OMNI
NEWSLETTER ON FASCISM USA
Compiled by Dick Bennett
for a Culture of Peace and Justice (#1
Jan. 10, 2012)
Reluctantly,
more and more watchers of US politics have concluded that fascism (variously
defined with a small “f”) is spreading and deepening and can happen, can gain
full control of the US. This
possibility should be a major focus of attention in our politics, education,
and media before control of information becomes too extreme to reverse.
Newsletters
Index:
See: CIA, Democracy, Imperialism, NSA, Patriot Act, War on/of
Terrorism, more
Contents Fascism Can Happen Here
Newsletter #2
Thom
Hartmann: Henry Wallace on US Fascism
1944
Howard Zinn
Interview
Noam Chomsky
Interview
Cockburn,
Fascism USA
Juan Cole, Creeping
Fascism
Jonathan Schell , US
Surveillance State
Lisa Graves, NSA
From Nixon to Obama
Martial Law
Detention List Prepared
Mussolini,
Definition of Fascism
Larson, Rise of
Nazis in Germany
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Published on Monday, July 19, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
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The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen
Here"
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by Thom Hartmann
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The Republican National Committee has
recently removed from the top-level pages of their website an advertisement
interspersing Hitler's face with those of John Kerry and other prominent
Democrats. This little-heralded step has freed former Enron lobbyist and
current RNC chairman Ed Gillespie to resume his attacks on Americans who
believe some provisions of Bush's PATRIOT Act, his detention of American
citizens without charges, his willingness to let corporations write
legislation, and the so-called "Free Speech Zones" around his
public appearances are all steps on the road to American fascism.
The RNC's feeble attempt to equate
Hitler and Democrats was short-lived, but it brings to mind the first
American Vice President to point out the "American fascists" among
us.
Although most Americans remember that
Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died
in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents
- John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early 1944,
the New York Times asked Vice
President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering
the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How
dangerous are they?"
Vice President Wallace's answer to
those questions was published in The New
York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis
powers of
"The really dangerous American
fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly
or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous
American fascist is the man who wants to do in the
In this, Wallace was using the
classic definition of the word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini
had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually
Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia
Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called
corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for
it.)
As the 1983 American Heritage
Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a
dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and
business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Mussolini was quite straightforward
about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism"
he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells
government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People -
instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate
interests in the nation.
In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision
of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it
with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of
the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now
instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Tom DeLay and covertly
write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.
Vice President Wallace bluntly laid
out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in
" If we
define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and
power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million
fascists in the
Nonetheless, at that time there were
few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace's view,
most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The
People instead of corporate cartels. "American fascism will not be
really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is
a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of
public information..."
Noting that, "Fascism is a
worldwide disease," Wallace further suggest that fascism's
"greatest threat to the
In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel
"It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is
helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The
politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and
patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional
American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens
a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book,
As Lewis noted in his novel,
"the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There
are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any
party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea
of the Corporate or
Lewis, the first American writer to
win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't
Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including
Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by
" Still
another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy
and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power
which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed
to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of
this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before
the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the
present unpleasantness' ceases."
Fascists have an agenda that is
primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary (www.thefreedictionary.com) notes,
fascism/corporatism is "an attempt to create a 'modern' version of
feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state."
Feudalism, of course, is one of the
most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies,
feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican
democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the rich."
Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich
get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class,
an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in his new book
"What's The Matter With Kansas" that, "You can see the paradox
first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America - 'going out of
business' signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush."
The businesses "going out of
business" are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally
owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big
business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to
gain some temporary advantage." He added, "Monopolists who fear
competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal
opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic
enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any
rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."
But American fascists who would want
former CEOs as President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and Senate
Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind,
don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it
does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the
trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin
with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.
In a comment prescient of George W.
Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays,
Wallace continued:
" The
symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to
immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by
their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and
vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that
the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of
prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that,
without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they
preach discrimination..."
But even at this, Wallace noted,
American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power.
And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who
could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote
their lies with ease.
"The American fascists are most
easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,"
Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate
every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.
They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."
In his strongest indictment of the
tide of fascism the Vice President of the
Finally, Wallace said, "The myth
of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush
fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed
and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and
dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and
deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in
the form of monopolies and cartels."
This liberal vision of an egalitarian
America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up
under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing,
leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day)
was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy
Roosevelt a generation earlier).
As Wallace's President, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in
Speaking indirectly of the fascists
that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the
issue to its core: "These economic royalists complain that we seek to
overthrow the institutions of
But, he thundered in that speech,
"Our allegiance to American institutions requires the
overthrow of this kind of power!"
