FYI, there's a relatively recent (October 11) video of an entire, public lecture by Naomi Wolf, outlining the steps to closing down a "democratic" society.
_http://youtube.com/watch?v=RjALf12PAWc
If you're not into watching, here are notes I took. About 5% of it is my own correlations to current events. I make no particular judgment on her presentation other than I thought it was pretty sincere-sounding and didn't feel creeped out until the end, because I thought the "hope for the future" bit was a kind of lame and unrealistic. I also thought I sniffed CoIntelPro at the very end when she said that all the Dem candidates for pres had been pressured to sign some kind of promise that they'd restore the constitution, and that they were working on Republicans to do the same. That just sounds purely silly to me.
How "democracies" are closed down. Recurrence of tactics, a blueprint perfected by dictators throughout history. Example, Germany in the 1930s. There are ten tactics that are used. All ten are in use in the USA right now. {I'm not sure these are numbered correctly, as she wasn't clear about numbering them, and I'm sure it's on a website somewhere anyway. These are just notes I took as I listened.}
1. Invoke an internal or external threat, real or imagined. Stalin warned of "sleeper cells" of capitalist agents dressing and acting like Soviet citizens, in wait to cause terrorist mayhem. Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, "embedded journalists" with German troops in Poland. Pinochet told Chileans in 1973 about "armed insurgents" and used faked documents to "prove" that they were going to go on an assassination spree.
2. Secret prisons and torture sites outside the nation, outside the law. Claims that all societies that do this eventually turn abuse against their citizens. In a fascist shift, state uses torture against marginal people with whom the mainstream doesn't identify (Germany tortured communists, Jews, anarchists, Gypsies), and eventually moves on to journalists, editors, labor leaders, political opponents. It is used to frighten, to push back democracy. US president can now label anyone an enemy combatant and confine them for up to three years without charge, effectively removing the "threat" of this person forever (psychologists know this kind of isolation drives people insane).
3. Growth of paramilitary forces within the country. In the US, mercenaries, federalized national guard, militarized police. Blackwater in New Orleans -- they have a $1 billion contract to respond to calls within the USA in the event of "emergency," which is declarable by the president.
4. Creation of surveillance apparatus aimed at ordinary citizens. As long as everyone knows they are being surveilled, they will be inhibited. Make the surveillance known while times are still "good" and there will be no resistance to its construction because most people feel they have nothing to hide.
5. Actual harrassment or even arrest of citizens to quell dissent. Societal resistance closes down as soon as people start reading about people THAT THEY IDENTIFY WITH being declared enemy combatants and being arrested. Then, they become frightened and shut up. 750,000 Americans now on "the watch list" and are given trouble at airports, including the nation's leading constitutional scholar Richard Murphy, members of Code Pink, anti-war organizers -- these people are pulled aside and interrogated as to where they're going and who they are going to visit. Eventually, job opportunities, welfare benefits, and other things close down if one is on the list.
6. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens to further spread fear of authority. We now have police and alphabet-soup agency people covertly infiltrating various organizations, looking to target key individuals as examples. Also many reports of police arresting people that would have merely been warned or otherwise spoken to. This and the previous step creates an atmosphere of distrust among people, to make them less likely to trust each other and cooperate.
7. Restrict the press.
8. A drumbeat of the words terror, terrorist, espionage, sabotage, etc. The definitions of traitor, terrorist, sabotage, etc., begin to expand to include more and more people. This has happened with animal-rights and environmental activists already.
10. Declare martial law, usually following dramatic scenes of instability, which can easily be sown by agents provocateur.
Wolf wonders about the tasering videos being eerily good in quality, suggesting they are designed to be widely seen. Claims Nazi Germany actually, judiciously showed pictures and film of atrocities intentionally to freak people out.
The U.S. attorneys that were fired were all in electoral "swing states." In the event of voting or election fraud cases or voting rights violations, it is the U.S. attorneys to whom cases are brought. If they are cronies of the ruling power, they provide insurance that if vote fixing is discovered, the defendants will not be found guilty (at least, not enough to alter election results). Thus, a violent coup is unnecessary. Tyrants love elections because it provides the appearance of validation for them. Austrians voted almost 99% for their own annexation by Hitler's Germany, but with brown-shirts at their doors.
People fail to understand what a closed society looks like. They imagine goosestepping soldiers, politicians addressing throngs from balconies, and crematoria in the countryside. Only once in history did it look like that. Even violent miltary dictatorships have all the trappings of civil society: there are still elections (they're just fixed or otherwise corrupted), there's a changing of the guard (just the same cabal in power), still a judiciary (they just don't go against the ruling power), still academics (they just watch what they say), still news media (but self-censoring, knowing exactly how far to push an inquiry), etc.
Hope: window is closing, but with pushback by millions insisting on restoration of rights, tyrants may be unseated. But when people wake up during a fascist shift, that's when the power cracks down harder. Naomi Wolf recommends resistance to further abuses of power, and impeachment. Says founding fathers didn't intend delegatation of the defense of liberty to a professional class of pundits, politicians, or scholars, but rather intended the people to do it.
