"The End of America: The Police State is Right Here, Right Now" by Carolyn Baker.

Hi;

Below is the Thursday, September 20, 2007 article titled "The End of America: The Police State is Right Here, Right Now" by Carolyn Baker. This article was sent to me by a friend.

Carolyn Baker makes the point very well that America has gone a long way down the road to fascism.

In paragraph 29, the sixth from last paragraph, she makes the point that I have made many times. That our society is being confronted with a variety of internal and external problems. That the inability of ruling pro-fascist faction in the capitalist class, and their fascist political elite, to find solutions to these problems will accelerate the ascendancy of fascism. This is because they must create a fascist state to maintain their power since they cannot maintain their power by solving the problems confronting our society.

Paragraph 29 reads as follows:

"Moreover, some pivotal factors that Wolf has not addressed are
global energy depletion, climate change, and global economic meltdown
which are exacerbating the fascist shift about which she so
brilliantly writes and which will continue to embolden that shift as
energy scarcity, climate chaos

, and financial crises add fuel to the fires of terrorism that the
ruling elite have so consciously and carefully incited and fanned
throughout America. As American society continues to unravel, the
fascist shift will escalate, and what is left of our civil liberties
will further evaporate."

John P. Stoltenberg, P.E.
N8362 State Highway 67
P.O. Box 596
Elkhart Lake, WI
53020-0596
920-876-2184
jpstolten@verizon.net

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE END OF AMERICA: THE POLICE STATE IS RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, By
Carolyn Baker

Thursday, 20 September 2007

As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In
both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly
unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must be aware of
change in the air-however slight-lest we become unwilling victims of
the darkness.

~Justice William O. Douglas~

In April, 2007 I was pleasantly surprised to find Naomi Wolf's
article, "Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps

" posted in several places online. I have been a fan of Wolf for many
years, greatly appreciating her works and especially her 1991 book,
The Beauty Myth. I had been looking for a list-or more specifically,
an encyclopedia of the losses of civil liberties in the United States
that might clarify for my history students the extent to which America
has become a fascist empire. Wolf's "10 Easy Steps" was perfect, but
her just-published book, The End Of America: Letter Of Warning To A
Young Patriot
, from which the 10 easy steps was compiled, offers an even fuller
picture-a succinct and engaging explanation of how our civil
liberties have been hijacked in the past decade. It is the most
poignant, powerful, genuinely patriotic piece of literature I have
encountered since Thomas Paine's Common Sense. No wonder then, that
the book's cover greatly resembles that 46-page tract by Paine
written in 1775-as well it should.

One of the most frightening realities of teaching college history is
that most students rarely have a clue what fascism is. They know about
Hitler and the extermination of Jews, but they see little connection
with Nazi rule in the 1930s and 40s and the current political milieu
in the United States. Overwhelmingly, they cannot define fascism, nor
can they define socialism or democracy. After all, they were
pre-occupied during grammar school with becoming standardized human
beings by way of taking standardized "No Child's Behind Left" tests,
five hours a day, four days a week. So why would they know the
definitions of fascism, socialism or democracy?

Refreshingly, Wolf is not shy about using the term fascism and lets
the reader know why. "I have made a deliberate choice in using the
terms fascist tactics and fascist shift when I describe some events
in America now. I stand by my choice. I am not being heated or even
rhetorical; I am being technical." (20) She explains that where
Americans tend to see the various political "isms" as all-or-nothing,
that perception is often inaccurate because of what she calls a "range
of authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, and varieties of Fascist
states...there are many shades of gray on the spectrum from an open
to a closed society." (20)

Wolf also emphasizes that America has flirted with fascism openly in
the 1930s when numerous corporations and robber barons helped finance
Hitler and when as Edwin Black notes in IBM And The Holocaust

, some American corporations assisted the Nazi regime in carrying out
its "final solution" to the "Jewish problem." In fact, several of
these corporate tycoons attempted to stage a coup d' etat

to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and restructure the American
government under fascist control. A thorough investigation of American
politics and society from the end of the Civil War until the present
moment reveals, as I have carefully traced in my book U.S. History
Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You, that much
of recent American history is replete with a preference on the part of
corporations and the politicians they own for an economic and
political system on the far right end of the spectrum. In fact,
resistance to fascism in the United States has been an arduous and
daunting struggle for those who have been able to understand and
oppose the appeal that fascism has to the corporatocracy, and in
fact, take seriously Mussolini's fundamental definition of fascism:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power."