In 2004, we again stand at the same
crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and
World War II. Fascism is again rising in
It's particularly ironic that the
CEOs and lobbyists who run the Republican National Committee would have
chosen to put Hitler's fascist face into one of their campaign commercials,
just before they launched a national campaign against gays and while they
continue to arrest people who wear anti-Bush T-shirts in public places.
President Roosevelt and Vice
President Wallace's warnings have come full circle. Which is why it's so
critical that this November we join together at the ballot box to stop this
most recent incarnation of feudal fascism from seizing complete control of
our nation.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com)
is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a
nationally syndicated daily progressive talk radio show. www.thomhartmann.com. His
most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient
Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of
Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," and
"We The People: A Call To Take
Back America." His new book, "What Would Jefferson Do?: A
Return To Democracy," based on four years of research in
HOWARD ZINN AND NOAM CHOMSKY LIVE
Here are
videos of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky talking about fascism : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHNwhDPY7iE&sns=fb
And
Chomsky: http://www.progressive.org/wx041210.html
From Abel T
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Alexander
Cockburn
Who are the real fascists: Marine Le Pen - or the United States
Americans worry about the rise of
extremism in Europe, but they aren't overly concerned by their own
'proto-fascist' country
Column LAST UPDATED AT 07:19 ON Thu 3 May 2012
Recent columns
AMERICAN
discussions of Europe swivel between
rationality and hysteria. A discussion of Europe's awful unemployment figures
and swelling mutiny against austerity suddenly mutates into tremulous wails
about the menace of fascism in France, rancid racism in the Netherlands, the
anti-Semitic beast unchained in Germany (in the terrifying form of Günter
Grass's new poem).
A lot of this
has to do with Marine Le Pen, leader of France
Marine Le Pen
is a nationalist politician, quite reasonably exploiting the intense social
discontent in France
Anti-Semitism?
Diana Johnstone, an excellent journalist who has been reporting from France
Marine Le Pen
certainly has made some unsavoury comments about immigrants and Islamisation.
But she has gone to the heart of the matter, asserting that monetary union
cannot be fudged, that it is incompatible with the French nation-state. She has
won 18 per cent of the vote by campaigning to pull France
It's true, things
could get ugly. Europe 's politics are being
refashioned before our eyes. Greece Spain Germany
was heavily indebted to foreigners in 1930, like Spain Germany
But there's another aspect to this habit of
flinging the charge of fascism at Europe , and
that's the simple matter of national hypocrisy. The mobs who flooded into the streets to revel in the execution of Osama
bin Laden a year ago were not exulting in America United States
Fascism, among other
things, is a system of extreme, methodical state repression, violent in contour
and threat, buttressed by ultra-nationalist mythology, a militarist culture and
imperial ambition. In the 1980s America New York City US
Fascist
regimes, ultimately the expression of corporate power, repress labour in all
efforts to organise. The onslaught here began with Taft-Hartley in 1947 and
continued with methodical ferocity during the Reagan and Clinton years. Obama
reneged on pledges to make organising easier, froze the wages of federal
workers and advanced free trade across the globe. Attacks on collective
bargaining are pervasive. Big money's grip on both parties ensures corporate
control no matter who's nominally in charge. Fascist regimes show open contempt
for democracy while deifying a leader who embodies the national spirit. We
salute democracy while suppressing it.
A fascist
regime is the sworn foe of the right to assembly, 'unauthorised' marches and
encampments. We're sure to see more signs of this around the Nato summit and the
national conventions. America
A fascist regime spies obsessively on its citizens. Study US laws on secret surveillance since the Patriot Act and you will find procedures that would have been the envy of the East Germans.
A fascist regime spies obsessively on its citizens. Study US laws on secret surveillance since the Patriot Act and you will find procedures that would have been the envy of the East Germans.
Ultimately a
fascist state claims the right to imprison its victims without term or hope of
redress or legal representation. As the executive power, in the form of the
president, it claims the right to kill its enemies, whether citizens (Awlaki)
or others (Guantánamo), without judicial review. In other words, rule by decree
- which is what Hitler's Enabling Act
won him in March 1933.
We live in a fascist country - 'proto-fascist' if you want to allay public disquiet, though there's
scant sign that most Americans are disturbed by the trends. So quit beating up
on Europe . ·
Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/us/46625/who-are-real-fascists-marine-le-pen-or-united-states#ixzz1uJzOW3OR
[Dick: This essay also appeared in The Nation entitled “So Who’s the
Fascist Here?” (May 21, 2012). See the
four letters in response June 18, 2012.]
