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1. DEMOCRACY DESTROYED: Election Frauds - Canada and US
3. DEMOCRACY DESTROYED: Loss of Sovereignty
Video that were posted but later pulled off internet
1. America Warning - Judgement Has Arrived
2. America Warning: Tribulation Has Arrived
3. Last Days - The End of America
Warning: Last Warnings to the Church - America -the World
Final Warning
Final Warning
(from video above) Brock Chisholm:
"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family, tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas."
"Children must be free to think in all directions irrespective of the peculiar ideas of parents who often seal their children's minds with preconceived prejudices and false concepts of past generations. Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are."
"Instead of bringing our children up according to our own preconceived rules of good and bad we must teach them to question everything. Tell your child you believe in God, point out that some people don't."
"The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy."
Do you question yourself about the things that are happening in this world? The various earthquakes, tsunamis, hatred, crime and so on? Did you know the Bible talks about these things? This documentary will prove to you how real the bible is like it or not, and how near Jesus return is! May God bless you and keep you!
[One caution - Many Christians believe that Christians will be here on earth for the first 3 1/2 years of the the 7 year tribulation period, that Christians will not be raptured until the "last trump" or when the 7th trumpet sounds in the book of Revelation. Here are some Bible scriptures to back this up: See 1 Corinthians 15: 51-55 "a mystery" , "at the last trump" , 1 Thessalonians 4: 13- 17 "the trumpet call", Revelation 10:1-7 "in the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets." and Revelation 11: 15,17-18 after the last (7th ) trumpet is sounded "God Almighty . . . you have taken your great power and have begun to reign . . . your wrath has come . The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great— and for destroying those who destroy the earth"
Take note: the pastor in the video mentions how the 1st Christians had to endure persecutions. Remember Jesus and his disciples all died horrble deaths. Jesus said that "a student was not above his teacher" and "If they persecuted me , they will persecute you also". So if they all were persecuted, why would you think Christians of this age are above all those mentioned above, to be treated any different?
It is important that Christians, at least, prepare for the possibility that the pre- tribulation interpretation of the time of the rapture may be wrong, elsewise, if Christ does not come to take them away when things get bad, they will NOT be prepared, and might even lose their faith all together. Satan is counting on this. Have faith - God will enable you to go throught what ever you might have to go through. For a Christian, death is a crossing over into the arms of Jesus. Remember that. Revelation 6:9-11, 20:4
Isaiah 43:2-3 (New International Version 1984)
2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze.
3 For I am the LORD, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior;
Major War Coming Within Months Involving Israel, Russia, USA - NEW UPDATE - 2013
"A world without America is not only desirable, it's acheivable." - President of Iran.
EMP - When Iran was test launching missles they were blowing up in the sky. This was not a failure. They were testing for EMP launching which is suppose to blow up in the sky. 100 million dead in the 1st 6 months.
Some say that 2012 is the year the islamic madih (the anti-christ) is to "return".
Pentagon issued a report in 2010 that by the year 2015, Iran may have intercontinental missles that can hit the US BUT capable now of launching missles to hit the US from ships.
" We (the US) are the ultimate prize. Israel is a bump in the road. We are the ultimate prize . . ."
Yuri Bezmenov
Soviet KGB defector and Communist propaganda expert,
predicts Obama's gameplan almost 30 years ago
Soviet KGB defector and Communist propaganda expert,
predicts Obama's gameplan almost 30 years ago
A WARNING from ex-KGB communist defector Yuri Bezmenov from *29 YEARS AGO*, detailing the 4 stages of a Marxist-Leninist revolution and taking over a nation. Watch this at your own risk, as your bones will literally begin to freeze as you start to realize he is describing EXACTLY what is happening today almost to the letter.
Yuri Bezmenov: Deception Was My Job
Pro-socialists within country are used during the destabilization process but "will be lined up against the wall and shot" when the socialist government comes to power"This is G. Edward Griffin's shocking video interview, Soviet Subversion of the Free-World Press (1984), where he interviews ex-KGB officer and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov who decided to openly reveal KGB's subversive tactics against western society as a whole.
Bezmenov explains how Marxist ideology is destabilizing the economy and purposefully pushing the U.S. into numerous crises so that a "Big Brother" tyranny can be put into place in Washington, how most Americans don't even realize that they are under attack, and that normal parliamentary procedures will not alter the federal government's direction.
He then explains how Marxist leaders use informers to make lists of anti-Communist and other politically incorrect people who they want to execute once they - actually an oligarchy - come to power. The oligarch's secret lists include "civil rights" activists and idealistically-minded "useful idiot" leftists as well.
Bezmenov provides several real world examples of how Marxist leaders even execute and/or imprison each other. Also he explains how American embassy employees were known to betray Soviets attempting to defect, how there existed a "triangle of hate" in the Soviet government, why he realized that Marxism-Leninism was a murderous doctrine, and how the CIA ignored (or didn't care) about Communist subversion.
He also mentions that revolutions throughout history are never the result of a majority movement, but of a small dedicated and highly-organized group who seize power, whether for good or bad. Next he explains how the American mass media spread lies about life in the Soviet Union.
Bezmenov also explains how the LOOK magazine article falsely claimed that the Russian people were proud of their victory in the Second World War, where in reality the Judeo-Bolshevik-Communist-Marxist government was happy that Hitler had been defeated so that they could remain in power.
