Naomi Wolf has been in the news a bit lately for alleging that America is a nearly fascist nation. I haven't read her book, but if this earlier article is any indication, she's extremely good at spotting bacteria while overlooking elephants.

I have a special fondness for American leftist celebrities who prefer to first criticize their country in foreign papers. After all, who can blame her, with our government completely controlling major American media outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, Newsweek, CNN, PBS, NPR, The LA Times, Time... places you'll never hear any criticism of the Bush administration. So it's understandable that she'd feel the first people who'd need to be informed of the awful dictatorship Amerikkka has become would be... the British.

(Why do people in other countries hate us? It's such a mystery!)

So, without further ado, Naomi Wolf's plan for turning the US into a dictatorship. (Ooops! Sorry, I meant her revelation of George Bush's plot to convert the US into a one party system and declare himself dictator-for-life.)

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

Naomi seems to waffle back and forth between admitting al Qaeda is a threat (which she does, once) and implying Bush is "creating a terrifying threat". She surrounds rather banal descriptions of AQ's disposition and intentions with scare quotes, as if she did not actually believe in such:

We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation"...

Bush claims terrorists are trying to attack our nation. As best as I can tell, that's accurate, and even Naomi seems to concede the point. But if he even mentions such in public, he's fear-mongering, and thus trying to create a fascist state.

On the other hand, Naomi Wolf claims our lives and freedoms are threatened, and implies the entire country is sliding into fascism. She is not fear mongering, and is NOT trying to demonize all who disagree; she is NOT (repeat NOT) working to create a one-party state where only people who agree with her may exercise power.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

Hey! Gitmo is a gulag! Which American citizens were rounded up and sent there? Nobody named. Any political prisoners? None alleged. And the torture? Even Democratic officials who have come back don't seem to be alleging, as Ms Wolf does, that "torture" is occurring.

The gulag, if I may remind Ms Wolf, was filled with citizens. It was not populated with a few dozen rag-tag combatants who were met by the Soviet Army during battle. And there are real gulags in the world: They are in North Korea. They are in China. Perhaps Naomi should learn something about the political leanings of the people who set these camps up. (They were "conservatives", no doubt.) And there is real torture going on in such places, which involves bodily harm, not women with red ink on their fingers which they pretend is fake menstrual blood, and impossible stories of Korans being flushed down toilets.

Instead, Wolf apparently fears her own country far more than these nations. And her intent is clearly to persuade British readers to adopt the same sentiment.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany.

Pay no attention to the "peace" protestors in New York City who recently attempted to bludgeon a plainclothes detective to death. Ignore the black-hooded "anti-globalism" protesters who smash windows for "peace" and violently attack counter-protesters. Never mind the conservatives and Christians who have their academic future and even sometimes lives threatened in our universities. Ignore the Democratic Precinct boss in Illinois who attempted to murder witnesses to his vote-stealing operation, and the children of prominent Democratic politicians in Milwaukee who slashed Republican bus tires -- not to mention the groups of thugs who broke into Republican election headquarters around the country during the 2004 Presidential elections.

(Why not? Wolf isn't paying any attention to these violent forms of domestic political intimidation either. Doesn't implicate the correct party, I guess.)

Instead, Wolf's American "thug caste" are contractors who sometimes provide security in Iraq. (A foreign nation -- not that she noticed.) Next, she'll be going after mall cops, too. I'm sure a few of those have also used too much force at times.

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

Wolf writes to United Kingdom citizens -- who are constantly watched and recorded by state-run video cameras everywhere in public -- to warn them that the United States is becoming a bit too much like Orwell's 1984! And, of course, the "internal" surveillance system Wolf alleges is the Bush administration's (fully lawful) attempt to tap into select foreign-bound phone calls!

5. Harass citizens' groups

I've already mentioned numerous systematic attempts to harass non-leftist US citizens. The point of such harassment is, of course, intimidation, and as such, much of it was done publicly. So it's a bit odd to see Wolf point to investigations which were supposed to be secret -- you can't claim you're being "harassed" if you don't even know you're being observed.

... the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents"...

Imagine that! Government agents worried that peace protestors might intend violence. (No basis for that, of course.) And the Pentagon wrote down accounts of anti-military protests in a database! Egads what will they do next? Use Microsoft Word to record other data?

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

Wolf does not notice the people who were imprisoned for calling Bill Clinton names back in the 1990s. Instead she defines "arbitrary detention" as having lists of people who might need to be watch closely on planes:

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly.

Thousands of people (including some on the left, who she names), of course, were wrongly included on such lists. (Including even yours truly, who is quite conservative: for quite a while, ticket agents had to put me through a rather time-consuming verification process.) And, I have no doubt, like myself, a few of these people suffered the inconvenience of being delayed a few moments on the way to their destination.

Earth to Naomi: This is not "arbitrary detention".

The lack of seriousness on the left astounds me.