GOP CONGRESS AUTHORIZES LYING TO PUBLIC
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Will get vetoed--but that
they tried to do it shows where the Repubs are headed.
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Juan Cole, “The Creeping
Fascism of American Politics”
Informed
Comment
A bipartisan amendment introduced by Rep. Mac Thornberry and Rep. Adam Smith would allow the Department of Defense to utilize propaganda. (image: Telegraph
The Creeping Fascism of American Politics
wo congressmen are attempting to insert a
provision in the National Defense Authorization act that would allow the Department of Defense to subject the US
domestic public to propaganda. The bipartisan amendment was introduced by
Rep. Mac Thornberry from
Nothing speaks more urgently to the
creeping fascism of American politics than the assertion by our
representatives, who apparently have never read a book on Germany in the 1930s-1940s
or on the Soviet Union in the Stalin period, that forbidding DoD and the State
Department from subjecting us to government propaganda "ties the hands of
America's diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability
to effectively communicate in a credible way." And mind you, they want to
use our own money to wash our brains!
As Will Rogers observed, "This
country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby
gets hold of a hammer."
I love our guys and gals in uniform,
but they can be extremely obnoxious in any discussion about US Washington
Of course, having a Pentagon
propaganda unit at all is highly anti-democratic. The best defense of the truth
is a free press. It should also be remembered that nowadays everything in Washington
Doing propaganda abroad has the difficulty
that it doesn't stay abroad. False articles placed in the Arabic press in Iraq
Then, another problem is that the
Defense Intelligence Agency analysts *also* read the false articles placed in
the Arabic press by *another* Pentagon office, which they did not know about.
So the analysts were passing up to the White House false information provided
by their own colleagues!
I was told by an insider that one
reason Washington analysts often read my blog in the Bush years was that I had
a reputation for having an accurate bull crap meter, and thus my judgments on
what was likely to be true helped them fight the tendency to believe our own
propaganda!
Not only should this amendment be
gotten rid of quick, but their constituents should please vote out of office
Reps. Thornberry and Smith next November.
Zombie Politics, Democracy, and the Threat
of Authoritarianism - Part I
Wednesday, 01 June 2011 09:41
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/1355:zombie-politics-democracy-and-the-threat-of-authoritarianism--part-i
(Image: Peter Lang)
The Rise of
Zombie Politics
In the world of
popular culture, zombies seem to be everywhere, as evidenced by the relentless
slew of books, movies, video games, and comics. From the haunting Night of the
Living Dead to the comic movie Zombieland, the figure of the zombie has
captured and touched something unique in the contemporary imagination. But the
dark and terrifying image of the zombie with missing body parts, oozing body
fluids, and an appetite for fresh, living, human brains does more than feed the
mass-marketing machines that prey on the spectacle of the violent, grotesque,
and ethically comatose. There is more at work in this wave of fascination with
the grotesquely walking hyper-dead than a Hollywood
appropriation of the dark recesses and unrestrained urges of the human mind.
The zombie phenomenon is now on display nightly on television alongside endless
examples of destruction unfolding in real-time. Such a cultural fascination
with proliferating images of the living hyper-dead and unrelenting human
catastrophes that extend from a global economic meltdown to the earthquake in
Haiti to the ecological disaster caused by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico
signals a shift away from the hope that accompanies the living to a politics of
cynicism and despair. The macabre double movement between “the dead that walk”[2] and
those who are alive but are dying and suffering cannot be understood outside of
the casino capitalism that now shapes every aspect of society in its own image.
A casino capitalist zombie politics views competition as a form of social
combat, celebrates war as an extension of politics, and legitimates a ruthless
Social Darwinism in which particular individuals and groups are considered
simply redundant, disposable—nothing more than human waste left to stew in
their own misfortune—easy prey for the zombies who have a ravenous appetite for
chaos and revel in apocalyptic visions filled with destruction, decay,
abandoned houses, burned-out cars, gutted landscapes, and trashed gas stations.