Find out how the KGB utilized various individuals to undermine the Western society in its morals and values.
Michael Boldea Prophecy Club: Part 1 of 6
or
America's Destruction Michael Boldea
Prophecy Club 1/6
The Bible says we are going to be on the earth for persecution in America
Mike Boldea was born in a small northern Romanian Village. At the age of nine, his entire family was deported from Romania for smuggling Bibles. His grandfather, Dumitru Duduman started an outreach ministry called "Hand of Help" of which Mike is now Chairman.
Mike has traveled internationally with Dumitru for over 11 years acting as Dumitru’s translator. They shared their testimonies, as well as an important message God gave Dumitru for the United States.
Recently Mike has translated the book entitled "Life In Christ" which Dumitru had penned prior to his death. The testimonies of those that were persecuted for their faith must live on to build up the body of Christ. Mike continues to operate in his gift as an Evangelist to exhort the body of Christ to present itself with a garment clean before our Lord.
Michael has a strong Christian heritage coming from a line of 4 generations of Christians. In the village of Hinceste Romania his Great grandfather was one of the first Christians converted there and his grandfather was a pastor and his father pastors the "Messiah" church in Botosani Romania with over 800 members. Their family worked with Richard Wurmbrandt, Harlan Popoff, and brother Andrew taking bibles to the underground Church.
Michael has seen the presence of God in accomplishing the work that his family was called to. In the face of great persecution and opposition thousands of bibles were given to the Christians of Romania even though it was punishable by imprisonment if caught. His grandfather Dumitru Duduman did suffer greatly being imprisoned for his faith. Under extreme torture he never recanted his faith and stands as a witness of faithfulness to this day in Romania.
Michael Boldea Prophecy Club: Part 2 of 6
or
America's Destruction Michael Boldea
Prophecy Club 2/6
The Narrow Door
22 Then Jesus went through the towns and villages, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem. 23 Someone asked him, “Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?”
He said to them, 24 “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to. 25 Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, ‘Sir, open the door for us.’
“But he will answer, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from.’ 26 “Then you will say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’
27 “But he will reply, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers!’
28 “There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out. 29 People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God. 30 Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.”
Michael Boldea Prophecy Club: Part 3 of 6
or
America's Destruction Michael Boldea
Prophecy Club 3/6
Michael Boldea Prophecy Club: Part 4 of 6
or
America's Destruction Michael Boldea
Prophecy Club 4/6
Michael Boldea Prophecy Club: Part 5 of 6
or
America's Destruction Michael Boldea
Prophecy Club 5/6
"'We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed; let us leave her and each go to our own land, for her judgment reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the heavens.' - Jeremiah 51:9
Michael Boldea Prophecy Club: Part 6 of 6
or
America's Destruction Michael Boldea
Prophecy Club 6/6
16 “I [Jesus] am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. . . . 18 On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles. 19 But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, 20 for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. 21 “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. 22 You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.23 When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. . . .
26 “So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. 27 What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One [God at the final judgment] who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.
32 “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. 33 But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven.
34 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
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the Isaiah 9:10 Judgement, part 1
(The 9 Harbingers - Jonathan Cahn)
the Isaiah 9:10 Judgement, part 2
buttonwood = sycamore
Wall Street used to have an actual wall
2nd shaking (economic crash) 7 years after 911
10 "The bricks have fallen down, But we will rebuild with hewn stones;
The sycamores are cut down,
The sycamores are cut down,
But we will replace them with cedars.” . . .
12 . . . For all this His anger is not turned away,
But His hand is stretched out still. 13 For the people do not turn to Him who strikes them, Nor do they seek the Lord of hosts.14 Therefore the Lord will cut off head and tail from Israel, Palm branch and bulrush in one day. 15 The elder and honorable, he is the head; The prophet who teaches lies, he is the tail. 16 For the leaders of this people cause them to err,
3 Thus says the Lord God: “Woe to the foolish prophets, who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing! . . .
10 “Because, indeed, because they have seduced My people, saying, ‘Peace!’ when there is no peace—and one builds a wall, and they plaster it with untempered mortar—
11 say to those who plaster it with untempered mortar, that it will fall. There will be flooding rain, and you, O great hailstones, shall fall; and a stormy wind shall tear it down. 12 Surely, when the wall has fallen, will it not be said to you, ‘Where is the mortar with which you plastered it?’”
13 Therefore thus says the Lord God: “I will cause a stormy wind to break forth in My fury; and there shall be a flooding rain in My anger, and great hailstones in fury to consume it.
14 So I will break down the wall you have plastered with untempered mortar, and bring it down to the ground, so that its foundation will be uncovered; it will fall, and you shall be consumed in the midst of it. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.
15 “Thus will I accomplish My wrath on the wall and on those who have plastered it with untempered mortar; and I will say to you, ‘The wall is no more, nor those who plastered it,
Ezekiel 7
The End Has Come
1 The word of the LORD came to me: 2 “Son of man, this is what the Sovereign LORD says to the land of Israel: The end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land. 3 The end is now upon you and I will unleash my anger against you. I will judge you according to your conduct and repay you for all your detestable practices. 4 I will not look on you with pity or spare you; I will surely repay you for your conduct and the detestable practices among you. Then you will know that I am the LORD.