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

An "airport employee" offered such an opinion, once, according to a friend of hers? (And never mind that the airlines aren't in charge of said lists!) If an unnamed ancedotal "airport employee" who holds leftist views similar to Wolf's says something is true, well, that seals it. No need to ask the ACLU or DHS if that's true; no need to produce supporting evidence.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line... Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration.

Wolf hasn't noticed the left's all-out war against non-leftists in academia, the literally hundreds of well-documented cases where non-leftist academics and students have been harassed, threatened, intimidated, and otherwise silenced.

Did some suggest, for example, that Ward Churchill should be fired for saying the victims of 9/11 had it coming? Or for lying on his application? Or plagiarism? Never mind! -- Ms Wolf will represent the salient issue as merely being merely that Churchill had been "critical of the administration."

8. Control the press

If overwhelming "control of the press" by one party is a sign of incipient fascism, then Naomi Wolf would do well to find out what political views most the US press seems to support, and what views they attempt to suppress or denigrate.

Instead, as usual, Wolf quotes a few half-baked charges from her peers:

Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Wolf doesn't inform her audience that the complaint originated with Exxon, not DHS, and the substance was that Palast had been filming one of their oil refineries -- the "critical infrastructure" Wolf misleads her audience into conflating with flood victims. Even according to lefty bloggers the only result was that Palast was briefly asked some questions by DHS. (Presumably, the government should not be allowed to ask questions of people who film oil refineries.)

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Of course, Wolf doesn't tell her audience that Plame was outed by an Richard Armitage, who is a critic of the Bush administration. Nor does Wolf inform her readers that Plame was merely a desk-jockey who worked in Washington DC -- with no covert status nor responsibilities -- thus with nothing to lose by being "outed". (As her lucrative Vanity Fair photo spread amply confirmed.)

9. Dissent equals treason

The only people I can see saying this -- that to merely disagree is "treason", and the few patriots are all on our side -- are on the left. (In fact, Wolf does precisely this, saying: "Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us...")

And Wolf provides no evidence of anyone on the right saying any such thing.

Instead:

When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat.

If publishing and thus destroying a top-secret intelligence program -- which even Keller admitted was not illegal! and which had already caught a number of terrorists -- is not "aid and comfort" to our enemies, then it's hard to envision what might possibly constitute such. Dissent is disagreement -- it does not include deliberately leaking classified information for merely political purposes.

(And note: What she alleges of the Plame case -- a politically-motivated leak of top-secret information by officials with an axe to grind -- actually happened here. How interesting that in one case, it's allegedly a crime (even though Plame was not a secret operative) and in the other, well, the exact same behavior is noble and shouldn't be prosecuted. It's hard to see Naomi's stance here as anything but unprincipled partisanship.)

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

If you've been paying attention, you'll note many of Naomi's objections are no-win situations. If the government DID NOT have the power to even ask questions of people who filmed oil refineries, landmarks, etc, Bush would no doubt be accused (correctly) of negligence. (What was he doing in those few months prior to 9/11? Never mind that previous administration which was there for eight years...) Likewise, keeping lists of dangerous individuals to watch at airports is allegedly out-of-bounds. (Doesn't happen in Europe, right?)

Here, Bush had been criticized because he DID NOT send the National Guard from neighboring states into Louisiana until Governor Blanco had given her permission -- which, if you will recall (or perhaps you don't, because the media didn't generally reveal this) took quite a while.

So Congress passed a bill authorizing the President to do exactly what his leftist critics had complained he didn't do: send in the National Guard whether local politicians liked it or not. And then this same group of critics are now criticizing him for doing exactly what they just demanded!

Europe: Naomi's Model of Freedom?

In case I was left with even a shred of respect for Ms Wolf, she makes sure I have lost it by the end of her essay:

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

As I mentioned, the UK is riddled with cameras and (like many European nations) has much more latitude to listen in on its citizens' domestic phone calls -- and Naomi wants them to complain to the US about our having too much surveillance? France secretly and indefinitely detains individuals (including those we released from Gitmo), sometimes for years -- and she wants the French to help improve the American judicial system? French television is also largely owned by French military contractors, the UK's largest TV and radio producers are all state-controlled -- and she wants France and the UK to help the US have a freer media? Belgium recently outlawed the largest conservative political party (who were actually dissenting) -- and Wolf looks to Belgium to teach the US to better tolerate political dissent?

Conclusion

This was a painful essay, as I used to quite like Naomi Wolf, despite our divergent political views. And I hate to say it, but she comes across as a flake (to put it lightly) -- and deeply ignorant about the comparative amount freedom in Europe and the US. (Europe doesn't even have a right to freedom of speech, for heaven's sake.) She goes in for ridiculous stretches (people being on watch lists = "arbitrary detention") while paying no attention to ACTUAL and SERIOUS incidents of the very things about which she complains (such as non-leftists being harassed and silenced in our universities).

If real fascism broke down her front door and sat in her living room eating cupcakes, she wouldn't notice it -- as long as it voted for her favored candidates, spoke in good-sounding but meaningless platitudes, and came with a European stamp of approval.