As an historian who views American history as the complex unfolding
of events that it is, I feel invigorated upon hearing someone like
Wolf-especially the Wolf of feminist Beauty Myth fame-part company
with the presentation of the Founders as "dead white men" inwardly
tormented by various hypocrisies, such as the ownership of slaves and
the subordination of women. Yes, Jefferson owned slaves and fathered
six children by one of them, but what gets lost in that drama and
other colorful stories of the Founders is that they were also
thinking, speaking, and writing highly subversive thoughts. "You are
not taught," says Wolf, that "these men and women were radicals for
liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the
face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging,
God-given order of nations; and that they were wiling to die to make
that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they
would never live to see." (27) I do not wish to romanticize the
Founders and their generation living in a milieu replete with racism,
misogyny, and classism, but neither will I throw their achievements
out with the bathwater of political correctness, nor is Wolf willing
to do so in her examination of them.

In the "10 easy steps" outlined by Wolf, countries move from open to
closed and repressive societies by devolving past certain markers, and
Wolf makes a powerful case for the way in which the United States is
following a similar pattern without any significant deviation. In
each instance she compares and contrasts how America's adherence to
the pattern compares or contrasts with the pattern in pre-World War
II Germany. The 10 steps are:

Invoking an external and internal threat

Establishing secret prisons

Developing a paramilitary force

Surveiling ordinary citizens

Infiltrating citizens' groups

Arbitrarily detaining and releasing citizens

Targeting key individuals

Restricting the press

Casting criticism as "espionage" and dissent as "treason"

Subverting the rule of law

As noted in the quote from Justice Douglas above, the fascist shift
is a protracted process; it never happens overnight, and in U.S.
History Uncensored, I offer an historical narrative describing
exactly how we have arrived where we are-at "the end of America".
Some aspects of the process were generated before the U.S. Civil War,
but our recent history is nothing less than the story of the
acceleration of the fascist agenda and the death of the Republic.

Frequently, books come into our lives with momentous timing. Several
weeks ago a friend of mine was traveling through a small town in
upstate New York looking for the location of a meeting he was
scheduled to attend. Realizing that he was lost, he spotted a police
officer in a marked car and waived to the officer to pull over. The
officer pulled over, and my friend innocently got out of his car to
walk back to the officer's car. Suddenly, the officer's voice came
blasting across a loud speaker, "Get back in the car! Stop where you
are! Get back in the car!" My friend returned to his vehicle and
waited for the officer to approach his driver's side window. The
officer, with a hand on his holstered firearm, angrily asked my
friend what he wanted. When my friend asked him for directions, he
replied with hostility that he didn't know the location of the place
for which my friend was searching and once again repeated, "Never get
out of your car when you're dealing with a police officer." So much
for asking directions from a police officer these days.

On another occasion, two friends of mine returning from Canada were
detained at the U.S./Canadian border, and while one of them had a
U.S. passport, the other had forgotten to bring his. He produced a
variety of identification but was taken aside, questioned, shouted
at, and harassed in an extremely hostile manner as if he were an
enemy of the state. Fortunately, after over-the-top intimidation from
a couple of surly customs officers, he was allowed to enter the U.S.

About three weeks ago I was returning from a routine visit to the
dentist in Mexico and had a U.S. passport with me, even though none
will be required for returning from Mexico until January, 2008. I was
told by a very aggressive female customs agent to pull over to the
center where vehicles are detained. I was ordered in a very hostile
manner to give her my driver's license and the keys to my vehicle and
stay in my vehicle. When I asked what the problem was, I was told to
be quiet and again, to stay in my vehicle. Having taught in Mexico
for three years, returning to the U.S. every day and rarely having to
show any identification whatsoever, I found this procedure to be
astonishingly rigid and unnecessary. I have made many trips to Mexico
in recent months and have never had any problem when the automatic
photos that are taken of every license plate crossing the border
appeared on U.S. Customs computer screens.