5 “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Disaster! An unheard-of disaster is coming. 6 The end has come! The end has come! It has roused itself against you. It has come! 7 Doom has come upon you—you who dwell in the land. The time has come, the day is near; there is panic, not joy, upon the mountains. 8 I am about to pour out my wrath on you and spend my anger against you; I will judge you according to your conduct and repay you for all your detestable practices. 9 I will not look on you with pity or spare you; I will repay you in accordance with your conduct and the detestable practices among you. Then you will know that it is I the LORD who strikes the blow.
10 “The day is here! It has come! Doom has burst forth, the rod has budded, arrogance has blossomed! 11 Violence has grown into a rod to punish wickedness; none of the people will be left, none of that crowd—no wealth, nothing of value. 12 The time has come, the day has arrived. Let not the buyer rejoice nor the seller grieve, for wrath is upon the whole crowd. 13 The seller will not recover the land he has sold as long as both of them live, for the vision concerning the whole crowd will not be reversed. Because of their sins, not one of them will preserve his life. 14 Though they blow the trumpet and get everything ready, no one will go into battle, for my wrath is upon the whole crowd.
15 “Outside is the sword, inside are plague and famine; those in the country will die by the sword, and those in the city will be devoured by famine and plague. 16 All who survive and escape will be in the mountains, moaning like doves of the valleys, each because of his sins. 17 Every hand will go limp, and every knee will become as weak as water. 18 They will put on sackcloth and be clothed with terror. Their faces will be covered with shame and their heads will be shaved. 19 They will throw their silver into the streets, and their gold will be an unclean thing. Their silver and gold will not be able to save them in the day of the LORD’s wrath. They will not satisfy their hunger or fill their stomachs with it, for it has made them stumble into sin. 20 They were proud of their beautiful jewelry and used it to make their detestable idols and vile images. Therefore I will turn these into an unclean thing for them. 21 I will hand it all over as plunder to foreigners and as loot to the wicked of the earth, and they will defile it. 22 I will turn my face away from them, and they will desecrate my treasured place; robbers will enter it and desecrate it.
23 “Prepare chains, because the land is full of bloodshed and the city is full of violence. 24 I will bring the most wicked of the nations to take possession of their houses; I will put an end to the pride of the mighty, and their sanctuaries will be desecrated. 25 When terror comes, they will seek peace, but there will be none. 26 Calamity upon calamity will come, and rumor upon rumor. They will try to get a vision from the prophet; the teaching of the law by the priest will be lost, as will the counsel of the elders. 27 The king will mourn, the prince will be clothed with despair, and the hands of the people of the land will tremble. I will deal with them according to their conduct, and by their own standards I will judge them. Then they will know that I am the LORD.”
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This is no longer on youtube but can be heard at this website : http://www.watchmanscry.com/audio.html
under: 9/08/10 - Nathan was a guest on OmegaMan Radio
A Very in depth discussion on what is coming to America!
It is Three hours long broken into three parts
or use these links : Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3
Nathan Leal from The Watchmans Cry ( http://www.watchmanscry.com/) was a guest on OmegaMan Radio - Sept.8th 2010....He discusses some very important Prophecies uncovered in our generation, this is an in-depth look into the devastation that is coming soon to America.
Right now you can decide to ignore the warnings given by many who have the gift of Prophecy or you can act accordingly...Time now is very short and the clock has nearly struck midnight.
Last Days - The End of America 1-11
Different from video below - This was her full oral presentation
Different from video below - This was her full oral presentation
I leave part 1 as evidence - I am very concerned that, as of this date, this specific film ( Naomi in a red skirted suit) has been removed everywhere on the internet. It is VERY INFORMATIVE! It is my hope that we will see it back on the internet soon.
The End of America - Naomi Wolf
or
The End Of America - 2008 Full Film
This keeps being removed from the internet
The End Of America - 2008 Full Film
This keeps being removed from the internet
Fascist America in Ten Steps
1. Invoke/make/invent a terrifying internal and external threat.
2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Harass citizens' groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
7. Target key individuals.
9. Cast criticism as espionage and dissent as treason.
10. Subvert the rule of law.
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001 [9/11], 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 [due to government propaganda] 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.
2. Create a gulag/ a prison system outside the rule of law
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 [To spread, especially destructively], 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.
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".
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. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. 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.
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.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
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.
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.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. 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.
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.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: 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.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
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.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now. "
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all [And Obama has been continuing and has firmed up these steps]
by Naomi Wolf, April 24, 2007
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001 [9/11], 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 [due to government propaganda] 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.
2. Create a gulag/ a prison system outside the rule of law
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 [To spread, especially destructively], 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.
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".
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. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. 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.
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.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
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.
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.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. 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.
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.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: 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.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
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.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now. "
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.
Naomi Wolf on the End of America
(Obviously this was made before Obama showed his true colors)
Oct 20, 2011 - Naomi Wolf: Citizen Empowerment 101
In her 2007 book The End of America, published in the waning days of George W. Bush's time in the White House, the social critic and journalist Naomi Wolf warned of a "fascist shift" in American society that was eroding constitutional rights. Four years and one presidential administration later, Wolf told Elmhurst students in the Frick Center on October 20, the situation has only become more dire.
