasantly surprised that people haven’t been able to rebut it as far as I know, or mock it too effectively.
Did you think you were making a risky argument as you were writing the book?
Of course, but I knew that the evidence supported the argument. If you read memoirs of people like you and me from 1931, they were having conversations like this. But they were concluding that “Surely it will pass, people will come to their senses." But then it did and the point of no return was reached. I hope and pray that we will not make the same mistake.
So how will we be able to recognize if the tide has turned, if our society has fundamentally shifted and we can’t turn back?
We are just about there. I keep going back to the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. If this bill passes, you and I could be rounded up tomorrow as terrorists. So when we will know it’s very, very, very dire? When that bill passes.
Rob Anderson is the Editor of Campus Progress.