Important in my opinion.
Steve
Naomi Wolf Thinks the Tea Parties Help Fight Fascism -- Is She Onto
Something or in Fantasy Land?
By Justine Sharrock, AlterNet
Posted on March 30, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146184/
In her bestselling /End of America/, Naomi Wolf outlines the 10 warning
signs that America is headed toward a fascist takeover. Using historical
precedents, she explains how our government is mimicking those of
Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin through practices like surveillance of
ordinary citizens, restricting the press, developing paramilitary forces
and arbitrarily detaining people.
The book was lauded by liberals under Bush: the Independent Publishers
gave it the Freedom Fighter Award; John Nichols at the /Nation/ named it
the most valuable political book of 2007. Now, under President Obama,
Wolf's book is providing ammunition for the Tea Partiers, Patriots, Ron
Paul supporters and Oath Keepers, who also warn of impending tyrannical
government. Even when the book first came out pre-Obama, Alex Jones,
Michael Savage and Fox News invited her on their shows, and agreed with her.
It’s not just her message. She speaks their language, referring to the
Founding Fathers and American Revolution as models, admitting to a
profound sense of fear, warning of tyranny, fascism, Nazism and martial
law. When Glenn Beck warns of these things we laugh. When Wolf draws
those same connections, we listen. How can both sides be speaking the
same language, yet see things so differently? Or are we just not
listening to each other? I telephoned Wolf to ask her what it means when
your book ends up bolstering policies you oppose.
*Justine Sharrock: First off, is your book still relevant under Obama?*
Naomi Wolf: Unfortunately it is more relevant. Bush legalized torture,
but Obama is legalizing impunity. He promised to roll stuff back, but he
is institutionalizing these things forever. It is terrifying and the
left doesn’t seem to recognize it.
*JS: Did you realize that your book is being lauded within the Tea Party
and patriot movements?*
NW: Since I wrote /Give Me Liberty/, I have had a new audience that
looks different than the average Smith girl. There is a giant
libertarian component. I have had a lot of dialogue with the Ron Paul
community. There are [Tea Partiers] writing to me on my Facebook page,
but I figured they were self-selective libertarians and not arch
conservatives. I am utterly stunned that I have a following in the
patriot movement and I wasn’t aware that specific Tea Partiers were
reading it. They haven’t invited me to speak. They invited Sarah Palin.
*JS: **If they did invite you, would you speak at a Tea Party?*
NW: I would go in a heartbeat. I’ll go anywhere to talk about the
Constitution. I believe in trans-partisan organizing around these
issues. When I went on Fox News people asked me why I was going on those
shows. Are you kidding? You have to go, especially to people you don’t
agree with. We need to get back into grappling with people we disagree
with if we want to restore the Republic.
I was invited by the Ron Paul supporters to their rally in Washington
last summer and I loved it. I met a lot of people I respected, a lot of
“ordinary” people, as in not privileged. They were stepping up to the
plate, when my own liberal privileged fellow demographic habituates were
lying around whining. It was a wake-up call to the libertarians that
there’s a progressive who cares so much about the same issues. Their
views of liberals are just as distorted as ours are of conservatives.
*JS: **Why do you think the sides don’t understand each other?*
NW: Frankly, liberals are out of the habit of communicating with anyone
outside their own in cohort. We have a cultural problem with
self-righteousness and elitism. Liberals roll their eyes about going on
"Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can
understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on
people we don’t agree with. It doesn’t serve us well.
There is also a deliberate building up of two camps that benefits from
whipping up home team spirit and demonizing the opposition. With the
Internet there is even more fractioning since we are in echo chambers.
With so much propaganda it is hard to calm down enough to listen.
*JS: **What do you think is the biggest misconception about the Tea
Parties?*
NW: The Tea Party is not monolithic. There is a battle between people
who care about liberty and the Constitution and the Republican
Establishment who is trying to take ownership of it and redirect it for
its own purposes.
*JS: In your essay, “**Tea Time in America*
<http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/wolf21/English>*" you said
that some of the Tea Party’s proposals are “ahead of their time.” What
are some examples?*
NW: I used to think “End the Fed" people were crackpots. The media
paints them as deranged. But it turned out we had good reason to have
more oversight. Or take their platform about states’ rights.
Demographically, I’m a hippie from San Francisco and I’m not culturally
inclined to be sympathetic to states' rights. My cultural heritage is
FDR and Medicare and federal government solutions. But if you think
through the analysis, strengthening state rights is a good corrective of
the aggregation of an over-reaching federal power. Take California’s
challenge of the Patriot Act or states like Vermont leading the way with
addressing the corruption of the voting system. It’s a good example of
the Tea Party thinking out of the box on how to address a problem.