The
twenty-first-century zombies no longer emerge from the grave; they now inhabit
the rich environs of Wall Street and roam the halls of the gilded monuments of
greed such as Goldman Sachs. As an editorial in The New York Times points out,
the new zombies of free-market fundamentalism turned “the financial system into
a casino. Like gambling, the transactions mostly just shifted paper money
around the globe. Unlike gambling, they packed an enormous capacity for
collective and economic destruction—hobbling banks that made bad bets, freezing
credit and economic activity. Society—not the bankers—bore the cost.”[3] In
this way, the zombie— the immoral, sub-Nietzschean, id-driven “other” who is
“hyper-dead” but still alive as an avatar of death and cruelty—provides an apt
metaphor for a new kind of authoritarianism that has a grip on contemporary
politics in the United
States
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/1355:zombie-politics-democracy-and-the-threat-of-authoritarianism--part-
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV
Network Chair Professorship at McMaster
University
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By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed
By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed
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America 's Surveillance Net - TheNation
Jonathan
Schell - TheNation
June 19, 2013 | This article appeared in the July 8-15, 2013 edition of The Nation.
June 19, 2013 | This article appeared in the July 8-15, 2013 edition of The Nation.
There is a revolution afoot—one that is being carried out by the government against the fundamental law of the land.
http://www.thenation.com/article/174889/americas-surveillance-net#axzz2XBLcJHyq
A school of fish swims peacefully in the ocean. Out of sight, a net is spread beneath it. At the edges of the net is a circle of fishing boats. Suddenly, the fishermen yank up the edges of the net, and in an instant the calm, open ocean becomes a boiling caldron, an exitless, rapidly shrinking prison in which the fish thrash in vain for freedom and life.
Increasingly, the American people are like this school of fish in the moments before the net is pulled up. The net in question is of course the Internet and associated instruments of data collection, and the fishermen are corporations and the government. That is, to use the more common metaphor, we have come to live alongside the machinery of a turnkey tyranny. As we now know, thanks to the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency has been secretly ordering Verizon to sweep up and hand over all the metadata from the phone calls of millions of its customers: phone numbers, duration of calls, routing information and sometimes the location of the callers. Thanks to Snowden, we also know that unknown volumes of like information are being extracted from Internet and computer companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.
The first thing to note about these data is that a mere generation ago, they did not exist. They are a new power in our midst, flowing from new technology, waiting to be picked up; and power, as always, creates temptation, especially for the already powerful. Our cellphones track our whereabouts. Our communications pass through centralized servers and are saved and kept for a potential eternity in storage banks, from which they can be recovered and examined. Our purchases and contacts and illnesses and entertainments are tracked and agglomerated. If we are arrested, even our DNA can be taken and stored by the state. Today, alongside each one of us, there exists a second, electronic self, created in part by us, in part by others. This other self has become de facto public property, owned chiefly by immense data-crunching corporations, which use it for commercial purposes. Now government is reaching its hand into those corporations for its own purposes, creating a brand-new domain of the state-corporate complex.
Surveillance of people on this scale turns basic liberties—above all the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against unreasonable search and seizure—into a dead letter. Government officials, it is true, assure us that they will never pull the edges of the net tight. They tell us that although they could know everything about us, they won’t decide to. They’ll let the information sit unexamined in the electronic vaults. But history, whether of our country or others, teaches that only a fool would place faith in such assurances. What one president refrains from doing the next will do; what is left undone in peacetime is done when a crisis comes.
The executive branch offers a similar assurance about its claimed right to kill American and foreign citizens at its sole discretion. But to accept such assurances as the guarantee of basic liberties would be to throw away bedrock principles of our constitutional order. If there is any single political idea that deserves to be called quintessentially American, it is the principle that government power must be balanced and checked by other government power, which is why federal power is balanced by state power and is itself divided into three branches.
The officials—most notably President Obama—have assured us that this system is intact, that the surveillance programs are “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government,” in Obama’s words. But the briefest examination of the record rebuts the claim. In this matter, the interactions of the three branches are a cause not for reassurance but for deeper alarm. It’s not that the legislative and judicial branches are not involved; it’s that each, in its own way, has abandoned its appointed constitutional role.
The
story arguably begins with George W.
Bush’s end run around the legal system after the terrorist attacks of 2001,
when, in complete disregard of the law, he initiated warrantless domestic
surveillance by the NSA. So clearly illegal and extreme was this program that
high-ranking officials of his administration, including James Comey, deputy
attorney general, and Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, threatened to
resign. Bush backed off some of the measures, and the confrontation did not
become known until much later.
What
happened then? Did Congress check
this executive usurpation? Did it castigate Bush, forbid the crimes, hold his
officials accountable? It did not. It adopted the worst features of the Bush
program as law, in the Protect America Act of 2007 and the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008; it also immunized from legal repercussions
corporations that had secretly knuckled under to Bush’s wrongdoing. Far from
correcting the abuses, Congress institutionalized them. At the same time, it
supported the executive branch’s cloak of secrecy over those abuses and the
classification of the legal opinions of the FISA court, whose rulings have
given legal protection to the new surveillance programs. The Obama
administration’s legal opinions on the practices are also classified.