Naomi Wolf on the End of America Part 1 of 2
Link here for transcript: http://www.democracynow.org/2007/11/28/the_end_of_america_feminist_social(posted on this page directly below part 2)
The United States is on the road to becoming a fascist society, right under our very noses. That's the premise of a new book by feminist social critic Naomi Wolf. It's called "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot" and is already on the New York Times bestseller list.
The United States is on the road to becoming a fascist society, right under our very noses. That's the premise of a new book by feminist social critic Naomi Wolf. It's called "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot" and is already on the New York Times bestseller list.
Amazon Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/End-America-Letter-Warning-Patriot/dp/1933392797
Amazon America: http://www.amazon.com/End-America-Letter-Warning-Patriot/dp/1933392797
Naomi Wolf outlines what she sees as the ten steps to shut down a democratic society and argues that the Bush administration has already implemented many of these steps.
Amazon America: http://www.amazon.com/End-America-Letter-Warning-Patriot/dp/1933392797
Naomi Wolf outlines what she sees as the ten steps to shut down a democratic society and argues that the Bush administration has already implemented many of these steps.
Naomi Wolf on the End of America Part 2 of 2
Link here for transcript (THOUGHT IT A GOOD IDEA TO INCLUDE THIS HERE IN CASE THEY TRY TO MAKE THIS VIEO DISAPPEAR TOO): http://www.democracynow.org/2007/11/28/the_end_of_america_feminist_social
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we’re joined by a special guest who has just written a book. The United States is on the road to becoming a fascist society, right under our very noses. That’s the premise of the new book by feminist social critic Naomi Wolf. It’s called The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, and it’s already on the New York Times bestseller list.
Naomi Wolf outlines what she sees as the ten steps to shut down a democratic society. She argues the Bush administration has already implemented many of these steps. Naomi Wolf is the author of several books, including the ’90s feminist classic, The Beauty Myth.
Critics describe her latest book, The End of America, as a wake-up call to Americans to heed the lessons of history and fight to save their democracy before its too late.
Naomi Wolf joins us in our firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!
NAOMI WOLF: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Start off with the stories that you tell in your book.
NAOMI WOLF: Well, they’re the stories of societies that were systematically closed down by would-be despots, would-be dictators, whether they were on the left or the right, who essentially developed a blueprint in the first part of the twentieth century to crush democracies or to crush democracy movements. So they’re also individual stories of how people react as a democracy is being closed down.
But I guess the book really began with a very personal story, because I was forced to write it, even though I didn’t really want to, by a dear friend who is a Holocaust survivor’s daughter. And when we spoke about news events, she kept saying, “They did this in Germany. They did this in Germany.” And I really didn’t think that made sense. I thought that was very extreme language. But finally she forced me to sit down and start reading the histories, of course, not of the later years, because she wasn’t talking about German outcomes, ’38, ’39; she was talking about the early years, 1930, ’31, ’32, when Germany was a parliamentary democracy, and there was this systematic assault using the rule of law to subvert the rule of law.
And once I saw how many parallels there were, not just in strategy and tactics that we’re seeing again today, but actually in images and sound bites and language, then I read other histories of Italy in the ’20s, Russia in the ’30s, East Germany in the ’50s, Czechoslovakia in the ’60s, Pinochet’s coup in Chile in ’73, the crushing of the democracy movement in China at the end of the ’80s. And I saw that there is a blueprint that would-be dictators always do the same ten things, whether they’re on the left or the right, and that we are seeing these ten steps taking place systematically right now in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Lay them out.
NAOMI WOLF: Well, they’re not happy. The first step is that all would-be dictators or would-be despots, which is what the founders of our country who foresaw exactly this kind of possibility would call them — all would-be dictators invoke a terrifying internal and external threat. And often it’s a real threat, which they will hype or manipulate. For instance, Stalin spoke about sleeper cells, which is one of those phrases that are being recirculated now by the Bush White House. And this was an invention. He said there were capitalist secret agents who were hiding among good Soviet citizens and who are going to rise up at a signal and create terrorist mayhem — fake story, but it worked to frighten citizens.
Pinochet talked about a real threat: armed insurgents. There were armed insurgents, but he hyped it using fake documents. And we saw — we see this a lot in the historical blueprint, that a would-be dictator will fake documents. His were called Plan Z. He claimed they were going to bomb infrastructure, assassinate leaders. We saw fake documents used by the White House to hype of a terror threat when they used the fake yellowcake documents to claim that Iraq was trying to secure yellowcake uranium. And remember the famous sound bite — “We can’t wait for the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud” — to drive us into an illegal war with a nation we were not at war with.
AMY GOODMAN: You also talk about the language, like the Department of Homeland Security.
NAOMI WOLF: That is where I, as a social critic and a student of language, get really scared. It’s scary enough to see these ten steps, but what is terrifying to me personally is how many actual phrases are being recycled, and tactics. “Homeland security” — “heimat” —- became popularized by the National Socialists. Goebbels [Propaganda expert] developed the practice of embedding journalists.[So journalists can be lead only where the government wants them to be] Leni von Riefenstahl was embedded, for instance, in Poland. And we’re seeing embedded -—
AMY GOODMAN: She’s the famous German filmmaker.
