Dear Readers,
I am happy to share with you in this space today and Wednesday the introduction to my new book,
The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.
As the title implies, the book is a letter of warning to all Americans
about the actions of the Bush administration and the threat these
actions pose to our Constitution and our democracy. I hope that you
will read this introduction and will be inspired to take action to help
save our democracy.
Best,
Naomi
*****
From the book's Preface:
I wrote this book because I could no longer ignore the echoes between events in the past and forces at work today.
When I discussed these issues informally with a good friend who is
the daughter of Holocaust survivors -- and who teaches students about
the American system of government as a kind of personal response to what
happened to her family -- she insisted that I present this argument.
I also wrote it as I did because, in the midst of my research, I went to Christopher Le and Jennifer Gandin's wedding.
Chris -- the "young patriot" of the subtitle -- is a born
activist, a natural grassroots leader and teacher. He helps run the
Nation Suicide Prevention Lifeline and is active on a range of issues.
Chris and Jennifer are characteristic of the kinds of the idealistic
young people -- idealistic Americans -- who need to lead our nation out
of this crisis.
I was there having emerged from my reading and could not ignore
the terrible storm clouds gathering in the nation at large, and I felt
that the young couple needed one more gift: the tools to fully realize
and defend their freedom; the means to be sure that their own children
would be born in liberty.
It is not just the young who are disconnected from democracy's
tasks at just the moment that the nation's freedoms are being
dismantled; in my travels across the country, I have heard from citizens
of all backgrounds who feel alienated from the Founders' idea that they
are the ones who must lead; they are the ones who must decide and
confront and draw a line. They are the ones who matter. This book is
written for them.
Such citizens need the keys to, the understanding of, the
Founders' radical legacy. They need to understand how despots have gone
about their work. They need a primer so they and those around them can
be well-equipped for the fight that lies ahead.
So they can fight it well.
So that our children may continue to live in freedom.
So that we may all.
What follows is the first of two parts of the introduction to The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.
Part II will be posted in this space on the Huffington Post on
Wednesday, September 12. Chelsea Green Publishing has also generously
made available a PDF version [PDF here] of the entire Introduction, with footnotes included.
Dear Chris:
I am writing because we have an emergency.
Here are U.S. news headlines from a two-week period in the late summer of 2006:
July 22: "CIA WORKER SAYS MESSAGE ON TORTURE GOT HER FIRED."
Christine Axsmith, a computer security expert working for the C.I.A.,
said she had been fired for posting a message on a blog site on a
top-secret computer network. Axsmith criticized waterboarding:
"Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong." Ms. Axsmith lost her
job as well as her top-secret clearance, which she had held since 1993.
She fears her career in intelligence is over.
July 28: "DRAFT BILL WAIVES DUE PROCESS FOR ENEMY COMBATANTS."
The Bush administration has been working in secret on a draft bill
"detailing procedures [for] bringing to trial those it captures in the
war on terrorism, including some stark diversions from regular trial
procedures. . . . Speedy trials are not required. . . . Hearsay
information is admissible . . . the [military] lawyer can close the
proceedings [and] can also order 'exclusion of the defendant' and his
civilian counsel." Those defined as "enemy combatants" and "persons who
have engaged in unlawful belligerence" can be held in prison until "the
cessation of hostilities," no matter when that may be or what jail
sentence they may get.
July 29: "THE COURT UNDER SIEGE." In June 2006, the Supreme
Court ruled that denying prisoners at Guantánamo judicial safeguards
violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law. The Supreme Court also
insisted that a prisoner be able to be present at his own trial. In
response, the White House prepared a bill that "simply revokes that
right."
The New York Times editorial page warned, "It is
especially frightening to see the administration use the debates over
the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and domestic spying to mount a new
offensive against the courts."
July 31: "A SLIP OF THE PEN." U.S. lawyers issued a statement
expressing alarm at the way the president was overusing "signing
statements." They argued that this was an exertion of executive power
that undermined the Constitution. Said the head of the American Bar
Association, "The threat to our Republic posed by presidential signing
statements is both imminent and real unless immediate corrective action
is taken."
August 2: "BLOGGER JAILED AFTER DEFYING COURT ORDERS." A
freelance blogger, Josh Wolf, 24, was jailed after he refused to turn
over to investigators a video he had taken of a protest in San
Francisco. Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the
University of Minnesota, said that, although the jailing of American
journalists was becoming more frequent, Mr. Wolf was the first American
blogger she knew of to be imprisoned by federal authorities.
August 2: "GOVERNMENT WINS ACCESS TO REPORTER PHONE RECORDS."
"A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two
New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources. . ." according to
The New York Times.
A dissenting judge speculated that in the future, reporters would have
to meet their sources illicitly, like drug dealers meeting contacts "in
darkened doorways."
August 3: "STRONG-ARMING THE VOTE." In Alabama, a federal judge
took away powers over the election process from a Democratic official,
Secretary of State Worley, and handed them over to a Republican
governor: "[P]arty politics certainly appears to have been a driving
force," argued the Times. "The Justice Department's request to shift Ms.