As for
the judicial branch, it happens that
in 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that the sort of metadata collected from
Verizon is not covered by the Fourth Amendment. (In fairness, there is no sign
that the Court anticipated or meant to approve the sort of indiscriminate
dragnet of metadata now under way. Thus, a lawsuit recently brought by the ACLU
to stop this has a chance of succeeding.) The FISA court almost never refuses
government requests. James Bamford, an expert on NSA surveillance, has
characterized this institution as “a super hush-hush surveillance court that is
virtually impotent.”
Our system of checks and balances
has gone into reverse. The three branches, far from checking one another’s power or protecting
the rights of Americans, entered one after another into collusion to violate
them, even to the extent of immunizing the wrongdoers. Balanced, checked power
has become fused power—exactly what the founders of this country feared above
all else. The political parties have been no more useful as checks than the
branches of government; their leaderships stand together protecting the abuses,
though individual senators, including Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, have proposed
sensible reforms.
Finally,
even elections have proven
ineffective: the voters chose a president who taught constitutional law running
on a platform of stopping civil liberties abuses; but he has become the author
of new abuses. Even now, his soothing demeanor and reputation for liberalism
(“Change we can believe in”) confuses and thwarts those who otherwise would be
reacting with anger.
What should Americans do when all official channels are unresponsive
or dysfunctional? Are we, as people used to say, in a revolutionary situation?
Shall we man the barricades? The situation is a little more peculiar than that.
There is a revolution afoot, but it is
not one in the streets; it is one that is being carried out by the government
against the fundamental law of the land. That this insurrection against the constitutional order by officials sworn to
uphold it includes legal opinions and legislation only makes it the more
radical and dangerous. In other words, the government is in stealthy
insurrection against the letter and the spirit of the law.
What’s
needed is counterrevolution—an American restoration, returning to and
reaffirming the principles on which the Republic was founded. Edward Snowden,
for one, knew what to do. He saw that when government as a whole goes rogue,
the only force with a chance of bringing it back into line is the public. He has helped make this
possible by letting the public know the abuses that are being carried out in
its name. Civil disobedients are of two kinds: those inspired by universal
principles, and those inspired by national traditions. Each has its strengths. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is the
first kind; Snowden, the second. Asked why he had done what he did, Snowden replied, “I am neither traitor
nor hero. I am an American.” He based his actions on the finest traditions of
this country, which its current leaders have abandoned but which, he hopes, the
current generation of Americans still share. In the weeks and months ahead,
we’ll find out whether he was right.
Jonathan Schell
Read more: America's Surveillance Net | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/article/174889/americas-surveillance-net#ixzz2YBGEu6yK
(Illustration by Rachel
K Dooley)
FEATURES » OCTOBER 17, 2013
Return to Nixonland:
How the NSA slipped its leash under Bush and Obama.
Each time we give up a bit of information about ourselves
to the Government, we give up some of our freedom. For the more the Government
or any institution knows about us, the more power it has over us.
The documents leaked by Edward
Snowden and published by the Guardian and
other outlets confirm what privacy advocates have been saying for years: The
government has secretly turned its most powerful weapons of foreign
intelligence surveillance inward on millions of Americans.
How can an ordinary citizen cut through the brush—with the avalanche of
complicated, classified materials released, the flurry of political
finger-pointing, and the various denials and narrowly crafted dodges? Welcome
to a guided tour of the National Security Agency (NSA) scandal. We’ll explore
how we got here and what Nixon’s got to do with it.
Who? Me?
The NSA has rebuffed demands by some in Congress for an estimate of
the number of Americans whose information has been gathered, stored and
searched, but the math is simple. Unless you are a child, a Luddite or a hermit
who has never dialed a phone or used the Internet, records of your phone calls
and online interactions have been captured by the NSA.
This includes your number and everyone you dial or text, plus how of-
ten and how long you talk, as well as your location—although the NSA has
claimed it doesn’t actually use the location data. In other words, the NSA has
the fact of all your calls with your friends, family, lover(s), bank(s) and
doctors’ offices for whatever ails you, along with calls to psychic hotlines or
phone sex workers, if that’s your thing. The number of innocent Americans
affected: at least 260 million.
That’s not all. For nearly a decade, the NSA was gathering records about
Americans’ “Internet transactions,” including “metadata” such as the “to, from,
cc and bcc lines of a standard email,” when your email was sent and opened,
your IP address and location, and an array of data about you as you search the
Internet, and interact with friends and strangers through social media. That
program is no longer authorized by a secret court in Washington , D.C.
