It's funny how dyed-in-the-wool lefty "liberals" (I hate these terms) like myself are showing up these days wrapping themselves in the American flag. I did it myself in my post "America, the Theoretically Beautiful, as Written by a True 'Conservative'", in which I said:
So when I look at the "Patriot Act" or what's worse – the proposed "Patriot II" bill – it makes me realize how far down the slope we've started. Just like the Federalists in the 1790's, when power-crazed John Adams pushed through the Alien and Sedition acts to crush his political opposition (which later coalesced politically into the Jeffersonian Republicans and the first real political parties) in the name of war and rumors of war, the Bush administration has decided that it is worth sacrificing our way of life – the basic protections of individual rights from the prying interests of the state, as promised to the Anti-Federalists as condition for them signing off on the Constitution in the first place – for the sake of countering the phantom menace of "terrorists."
I agree – we are dealing with bad people. They did bad things to us and others in the world. But this kind of political reaction has many precedents in history – including especially our own – and the menace we faced has usually not in actuality posed a threat commensurate with our overreaction.
Such were the words of one self-described "true patriot," writing with concern about the erosion of our most basic civil liberties as an American, not as a mere "Democrat" or "Republican", writing in from overseas as I watch the spirit and the letter of the Constitution increasingly gutted.
And in that piece, I lamented that the so-called "conservatives" and "patriots" are so busy being petty and political around Bush and perceived cultural threat of gay rights, abortion, or teaching scientific theories such as evolution in science classes, that doing everything short of actually taking a scissors to the original, yellowed text of the Constitution itself is OK. Well, as long as he's accomplishing our direct and fleeting political goals, right?
But I'm a purist. I hesitate and wince when people talk about canceling the 2nd Amendment in response to the Cho Seung-hui incident; and Canadians own guns like a mofo and they're not shooting each other left and right, a point most famously pointed out by none other than Michael Moore. I think it would be legitimate to define handguns as outside the reasonable definition of "arms" – hand grenades and bazookas are not legal, after all; there's gotta be a line drawn somewhere, right? Maybe it should include handguns? It's a legitimate question.
Yet, I don't like slippery slopes. And I don't like it when people mess with any of the original ten Amendments, affectionately known as "The Bill of Rights."
Apparently, Naomi Wolf, whose "liberal" credentials aren't in dispute, is becoming my kinda brand o' "true conservative." She writes in The Guardian in her piece "Fascist America, Ten Easy Steps", and while the title is bombastic, the contents are far more compellingly chilling. An excerpt:
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.
But that's just being paranoid, right? The word "fascism" applied to America? That's a bridge too far! Such are the dangers posed by that very peculiar brand of American exceptionalism, which runs throughout American thinking and identity, which postulates that the historical processes that apply to the rest of the world don't apply to us.
God, I hope they're right, but I don't feel like I can just stick my face in the sand as the signs tell me that notions of exceptionalism might not save us:
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. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
The fact is, if I were right now asserting my Constitutionally-protected right to sign up for an anti-war group, or walk in a peace march, or write inflammatory words on a blog, I could end up on the "no-fly list" and I would have no legal recourse to find out who put me there, why, nor have a way to get off.
Is this paranoia, as people on the right tend to write this off as?
What's surprising to me is that the self-described conservatives should be starting to be my "strange bedfellows," but are increasingly on the other side of the fence, happy that "national security", gay rights, and abortions as swing issues are keeping them nice and happy.