NAOMI WOLF: Filmmaker. If you look at the sequence of, you know, Hitler descending in an airplane in von Riefenstahl’s famous Triumph of the Will and being greeted by the uniformly armed paramilitary sort of surrounding their leader and him saying, “Help us accomplish our mission,” and then you look at other famous images from this administration —-
AMY GOODMAN: Like George Bush on “Mission Accomplished.”
NAOMI WOLF: “Mission Accomplished,” exactly right. You look at how, you know, Hitler said we have to invade Czechoslovakia because they’re a staging ground for terrorists and they’re abusing their ethnic minorities -— again, a country that we’re not at war with, when the WMD charge vanished, the White House said we have to invade Iraq because they’re a staging ground for terrorists and they’re abusing their ethnic minorities. On and on and on.
I mean, this one scare’s me to death. You know, Mussolini developed — again, a parliamentary democracy, Italy was, in the teens and into 1920. He developed the Blackshirts, which were these paramilitary thugs that beat up newspaper editors, terrorized the population, and they intimidated people counting the vote in Milan. And then Hitler studied Mussolini, so many things were repeated by Hitler. Stalin studied Hitler, Hitler studied Stalin. But Hitler developed the Brownshirts, the SA, who intimidated people counting the vote in Austria. So 90% of them voted for their own annexation, because they were the Brownshirts. And you saw this scene of identically dressed Republican staffers in Florida in 2000 intimidating people counting the vote.
So things like that are really chilling. And they’re more and more chilling as — I think right now people are kind of ramping up their awareness of these echoes, and what you also see predictably, because the blueprint is predictive, is that the White House is ramping up its implementation of some of the scariest aspects of its crackdown.
AMY GOODMAN: You began with these stories back in the summer of 2006 of headlines from a two-week period. Give some of those examples.
NAOMI WOLF: Well, 2006 seems so long ago and so innocent a time, considering how swiftly we’ve zoomed along implementing this blueprint or we’re suffering this implementation. In 2006, a blogger was jailed in San Francisco. In 2006, people in Alabama couldn’t get a fair hearing for protecting voter rolls. There was the beginning of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, in which the state basically legalized torture, which is one of these crucial turning points as an open society closes down.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about Christine Axsmith, the computer security expert working for the CIA, who, what, wrote — posted a message on a blog site on a top-secret computer network, criticizing waterboarding —-
NAOMI WOLF: Waterboarding.
AMY GOODMAN: —- saying waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong.
NAOMI WOLF: And then she lost her security clearance. She’s one of many, many whistleblowers, key individuals, who have tried to take a stand against some of these positions and who have faced — again, in a closing society this is what happens. This is step seven: target key individuals. They face job loss, character assassination or worse. Valerie Plame’s bolts were taken away from her back deck, fifty feet off the ground. She has two toddlers. People are being put on the watch list for criticizing the government, for engaging in antiwar protest. Their kids are being put on the watch list. But, yeah, back then, all she said was it’s wrong. And now we’ve just confirmed an attorney general who pretends not to know what waterboarding is, because if he acknowledged that it’s against US and international law, he’d be confirming the fact that there are criminals in the White House right now who have already staged a coup. [END OF PART 1]
AMY GOODMAN: You say step three is establishing secret prisons.
NAOMI WOLF: That’s right. You establish secret prisons, and what I mean by that is unaccountable prisons where torture takes place. And often there will be a military tribunal system set in place. Lenin pioneered that. Mussolini developed the confino system. Hitler again studied Mussolini and developed the People’s Court.
And what starts to happen is — and this is what’s so scary about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and these black sites around the world — apart from the moral issue — and your interview just now with the Palestinian representative brought me to tears, because when he said it’s not just the Palestinians he’s concerned about, it’s the Israelis who lose their souls by this kind of occupation — it’s not just the often-innocent prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and these black sites around the world we should be concerned about, it’s our own American souls that are at stake. But just for purely personal reasons, we should be afraid when the state starts to torture people that it sees as at the margins or that citizens see at the margins: brown people on an island in Guantanamo with Muslim names, whatever. That’s what they did in Germany in ’31, ’32: anarchists, communists, Gypsies, Jews, whatever, homosexuals, whatever. You know, people didn’t care, because they were seen as at the margins. People knew about the torture cellars in Germany.
But then, what always happens, always — you can’t name a society in which this doesn’t happen, Amy — is that there’s a blurring of the line. And once the state legalizes torture of people at the margins, inevitably it will begin to direct state abuse at people at the heart of civil society, and it’s always the same cast of characters: journalists, editors, opposition leaders, outspoken clergy and labor leaders. And when that starts to happen, society can close down in a heartbeat, because people start to sensor themselves.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting. During the lead up to Nazi Germany, American reporters were fired by their American editors, pulled back from Germany, because they were sounding the warning. They were saying, “We’re seeing a fascist society build.” And they were told that they were biased, they were not understanding the circumstances in which Hitler was rising up, people were concerned about their economy, they had been devastated, and that they were being alarmist.