Even that’s not all. Though the NSA has emphasized that it does not
obtain the “contents” of your calls or emails through this program, the
government has decided that the contents of all international phone calls and
emails “to or from” Americans and others abroad are fair game for acquisition
by the NSA without a warrant. At least 40 million American citizens travel
internationally each year, and America
And there’s more. Newly declassified documents prove that countless purely “domestic”
conversations between innocent Americans here in the United States
Additionally, the affidavits in lawsuits filed in 2006 by the Electronic
Frontier Foundation present evidence that shortly after 9/11 the NSA installed
“NARUS” devices at AT&T’s main transmission station in San Francisco and at
other telecommunications hubs across the country. Those devices are designed to
make a duplicate of the communications stream (content and data) as it passes
through the system at the speed of light.
Accordingly, such devices can give the NSA access to all American
domestic and international phone calls and Internet activity that travel
through AT&T, which provides the backbone of the communications system that
other phone and Internet service providers rely on. So, as a technological
matter, if law were no barrier, the evidence indicates that the NSA could
technically acquire, store and analyze almost every word spoken or written on
American phones and computers.
Snowden’s revelations include Power Point presentations referencing an
array of tools—with code names like “PRISM”—the NSA has used to target the
social media activities, Internet searches and emails of specific people. But
there’s still a lot we don’t know. And that’s a problem in a democracy in which
the government is supposed to govern by consent of the people.
The risk of ‘total tyranny’
Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) said after his investigation of the NSA in
1975, following leaks about President Richard M. Nixon’s use of the NSA to spy
on his enemies, opponents of the war in Vietnam
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge
in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence com- munity
has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there
would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine
together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done,
is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this
technology. … We must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess
this technology oper- ate within the law and under proper supervision so that
we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no
return.
Those were the late Senator Church’s fears before almost every American
had a “smart phone” and before most of us heard of the Internet—which in the
1970s was merely a computer network within the Pentagon and a few Silicon
Valley companies—let alone traversed it daily.
Indeed, before Google was a word, let alone an empire; before almost all
of our telephone conversations, emails and transactions of daily life were
transmuted into a searchable digital world; and before a handful of murderers
crashed into the World
Trade Center
Now that need is even more urgent.
Along with the seismic transformation in the way we communicate, the
legal controls on the NSA’s powers have been systematically loosened, if not
obliterated, by the White House, Congress and the courts at the urging of
leaders of the military intelligence community.
The NSA says it has “internal controls” but once information about
Americans is stored by the NSA—including in a gargantuan 1-million-square-foot
data storehouse being finalized in Bluffdale ,
Utah
More importantly, how can we ever trust that the NSA’s new powers won’t
be misused by those in power? We already know that during the Occupy Wall Street
So the question isn’t whether the information that the NSA has been
allowed to gather on Americans will be misused. The question is, when? And by
whom? Perhaps our next president? Religious- Reactionary Rick (Santorum)? Tea
Party Ted (Cruz)? Take-Two Rick (Perry)? You may laugh, but remember that prior
to the 1980 presidential election, Trees-Cause-More-Pollution-Than-Automobiles
Ronald (Reagan) was a joke.
Who in the NSA’s quasi-military hierarchy has the power to question a
demand to provide information in its databases about specific Americans when
made under the authority of the commander in chief, no matter who the president
is or which power-hungry advisors aid the White House in 2016 or 2020 or
beyond?
It’s a state of affairs that would make Nixon smirk. It’s also why
foreign citizens who’ve lived under authoritarian regimes, in Germany
The past isn’t even past
To understand what happened to the rule of law since 9/11, it’s
important to understand the path of the law before the World Trade
Center
It begins with the Fourth Amendment, which makes no distinction between
“intelligence gathering” and “law enforcement.” The Constitution speaks instead
to the rights of Americans regardless of the agent that would violate them:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized.
Those words were born of the vanquishing of an authoritarian tyrant
whose officers used “general warrants” to search colonists at will to protect
the crown and its interests.
Surprisingly, it was not until 1967 that the Supreme Court ruled that
the government needed a warrant to listen to Americans’ phone calls. The
following year, in 1968, Congress passed a crime bill to provide rules for
obtaining warrants for wiretaps but—at the secret urging of the NSA—the legislature
exempted surveillance in the name of national security.
In November of that year, Nixon was elected president.
In 1969, just six months after taking office, Nixon directed the NSA to
search its files for information on specific Americans whom he and J. Edgar
Hoover had placed on a watch list.