*JS: **That’s interesting because strengthening states' rights is key to
their entire platform, including protesting health care reform. Would
you call yourself pro-Tea Party?*
NW: Even though I’m appalled when racism surfaces, and I personally
don’t agree with certain policy solutions and a lot of what they believe
in, as someone who is very concerned about reinvigorating democracy the
Tea Parties are an answer to what I asked for.
I was basically saying don’t sit around waiting for the two corrupted
established parties to restore the Constitution or the Republic. The
founding generation was birthed by the rabble of all walks of life that
got fed up and did risky things because they were captivated by the
breath of liberty. There is a looming oligarchy and it is up to the
people to organize a grassroots movement and push back. You guys have to
do it yourself. Their response is the most visible and the initiative
they show is the most recognizable. People of all kinds are waking up.
Even people passionate for Obama realize even that knight on a white
horse isn’t enough to roll back the oligarchy. I’m seeing a lot of
action on the left as well that is never reported. But the Tea Party
response is the most visible and the initiative they show is the most
recognizable.
*JS: **How do you feel about your books bolstering a fight for policies
you don’t agree with?*
NW: If people are taking my book seriously and organizing, getting into
office, caring about the constitution, and not waiting for someone else
to lead them, I think, God bless them. All of us should be doing that.
The left should be doing that. There is always the risk in advocating
for democracy that the first people to wake up might not be your team,
but that is a risk worth taking. I would rather have citizens I don’t
agree with organized and active than an oligarchy of people that I agree
with.
*JS: **These days the kinds of comparisons you make in your book between
America and Nazis and fascists are mostly coming out of the mouths of
people like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. What do you make of the
commonality of the rhetoric?*
NW: There is no question that the right-wing idea machine saw how that
message was resonating in the run-up to the last election. A YouTube
video of a speech I gave went viral and got 850,000 hits. I’m not saying
that is the only thing that caused this, but there is no question that
the Republican and the right wing are quick to co-opt the strategic
language that's resonating on the other side and turn it against itself.
*JS: **How is your comparison of Obama to Hitler any different from
someone at a Tea Party holding up a placard of Obama with a Hitler
mustache?*
NW: Those signs are offensive. If only the Holocaust was just about
imposing health care on my people. Obama has done things like Hitler
did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people
up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture
impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn’t a
question of what has been done that Hitler did. It’s what does every
dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now.
The real fight isn’t left or right but between forces of democracy
across the spectrum and the forces of tyranny.
*JS: **People criticize Beck’s use of that kind of language as
incendiary and hyperbolic. Why is your use any different?*
NW: Every time I use those analogies, I am doing it with a concrete
footnoted historical context. When people like Glenn Beck throw around
the word Nazi without taking that kind of care, they are engaging in
demagoguery. There’s an important difference.
*JS: **What about your warnings about concentration camps and martial
law? How do they compare to conspiratorial fears about FEMA
concentration camps?*
NW: With the FEMA rumor, I have heard some suggestive first-person
accounts that some good reporters should follow up on. But until I see
two well-documented sources of it, I can’t speak to it at all.
*JS: **Well, more generally, you talk about the possibility of
concentration camps and martial law.*
NW: I think we have gone very far down that road. I met Muslim
immigrants in Brooklyn who were swept up in 9-11 raids, held in abusive
conditions, beaten, denied rights. That’s how things started in Germany.
Guantanamo was modeled after what Stalin developed for the Gulag. Why
are we engaged in psychological denial that it’s not a concentration
camp? In terms of martial law, my god. Since the book came out they
deployed a brigade in the U.S. and suspended the Posse Comitatus Act.
There is no question that it’s something to take seriously. People have
a histrionic view of what martial law will look like.
I’m not worried that tomorrow there will be a battalion outside your
Greenwich Village apartment. I’m worried about things like the McCain
Liberman bill that would define enemy belligerents so loosely it would
include Americans, which is just like Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini.
If Obama tries people with military tribunals, setting that precedent,
that is what a military state does. That is what martial law looks like.
From a constitutional point of view Bush passing through the Patriot Act
is no worse than Obama renewing it.
/Editor's note: This piece originally said that the Nation had called
"The End of America" the best political book of 2007. In fact, John
Nichols said that Wolf's book was "the most valuable political book" of
2007 in a blog post on the Nation.com <http://Nation.com>./
/Justine Sharrock is a former Mother Jones staffer. Her book Tortured:
How Our Cowardly Leaders Abused Prisoners, American Soldiers, and
Everything We're Fighting For, will be out in June. For more of her
stories, click here <http://www.motherjones.com/authors/justine-sharrock>./
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
George Vye
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
http://dieoff.org/
http://www.vhemt.org/
After Hubris Comes Nemesis
* ~ Byron King, Whiskey and Gunpowder*
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