NAOMI WOLF: Interesting. That’s really interesting. I mean, I’m immediately thinking, as you say that, which I actually hadn’t known, that — thinking of a lot of books I’ve been reading lately about deep US involvement. Some corporations were deeply involved in Nazi Germany, making millions, like IBM. How did they round people up so quickly, you know, in Germany when they were rounding up the Jews so fast? It’s because IBM had developed this prototype of a punch card system, and they were secretly working with the Nazis. Prescott Bush, Bush’s grandfather, was making millions in consolidation with Krupp, Thyssen, and it’s very interesting to me, because in the Nuremberg trials they went after these industrialists like Krupp, and so there was a moment at which the Nuremberg trial was about to identify supporters of these war crimes who were US collaborators.
AMY GOODMAN: But they didn’t.
NAOMI WOLF: But they didn’t. But I think it’s interesting that there is that historical memory in the family.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s the question of who controlled the trials, right? It’s the question of who controlled the trials and not wanting their own people to be involved.
NAOMI WOLF: I see.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk then — [step] four, developing a paramilitary force and surveiling ordinary citizens. Those are the fourth and fifth steps.
NAOMI WOLF: Yeah, that’s another big one. I just want to note about the blurring of the line why we’re in such a moment of danger right now. The President has said that he can say, “Amy Goodman, you’re an enemy combatant. Naomi Wolf, you’re an enemy combatant. This guy behind the camera, you’re an enemy combatant. A person walking down the street, enemy combatant. can be anyone. A person walking down the street, enemy combatant.” And it doesn’t matter that we’re innocent US citizens. I mean, we could be Republicans, we could be evangelicals. It doesn’t matter. He can take us, and if he says it’s true, that makes it true, because it’s a status offense, and he can put us in a ten-by-twelve-foot cell in a Navy brig in solitary confinement for three years, making it difficult for us to see our families, to contact an attorney, to get charges filed.
They can’t torture us yet, though I was chilled to learn that an adviser to the White House was reported in a British newspaper yesterday as not ruling out waterboarding against US citizens. However, psychologists know that prolonged isolation makes sane people insane. That’s what happened to Jose Padilla. So, you know, when I say everyone’s got their moment at which they start to silence themselves, the day I read in the New York Times that someone I identify with has been named an enemy combatant and is sitting in a Navy brig in isolation, that’s when I’m going to stop talking in a context like this, because that’s when I will become too afraid.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Naomi Wolf. Her book is The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Number six in these ten steps toward fascism: infiltrate citizen groups. Seven: arbitrarily detain and release citizens. Eight: target key individuals. Infiltrate citizens’ groups, the evidence?
NAOMI WOLF: Well, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] is suing many agents of the state for illegally infiltrating citizens’ groups. It’s not a new thing in the United States. COINTELPRO did it quite a lot. But it is a hallmark — it’s an extension of a surveillance society, and it’s a hallmark. It’s an extension of step number four, which was the surveillance apparatus. Now, you can’t close down a democracy without a surveillance apparatus aimed at ordinary citizens. And what many of us know is that there’s been a heightening of surveillance in the wake of 9/11.
But what we’ve got to understand is that our country is unique right now in directing the crackdown on civil liberties and surveillance at citizens. In countries like England and Spain, experienced the same terror attacks, the same kind of terror attacks by the same bad guys that we did, but they’re not using that as a pretext to strip citizens of civil liberties in the same way. And what is so terrifying — again, Italy had a surveillance apparatus, people were informing on each other; Germany, surveillance, the Stasi in East Germany. You couldn’t have a conversation with your neighbor without fearing that it was going to go into your file.
You can’t close down a society without a paramilitary force. We skipped over that one. It’s very important. Blackwater, the Blackshirts, the Brownshirts, that’s not answerable to the people, and surveillance.
So why am I petrified, you know, when I read about Blackwater and about surveillance? I was on the watch list for a year and a half, Amy, which means that every time I got on a plane, I got taken aside for extra searching, quadruple-S high-risk Naomi, you know. And I was told, “You’re on a list.” And I found out that many critics of the administration are on the list: ACLU staffers, Ted Kennedy, antiwar activists, David Altoon [phon.], a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran who was critical of the Iraq war. Not only is he on the list, but people who come to me in tears after my readings are more upset that now their kids are on the list if they write a letter critical of the Bush administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you been able to get off the list?
NAOMI WOLF: Well, I was off the list ’til this book came out, and now I’m back on the list. Why is this more than a sort of irritation? Or, you know, in a strong society, it’s just like whatever, you know, it’s a kind of compliment. But in a closing society, it gets very frightening. In February, the management of the list, which has swollen from 45,000 to 775,000 Americans — they’re adding 20,000 names a month, right? Where are they getting those names? Remember when I said, how do they round up people so quickly in a closing society? The management of the lists is going to go from the airlines to the government. And in February, unless we push back this regulation — it’s being slipped in very quietly — we are going to have to apply to the state to get an airline ticket to cross a border, which moves us from 1931 to about 1936.
AMY GOODMAN: Number nine and number ten of your steps toward fascism: restrict the press; cast criticism as espionage, dissent as treason. Subvert the rule of law is eleven. What is the patriot’s task, where you conclude?