After what seemed like an eternity the female officer returned and
told me that it appeared that I had had an expired vehicle
registration four years ago which I had not taken care of and that I
needed to do so at once. She gave me the name of the court where the
offense was allegedly registered. The very next day I contacted the
court and discovered that indeed I had been stopped four years ago
for an expired registration for which I was given a warning. Every
year since, I have purchased my annual registration well before the
deadline, but the offense was never brought to my attention, and I
even acquired a new driver's license last year through the motor
vehicles division and was not informed of the offense. Not wanting
any further hassle regarding the "heinous crime" of having an expired
registration four years ago, I agreed to pay the small fine imposed by
the court.

Some readers may assume that I was harassed because of who I am and
my open delivery of alternative news and opinions on this website
daily. I, on the other hand, do not believe that this was "all about
me." Whether or not it was, it is blatantly obvious to me that the
behavior of law enforcement in the United States has shifted
dramatically in recent months. Whether or not I was targeted, which I
sincerely doubt, this kind of treatment is becoming standard in law
enforcement procedure throughout the United States.

And now fast-forward to yesterday, September 18, 2007, at Florida
State University and the tasering of a student questioning John Kerry
regarding the 2004 elections and Kerry's membership in Skull and
Bones-an incident which has been viewed by millions on the internet
and on mainstream TV news broadcasts. Writing of this debacle, Wolf's
article "A Shocking Moment For Society

" appeared on various internet sites this morning, and in it she
states:

There is a chapter in my new book, The End of America

, entitled "Recast Criticism as Espionage' and Dissent as
Treason,'" that conveys why this moment is the horrific harbinger it
is. I argue that strategists using historical models to close down an
open society start by using force on undesirables,' aliens,'
enemies of the state,' and those considered by mainstream civil
society to be untouchable; in other times they were, of course, Jews,
Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals. Then, once society has been
acculturated to that use of force, the blurring of the line' begins
and the parameters of criminalized speech are extended - the
definition of terrorist' expanded - and the use of force begins to
be deployed in HIGHLY VISIBLE, STRATEGIC and VISUALLY SHOCKING WAYS
against people that others see and identify with as ordinary
citizens. The first torture cellars' used by the SA, in Germany
between 1931 and 1933 - even before the National Socialists gained
control of the state, during the years when Germany was still a
parliamentary democracy - were informal and widely publicized in the
mainstream media. Few German citizens objected because those abused
there were seen as other' - even though the abuse was technically
illegal. But then, after this escalation of the use of force was
accepted by the population, students, journalists, opposition
leaders, and clergy were similarly abused during their own arrests.
Within six months dissent was stilled in Germany.[emphasis below by DM]

What is the lesson for us from this and from other closing
societies, some of them democracies? You can have a working Congress
or Parliament; newspapers; human rights groups; even elections; but
when ordinary people start to be hurt by the state for speaking out,
dissent closes quickly and the shock chills opposition very, very
fast. Once that happens, democracy has been so weakened that major
tactical and strategic incursions - greater violations of democratic
process - are far more likely. If there is dissent about the vote in
Florida in this next presidential election - and the police are
tasering voters' rights groups - we will still have an election.

What we will not have is liberty.

We have to understand what time it is. When the state starts to hurt
people for asking questions, we can no longer operate on the leisurely
time of a strong democracy - the Oh gosh how awful!' kind of time. It
is time to take to the streets. It is time to confront those
committing crimes against the Constitution. The window has now
dropped several precipitous inches and once it is closed there is no
opening it without great and sorrowful upheaval.

As I read Wolf's latest article, I realized that despite my enormous
admiration for her and The End Of America, there are a number of areas
where I must disagree with her.

First, the only thing shocking to me about the University of Florida
incident is that so many Americans are shocked that it happened. Last
night I posted a communication

to her mailing list regarding the incident from former Congresswoman
Cynthia McKinney who says:

No police officer should be in the business of denying
Constitutional rights to anyone; I am particularly chagrined when it
appears that a black police officer participated in this attack on an
innocent student.

What is happening to us???? How much more will the people accept?? I
was outraged as early as 2000 when Florida was stolen and the
Democrats said nothing!!!! Now, innocent students get tasered just
for asking questions.

What kind of US Senator do we have who can't or won't answer a
question about his own election that affects all of us???

Wolf has given us a compendium of civil and Constitutional rights
stolen from us during the past eight years of the Bush
administration. If one understands this odyssey of oppression, then
yesterday's tasering of a questioning student makes perfect sense. I
appreciate why Wolf used the word "shocking" in her most recent
article, but I'd be willing to bet that she isn't shocked at all-not
after the extraordinary documentation she has given us in The End Of
America. What I do believe she wishes to clarify is the intentionally
traumatizing methodology of law enforcement to maintain social
control.