At that time, the existence of the NSA, formally established in 1952,
was so secret that almost no one in Congress knew about it, and its funding was
concealed in the Pentagon’s classified “black budget.” For decades, the NSA and
its predecessors had acted as the government’s signal corps, listening for
radio communications from enemy ships, tapping into the cables of diplomats of
the Soviet Union and decrypting ciphers sent
by spies. Unbeknownst to Congress, the NSA and its predecessor, the Armed
Forces Security Agency, had also been spying on Americans for decades, making
duplicates of all of the international telegrams sent to or from Americans by
“wire” or cable since 1945, as well as gathering radio transmissions from
across the globe through earth-bound satellite receivers and satellites. By the
early 1970s, the NSA’s analysts were reading over 150,000 telegrams to or from
Americans a month under that program, called “Operation SHAMROCK.”
With this vast and secret intelligence-gathering apparatus at his
disposal, Nixon later expanded his watch list, directing the NSA to search for
anything “subversive” or related to drug-dealing. In the meantime, in 1972, a
case involving Nixon spying on Americans under the guise of national security,
with no link to a foreign government, made its way to the Supreme Court. In
that case, known as the Keith case, the Court unanimously declared:
The Fourth Amendment freedoms cannot properly be guaranteed if domestic
security surveillances may be conducted solely within the discretion of the
Executive Branch. … The Fourth Amendment does not contemplate the executive
officers of Government as neutral and disinter- ested magistrates.
In August 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal involving the
illegal surveillance activities of the Committee to Re-Elect the President
(CREEP), Nixon resigned in disgrace.
Yet the extent of electronic surveillance under the administration
wasn’t revealed until December 1974, when the New York Times published a front-page story by
Seymour Hersh under the headline “Huge C.I.A. Op- eration Reported in U.S.
Against Anti-War Forces.” The article exposed part of Nixon’s spying under a
program code-named “Operation MINARET,” which made use of the cables the NSA
searched via SHAMROCK and by capturing radio transmissions.
Congress was shocked. During the investigation led by Sen. Church in
1975, Congress discovered that the NSA had access to communications involving
millions of Americans and that there were about 1,200 Americans on watch lists,
mostly people opposing the Vietnam War.
But the names of some Americans on the watch list were kept sealed until
they were released this September. The newly declassified documents reveal that
the NSA’s spying targeted prominent Americans even before Nixon took office.
According to the National Security Archive, the NSA “eaves- dropped on civil
rights leaders Martin Luther King and Whitney Young, as well as boxing champion
Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and Washington Postcolumnist [and humorist] Art Buchwald”— and
Sen. Church himself.
In response to Sen. Church’s investigation, Congress passed the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, over the objections of a few
hard-liners in the Ford administration, including Laurence Silberman. It was
intended to ensure that the NSA was focusing on foreigners and not on
Americans, and “to curb the practice by which the Executive Branch may conduct
warrantless electronic surveillance on its own unilateral determination that
national security justifies it.”
FISA barred the NSA from inten- tionally acquiring radio signals of the
domestic communications of Ameri- cans without a warrant. It also barred the
NSA from acquiring wire communications here that were to or from Americans,
whether intentional or not. And it barred the NSA from intentionally targeting
radio communications to or from a known U.S.
Congress also created a special court, the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISC), to hear these warrant requests. At the same time,
Congress established permanent Senate and House Intelligence Committees to
conduct oversight of the NSA, CIA and more.
Project MINARET and Operation SHAMROCK were said to be terminated when
FISA passed, and the public believed such activities were barred. By almost all
accounts, the NSA was directing its powerful surveillance tools outside of the United States
Then came 9/11. MORE http://inthesetimes.com/article/15737/return_to_nixonland_nsa_spying/
ABOUT
THIS AUTHOR
Lisa Graves is the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy and formerly served as Deputy
Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice and as the Senior
Legislative Strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union on national
security issues. She has been called to testify before Congress as an expert
witness on national security and civil liberties issues.