NAOMI WOLF: Well, the patriot’s task is, first, wake up. I mean, all around the world, democracy activists who are familiar with these same ten steps are sort of waving their arms at us, going, “No! You know, recognize this.” You don’t make it easier for the President to declare martial law, as we just did with the 2007 Defense Authorization Act. You don’t make it easier for the President to lock up political opponents in a cell or strip people of habeas corpus. No, you don’t make it easier for the President to have a paramilitary force like Blackwater, composed of hand-selected torturers and murderers from countries like Chile and Nigeria and El Salvador, where they’re trained to torture their own civilians. You know, you don’t set them loose in Illinois and Southern California and North Carolina. No! Bad idea! So, first, you wake up. You see the blueprint.
AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds.
NAOMI WOLF: Finally, we have to — we started the www.americanfreedomcampaign.org. It’s a democracy movement to restore the rule of law. We’re calling for lawyers across the country and citizens to call for hearings, special prosecutor, identify the crimes, impeach and prosecute, and save the country.
AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Wolf, I want to thank you for being with us. Do you think Democratic candidates are raising these issues, for president?
NAOMI WOLF: Not enough. This is a transpartisan issue, and we all need to push them, hold their feet to the fire across the board.
AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Wolf’s book is The End of America. Thank you for being with us.
Jeremiah 9
13 The LORD said, “It is because they have forsaken my law, which I set before them; they have not obeyed me or followed my law. 14 Instead, they have followed the stubbornness of their hearts . . . 20 Now, O women, hear the word of the LORD; open your ears to the words of his mouth. Teach your daughters how to wail; teach one another a lament.
21 Death has climbed in through our windows and has entered our fortresses; it has cut off the children from the streets and the young men from the public squares.
22 Say, “This is what the LORD declares: “‘The dead bodies of men will lie like refuse on the open field, like cut grain behind the reaper, with no one to gather them.’”
23 This is what the LORD says: “Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, 24 but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the LORD.
25 “The days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will punish all who are circumcised only in the flesh— all these nations are really uncircumcised, . . . uncircumcised in heart.
Jeremiah 45
4 The LORD said, “Say this to him: ‘This is what the LORD says: I will overthrow what I have built and uproot what I have planted, throughout the land. 5 Should you then seek great things for yourself? Seek them not. For I will bring disaster on all people, declares the LORD, but wherever you go I will let you escape with your life.’”
Jeremiah 18
7 If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, 8 and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. 9 And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, 10 and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.
11 “ . . . ‘This is what the LORD says: Look! I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.’ 12 But they will reply, ‘It’s no use. We will continue with our own plans; each of us will follow the stubbornness of his evil heart.’”
2 Chronicles 36
15 The LORD, the God of their fathers, sent word to them through his messengers again and again, because he had pity on his people and on his dwelling place. 16 But they mocked God’s messengers, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets until the wrath of the LORD was aroused against his people and there was no remedy.
Link for Dangerous Economic Misconceptions by By Giordano Bruno, Neithercorp Press – 09/07/2010
A Prophetic Word.....
To Those that would have the Eyes to See and the Ears to Hear, it has Become So.
The Judgement that was at the door has walked through the threshold.
The Patience of the Lord God Almighty has diminished and grown weary.
The sins of the land have poisoned the waters of America and are overflowing the banks. The waters and the rivers of America are full of the blood of the murdered unborn; they are full of iniquity, adultery and fornication...
They are full of the abomination of Sodom. The waters are polluted, the waters are polluted, the waters are polluted, they are foul.
Therefore, this Watchman declares and cries out over the land that the Judgement of The Lord Jehovah has begun, because the people of apostasy did not desire the truth, nor the Living Water of the Word of God...
prepare to see the poisoning of the water of the land; Because the ears of the sleeping have been closed to the cries of the Prophets,
prepare to hear the cries of the people as God allows them to be stripped of their earthly Idols and Possessions; Because the people of Apostasy did not desire the True Bread of Life, prepare to see the bread of man become more precious than gold.
Famine will reach the shores of America, idle hands will be replaced with hands searching for food; Because the people of Apostasy place material goods, cars and wealth over Holiness....prepare to see these people Living in their cars.
The land weary and full of iniquity will soon answer the cry from Heaven with; Famine, Earthquakes and a Tempest of Deadly Storms.
Therefore let the people of God seek shelter in the Heart of God with Repentance, Tears and Reverence.
Let the People of God seek the Wisdom of God for instruction to weather the days ahead....
This Watchman has Declared it, Let it be So. Amen
(Prophetic Word April 18th 2008)
Please forward this playlist to others and I pray that you will take this message very seriously. This Judgement has already begun and will only get worse.
Prophecy Warning to the USA, Islam and the Church
To the Nation once called of itself "Under God" (USA) and to the Sons of Ishmael ( Islam) , and to the Churches of Men . . . Hear the Word of the Lord.
3/28/07 From God The Father and Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ - A Letter Given to Timothy, For All Those Who Have Ears to Hear
[God] Timothy, you are My servant... Doubt not yourself, nor My words I shall speak to you this day. For you are delivered out of the hand of the oppressor and of even all he shall send against you. You are My prophet, and you shall endure. Even by the power of My Right Hand, I shall prosper you. You shall grow strong and proclaim My strong Word to those who are close and to those who are afar off. You shall speak to the believer and the heathen alike, and shout My proclamation and My judgement against the heathen and your enemy, Ishmael. Even My judgment against your own nation shall you proclaim in a loud voice, in all manner of speaking and devices, for your land has gone the way of the wicked and the heathen. Even Sodom and Gomorrah are revived and now thrive before My face within your own borders. Yet I hold My hand for the sake of the elect... They shall shortly be taken out of the way.