Secondly, I must take issue with Wolf regarding her statement that
"...we on the left must snap out of our
it's-all-the-WTO-the-two-parties-are-the-same' torpor...We have to
reengage in an old-fashioned commitment to democratic action and
believe once again in an old-fashioned notion of the Republic. We
need to help lead a democracy movement in America like the ones that
have toppled repressive regimes overseas." (141)

Again, let's fast forward not to yesterday, but today and the
headline "Senate bars bill to restore detainee rights

"-a decision which supports the Bush administration's denial of
habeas corpus to Guantanamo prisoners who want to challenge their
imprisonment in court. Need we reiterate one more time that since the
2006 elections, the Democrats have done virtually nothing to end the
occupation of Iraq? Need we watch the video one more time of John
Kerry standing mute and statue-like on the University of Florida
auditorium stage-saying or doing nothing as a student was tasered for
asking him why he handed the 2004 election to George W. Bush? Does
anyone seriously believe that in a world where fellow students
applaud as police remove and taser a questioning student and do
nothing to speak up against such an outrage that we will see a
viable, effective "democracy movement in America like the ones that
have toppled repressive regimes overseas"?

As for Wolf's suggestion in today's article that we "take to the
streets", the police state is preparing for that eventuality as well
by letting us know that it has developed severely injuring
electromagnetic crowd control technology

that will dramatically limit how many and how often people can "take
to the streets." Welcome to full-spectrum "1984".

I repeat: the police state is right here, right now!

Moreover, some pivotal factors that Wolf has not addressed are
global energy depletion, climate change, and global economic meltdown
which are exacerbating the fascist shift about which she so
brilliantly writes and which will continue to embolden that shift as
energy scarcity, climate chaos

, and financial crises add fuel to the fires of terrorism that the
ruling elite have so consciously and carefully incited and fanned
throughout America. As American society continues to unravel, the
fascist shift will escalate, and what is left of our civil liberties
will further evaporate.

As for political parties, I prefer the definition offered by Mike
Ruppert in "America: From Freedom To Fascism

" in which he explains that the two major parties are like two crime
families-the Genoveses and the Gambinos. They function like players
in a crap game that feign opposition to each other, but when the
chips are down, they will always unite to serve their common
interests. (If the Iraq occupation is not a case in point, then I
don't know what is.) When we vote in presidential elections for
corporately-owned candidates or "the lesser evil", we are merely
choosing between the two crime families, and even if one candidate
were not a crime family member, our votes in the past two
presidential elections, as Bev Harris has so astutely demonstrated

, have been hacked. In the throes of the current, and I might add,
rapidly-accelerating fascist shift, what evidence do we have for
assuming that if there is an election in 2008, anything will be
different? Tell me again, what's the definition of insanity?

At this moment another Naomi comes to mind-Naomi Klein whose book
Shock Doctrine
I shall soon review on this site. In that work Klein documents one
of the key strategies of fascist empires: shocking their citizens
into submission in a variety of ways from widespread societal
terrorism to the administering of electroshock therapy to
individuals. What we witnessed at the University of Florida
yesterday, and what we are likely to see more frequently in America,
are deliberate shock tactics applied by law enforcement to citizens
for the purpose of achieving massive social control.

Some of my students who are criminal justice majors tell me that the
latest strategies now being taught to police officers are "shock
doctrine" techniques which terrorize and intimidate civilians in
order to control them. Law enforcement officers are no longer
encouraged to "keep a cool head" but to "follow their own instincts"
(which usually means their own internal, adrenaline-charged state of
terror) and react with full force because it's easier to apologize
(or encounter a lawsuit) than to ask permission or risk being killed.
Terrified people should not be wearing a badge and carrying a gun, and
when they are, a fully terrorized society is guaranteed.

In spite of my disagreements with Naomi Wolf's suggested solutions,
I cannot recommend The End Of America enthusiastically enough. It is
now a permanent part of my U.S. history curriculum and is an ideal
tool not only for educators, but for parents who want to teach their
children where all those civil liberties we used to have actually
came from as well as how and why they are disappearing in the present
moment.

Last Updated ( Thursday, 20 September 2007 )

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