Fascist America in Ten Easy Steps
From the Guardian U.K.
The recipe for creating a military dictatorship is quite well known to students of history. Naomi Wolf revisits this recipe in the context of our current civic predicament.
I don't know--some people, particularly those who are averse to 'thinking things through' take to fascism quite easily. If you are someone who instinctively reaches for your revolver every time someone mentions the word 'culture', then you would probably thrive in the 'new order'.
But the rest of us, accustomed to freedom of thought, and the right to petition the authorities over grieviences, well, who knows, maybe we are an endangered species.
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See also the Sinclair Lewis classic It Can't Happen Here and the chilling historical study by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. Hitler's Thirty Days to Power: January 1933
While it is entirely conceivable to me that racism deliberately fomented may yet be an essential factor that enables McCain/Palin to pull this election out, we are not looking at any possibility of a McCain/Palin Administration doing to African Americans anything like what was done to Jews, gays, and Gypsies in 1930s and 1940s Germany.
The realistic dangers we face have to do, instead, with a continued gradual deterioration of living standards for the non-affluent under an ideologically right-wing government that rigs elections, suppresses dissent, strips away our liberties, and scapegoats vulnerable "others" in lieu of using the government energetically and creatively to ameliorate large-scale suffering--each of these tendencies magnified and intensified in the event of another major terrorist attack or some other large shock to the system.
October 17, 2008 11:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
I pretty much agree with your assessment. My fear is not the scapegoating of minorities, but the stifling of dissent, the ant-intellectualism, and the tolerance of intimidation as a political tactic--you know, your basic authoritarian dictatorship, more along the lines of the Chinese model.
I've read the Lewis classic but not Turner's 30 days, although I have heard of it. I will have to check it out, now.
October 17, 2008 11:42 AM | Reply | Permalink