Behold, I am against you, oh nation of harlots! I had made you strong and gave you blessings beyond compare. Yet you turn your face from Me, even the One who bought you in His own blood...Beaten, scourged and mocked, even pierced for your transgressions! Yet you turn your back on Him and use His name, Even the very name I, Myself, have given Him, as a cursing! Desecration! Blasphemy!
You, oh nation not desired, you are given into the hands of your enemies, and they shall kill you and burn you with fire and tear down all your tall towers. And you shall raise your hand, in great anger and haste, and repay them double! Says the Lord of Hosts. For as you are given up, so shall they be given to you for retribution. Even DOUBLE shall you afflict them, even double shall they receive at your hand. A strong wind and dark storm, a great whirlwind shall you be in your vengeance... Yet the end is not yet. For you have those among you, who I know and see of Myself in them, I must take them... I shall surely deliver them. Then you shall fall, oh mighty nation, and great shall be your falling, for then shall rise one whom you shall fear. And all, who feared you, shall fear him; and those, who served you, you shall serve. And you will not be satisfied, and you will grumble and not sit still, but in false hope you shall rise up and meet your end... Plucked up and put underfoot by him, who is called wickedness and lying.
Churches, hear the Word of the Lord! You, also, have neither heard, nor do you listen to what the Lord speaks to His flocks. Cup your ears, and give heed. Churches of men, listen to what the Lord your God says, and give heed. You have gone your own way and corrupted My Word for your own glory. Pride is your master; greed has entered into your houses you call My house... Blasphemy! I dwell not in any church made by human hands... I dwell in the temples made by My own hands.
Oh churches of arrogance, how shall I gather you when you resist all correction, and follow after the vain babblings of men in authority, heaping to yourselves teachers, wolves in sheep’s clothing, saying that the Word of God is the way into riches and material things?... WOE! I say to you, who follow these acolytes of satan... False teachers! Soothsayers!
Desolations are coming... Great want! How, then, shall these silver coins and paper, houses made of brick and wood, save you? The riches of men shall be taken from them in a day. What, then, shall you stand upon, oh men of vanities and vain deceits? Churches, purify your robes and cast out these leaders who speak as doves and teach doctrines of devils.My children, wash your clothes and purify your house, for the Holy One comes nigh! Be not left in bitter sorrows, refinement in the heat of the Lord’s Day.
Cast away these false doctrines, stop committing fornication with the harlot. Your mother has forsaken you and serves your enemy, even satan. She shall be left utterly desolate. Repent, therefore, and come out of her, says the Lord. Take not one of her doctrines to yourself. Return to Me, abide in My Son... He is your Sanctuary from the storm. Yeshua (Jesus) is the Gift and Salvation... To Him you shall flock. His flesh shall you eat, His blood shall you drink. Live in His Word and obey My commandments.
Beloved, your nation is judged and given up... Turn to God! The Son of Man comes quickly to deliver you! Behold! You shall see the angels of Heaven ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. The sleepers shall awake... And you who are yet awake, having been fully awakened to Him, Shall be caught up with them to meet the Lord in the air, And forever shall you be with the Lord. Purify your faith, purify your worship, purify your houses... Do it now! Says the Lord God, Creator of Heaven and earth.
[Jesus] I have come, not to make peace, but war, even war in My members... The scourging of the nations, the wrath of God. The fulfillment, of all that is written, is at hand and shall progress quickly. For the sake of the elect, it shall be cut short.
Beloved of My heart, be not troubled, nor weep... These things must be. Then the end shall come, and I shall show My glory. Yea, the heavens, even the whole earth, shall be filled with My glory! I am the power of God’s Right Hand. I shall cleanse the sanctuary, restore the garden... And you shall learn war no more... NO MORE! Says the Holy One of Israel.
I died... I am risen! Amen. And so, as I died, sin has also died in those who love Me; and that which leads My people into sin shall be destroyed. I shall trample it beneath My feet, grinding it to powder, never to be seen of again, nor remembered... Carried away upon the winds of restoration, which I am... A new day begun and established atop the setting of the sun upon this age of men.
Thus has the Morning Star risen, first in the hearts of men, restoring them to glory, the writing of the Holy Law in their hearts. Now I am come, and shall arise and defend the weak and the needy, the afflicted... A great recompense, paid in full, against the wicked and the wickedness of this world. Vengeance is Mine, says the Lord! And with a sharp sword, with two edges, it shall be carried out, it shall be done.
The Morning Star is risen! The universe is filled with His glory, and that glory shall abide with men, even in them and among them. I shall be a Father unto them, and they shall be My beloved children, forever... Lo, a return to innocence. Paradise lost is paradise found, a return to the garden... The universe, your playground.
Thus have I spoken, so shall it be done. The mystery of God revealed, the counting of days no more...Forever young in the presence of your Shepherd, your Redeemer, your Father,Your Brother, your most beloved Friend...The Fulfillment of all things for which your hearts have groaned...I am the Meaning of Life. And all who live in Me, and I in them...WILL... LIVE... FOREVER .
Amen and amen.