Worley's powers to Governor Riley is extraordinary." When Worley sought
redress in a court overseen by a federal judge aligned with the Bush
administration, she wasn't allowed her chosen lawyer. It was "a
one-sided proceeding that felt a lot like a kangaroo court. . ."
cautioned the newspaper. She lost.
Why am I writing this warning to you right now, in 2007? After
all, we have had a Congressional election giving control of the House
and the Senate to Democrats. The new leaders are at work. Surely,
Americans who have been worried about erosions of civil liberties, and
the destruction of our system of checks and balances, can relax now:
see, the system corrects itself. It is tempting to believe that the
basic machinery of democracy still works fine and that any emergency
threatening it has passed -- or, worst case, can be corrected in the
upcoming presidential election.
But the dangers are not gone; they are regrouping. In some ways
they are rapidly gaining force. The big picture reveals that 10 classic
pressures -- pressures that have been used in various times and places
in the past to close down pluralistic societies -- were set in motion by
the Bush administration to close down our own open society. These
pressures have never been put in place before in this way in this
nation.
A breather is unearned; we can't simply relax now. The laws
that drive these pressures are still on the books. The people who have a
vested interest in a less open society may be in a moment of formal
political regrouping; but their funds are just as massive as before,
their strategic thinking unchanged, and their strategy now is to regroup
so that next time their majority will be permanent.
All of us -- Republicans, Democrats, Independents, American
citizens -- have little time to repeal the laws and roll back the forces
that can bring about the end of the American system we have inherited
from the Founders -- a system that has protected our freedom for over
200 years.
I have written this warning because our country -- the
democracy our young patriots expect to inherit -- is in the process of
being altered forever. History has a great deal to teach us about what
is happening right now -- what has happened since 2001 and what could
well unfold after the 2008 election. But fewer and fewer of us have read
much about the history of the mid-twentieth century -- or about the
ways the Founders set up our freedoms to save us from the kinds of
tyranny they knew could emerge in the future. High school students,
college students, recent graduates, activists from all walks of life,
have a sense that something overwhelming has been going on. But they
have lacked a primer to brief them on these themes and put the pieces
together, so it is hard for them to know how urgent the situation is,
let alone what they need to do.
Americans expect to have freedom around us just as we expect to
have air to breathe, so we have only limited understanding of the
furnaces of repression that the Founders knew intimately. Few of us
spend much time thinking about how "the system" they put in place
protects our liberties. We spend even less time, considering how
dictators in the past have broken down democracies or quelled
pro-democracy uprisings. We take our American liberty for granted the
way we take our natural resources for granted, seeing both, rather
casually, as being magically self-replenishing. We have not noticed how
vulnerable either resource is until very late in the game, when systems
start to falter. We have been slow to learn that liberty, like nature,
demands a relationship with us in order for it to continue to sustain
us.
Most of us have only a faint understanding of how societies
open up or close down, become supportive of freedom or ruled by fear,
because this is not the kind of history that we feel, or that our
educational system believes, is important for us to know. Another reason
for our vagueness about how liberty lives or dies is that we have
tended lately to subcontract out the tasks of the patriot: to let the
professionals -- lawyers, scholars, activists, politicians -- worry
about understanding the Constitution and protecting our rights. We think
that "they" should manage our rights, the way we hire a professional to
do our taxes; "they" should run the government, create policy, worry
about whether democracy is up and running. We're busy.
But the Founders did not mean for powerful men and women far
away from the citizens -- for people with their own agendas, or for a
class of professionals -- to perform the patriots' tasks, or to protect
freedom. They meant for us to do it: you, me, the American who delivers
your mail, the one who teaches your kids.
I am one of the citizens who needed to relearn these lessons.
Though I studied civics, our system of government was taught to me, as
it was to you, as a fairly boring explication of a three-part civil
bureaucracy, not as the mechanism of a thrilling, radical, and totally
unprecedented experiment in human self-determination. My teachers
explained that our three-part system was set up with "checks and
balances," so that no one branch of government could seize too much
power. Not so exciting: this sounded like "checks and balances" in a
bureaucratic turf war. Our teachers failed to explain to us that the
power that the Founders restrained in each branch of government is not
abstract: it is the power to strip you and me of personal liberty.
So I needed to go back and read, more deeply than I had the
first time around, histories of how patriots gave us our America out of
the crucible of tyrants, as well as histories of how dictators came to
power in the last century. I had to reread the stories of the making and
the unmaking of freedom. The more I read these histories, the more
disturbed I became.
I give you the lessons we can learn from them in this pamphlet form because of the crisis we face.
To be continued...
Naomi Wolf is the author of The End of America: A Letter of
Warning to a Young Patriot, Chelsea Green Publishing, September 2007.
She is also a co-founder of the American Freedom Campaign, a grassroots
and grasstops democracy movement.
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