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Main
Core: A List Of Millions Of Americans That Will Be Subject To Detention
During Martial Law By Michael Snyder June 15, 2013 "Information Clearing House - Are you on the list? Are you one of the millions of Americans that have been designated a threat to national security by the The following is how Wikipedia describes Main Core… Main Core is the code name of a database maintained since the 1980s by the federal government of the It was Christopher Ketchum of Radar Magazine that first reported on the existence of Main Core. At the time, the shocking information that he revealed did not get that much attention. That is quite a shame, because it should have sent shockwaves across the nation… According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention. Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a “national emergency.” Executive orders issued over the last three decades define it as a “natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency,” while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like “riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order.” According to one news report, even “national opposition to So if that list contained 8 million names all the way back in 2008, how big might it be today? That is a very frightening thing to think about. Later on in 2008, Tim Shorrock of Salon.com also reported on Main Core… Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as “Main Core,” the database reportedly collects and stores — without warrants or court orders — the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security. According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as “an emergency internal security database system” designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. So why didn’t this information get more attention at the time? Well, if Obama had lost the 2008 election it might have. But Obama won in 2008 and the liberal media assumed that he would end many of the abuses that were happening under Bush. Of course that has not happened at all. In fact, Obama has steadily moved the police state agenda ahead aggressively. Edward Snowden has just made that abundantly clear to the entire world. After 2008, it is unclear exactly what happened to Main Core. Did it expand, change names, merge with other programs or get superseded by a new program? It appears extremely unlikely that it simply faded away. In light of what we have just learned about NSA snooping, someone should ask our politicians some very hard questions about Main Core. According toChristopher Ketchum, the exact kind of NSA snooping that Edward Snowden has just described was being used to feed data into the Main Core database… A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as “warrantless wiretapping.” In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor “huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records.” Authorities employ “sophisticated software programs” to sift through the data, searching for “suspicious patterns.” In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it’s notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. “The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed,” the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. “Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach.” The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database. This stuff is absolutely chilling. And there have been hints that such a list still exists today. For example, the testimony of an anonymous government insider that was recently posted on shtfplan.com alluded to such a list… “We know all this already,” I stated. He looked at me, giving me a look like I’ve never seen, and actually pushed his finger into my chest. “You don’t know jack,” he said, “this is bigger than you can imagine, bigger than anyone can imagine. This administration is collecting names of sources, whistle blowers and their families, names of media sources and everybody they talk to and have talked to, and they already have a huge list. If you’re not working for MSNBC or CNN, you’re probably on that list. If you are a website owner with a brisk readership and a conservative bent, you’re on that list. It’s a political dissident list, not an enemy threat list,” he stated. What in the world is happening to What in the world are we turning into? As I mentioned in a previous article, the NSA gathers 2.1 million gigabytes of data on all of us every single hour. The NSA is currently constructing a 2 billion dollar data center out in If you are disturbed by all of this, now is the time to stand up and say something. If this crisis blows over and people forget about all of this stuff again, the Big Brother surveillance grid that is being constructed all around us will just continue to grow and continue to become even more oppressive. This article was originally published at American Dream
Modern
History Sourcebook,
Benito Mussolini: What is Fascism, 1932
Benito
Mussolini (1883-1945) over the course of his lifetime went from Socialism -
he was editor of Avanti,
a socialist newspaper - to the leadership of a new political movement called
"fascism" [after "fasces", the symbol of bound sticks
used a totem of power in ancient
Mussolini
came to power after the "March on
In 1932
Mussolini wrote (with the help of Giovanni Gentile) and entry for the Italian
Encyclopedia on the definition of fascism.
Fascism, the more it considers and
observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from
political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility
nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of
Pacifism -- born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in
the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human
energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to
meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put men into
the position where they have to make the great decision -- the alternative of
life or death....
...The Fascist accepts life and loves
it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as
duty and struggle and conquest, but above all for others -- those who are at
hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come
after...
...Fascism [is] the complete opposite
of…Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human
civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among
the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and
instruments of production.... Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness
and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive,
direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied,
according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by
the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their
control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging
class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of
history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant
force in the transformation of society....
After Socialism, Fascism combats the
whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in
its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that
the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human
society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical
consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful
inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the
mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage....
...Fascism denies, in democracy, the
absur[d] conventional untruth of political equality dressed out in the garb
of collective irresponsibility, and the myth of "happiness" and
indefinite progress....
...iven that the nineteenth century
was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not
necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of
Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity
remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of
authority...a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century
of individualism it may be expected that this will be the century of
collectivism and hence the century of the State....
The foundation of Fascism is the
conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism
conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all
individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation
to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing
force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a
collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording
results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has
itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the
"ethic" State....
...The
...For Fascism, the growth of empire,
that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of
vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or
rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; and
renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best
adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the
people of
This text is part of the Internet
Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of
public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in
modern European and World history.
Unless otherwise indicated the
specific electronic form of the document is copyright. Permission is granted
for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes
and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No
permission is granted for commercial use of the Sourcebook.
(c)Paul
Halsall Aug 1997
halsall@murray.fordham.edu
In the
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END
FASCISM USA
