stuff i wrote to america

discussion found here : http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread500992/pg8#pid7098018

Originally posted by Kryties :
Yes but the countries where they come from don’t make a huge deal of declaring that they are the Worlds Best at everything and making sure the world knows it.

Originally posted by Stormdancer777 :
Are you sure?
You see many Americans going to foreign countries, and ?
What exactly do they say?
Hi I am an American, you suck ? :lol:

quintal :
You dont have to meet americans in person to observe that this is a very common behavior among them.
Just frequent social spaces on the net… it happens everytime a bunch of americans are around. There are always some typical americans who never waste an opportunity of expressing their complete despise from any other country than their own.

The point is, there are obnoxious overly proud nationals in every country but in america, it is the norm. It is the crap you are fed with from craddle to grave. Only a minority of americans have wisen up and realized that theirs ISNT the greatest country in the world, and theirs ISNT the good giant of world’s history.

Brainwashed obnoxious children, that’s what you rightly pass for. Except a minority.

I explain it with History, the united states are a young nation that has never known war on its soil.
We europeans know that our countries are evil, because our countries have committed horrible deeds many times in the course of two millenia and we know it.

But you guys… your idea of yourselves is more like a disney cartoon than a historical documentary. You believe you only do good in the world.

And this is not only obnoxious and ridiculous, it is psychotic and evil.

When you can’t face your negative side, you are a human hazard. You walk around claiming how great you are while shitting on everyone’s face and singing halleluya.

WE know we screw around with weaker nations. You dont know you do. You can’t face that reality. It would shatter your dreamworld of “america is GOOD”.
This is more than stupid, this is insane and evil.

Stop pretending to be good, you aren’t. You are Farking nazi germany. You are the BAD cop of the world.
You are Britain’s pitbull. You are the visible center of the world’s dark empire. Not good.

Since 9/11 nearly everyone has realized that.
The show is over. Maybe it’s time for you (I’m talking here about the ignorant americans) to get a clue too.

P.S. As for healing. Yes healing is a good idea. And healing takes one thing to start with : facing the sickness. The pain. The error of one’s ways. Good luck because as a whole you seem uncannily unaccustomed to doing it.
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http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread500992/pg8#pid7098371
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Originally posted by soul of integrity

america’s not sick.

america’s terminal.

300 million souls in a capsized boat.

me, i’m hanging on for the ride, and enjoying a front row seat.

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quintal:
at least dont be part of a human rosy-cross like the actors in Titanic ;-)
(she was holding her arms out while he was holding the rose on her chest)
these movies are evil.

The whole world may capsize if the USA do, but many will cheer anyway if they do because they’ve pissed them off for too long.

I believe this and other discussions on the same topic are a chance we are giving to the ignorant americans : get a clue, fess up, man up because you dont have much time left to do it. Loose the macho john wayne “we are the best” crap, you’re really out of time now.

You’re nearly exploding and you’ll only have the inner strength and the outside help not to burst completely belly up if you STOP acting like the self-satisfied morons you have acted like for so long.

NO you arent the best. No the others arent inferior. No they arent “backward” (sic) (it is spelt “backwards” sir, in YOUR native language which isnt mine.)

No your ways arent the best ways. No the mission of america isnt about parading yelling how you are better than everyone else.

You took your mission in the most childish ignorant immature way, like 2 year old kids proud that their daddy has a big car.
Alright, your dad has a big car, but the car was supposed to help everybody, to be of SERVICE, not to stomp on everyone’s face.

America was the only country to have a constitution that guarantees that its citizens are kings in their own right, on their own land. That’s what it’s about. Not lording it over the people of the world, not parading around shitting on everybody else barking that you’re the best.

Any gift you have, you have it in order to SERVE others, not to serve yourself. That’s maturity.

You have been given more than others and you have used this opportunity to require less of yourselves than the rest of the world require of themselves.

“spoiled brat” is perfectly fitting.

Pain, discomfort, fear are doing you much good. Finally some of you are getting a clue and trying to warn the rest. The current crisis is a blessing. You blew it after 9/11, it was a great opportunity that you turned into fear, war and dictatorship.

Now comes the mother of all economic depressions. Show us what you got. We wanna see the real cowboys now.

Guess what, the people you despise and call “backwards” know how to live off the land with little money or tech. They know how to heal, feed and so on with self made means. Some even know how to respect nature around them. That’s how they survived for at least FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS (the aborigenes).

Who’s your daddy now?
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http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread500992/pg9#pid7098849
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Originally posted by NightSkyeB4Dawn

Just look over the few post that are here is this thread. The hatred from some is almost palpable and this is just a pixel in the whole picture.

With this kind of hatred do you really think we stand a chance?

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quintal:
I dont know if you’re refering to my posts when mentionning hatred, but you couldnt be more wrong.
When you slap the face of a friend who is acting drunk, it isn’t out of hate.
I believe most people in the world today who are annoyed at America would love the big brother to behave well again. It’s just like family. You may be shouting at your sibling but deep down what you want is him/her to be useful and productive again.

When France told you not to go to Iraq you lashed out a hate propaganda campaign instead of seeing it was out of friendship that they disapproved you.

You have decimated (killed 10% of) the Iraqi people (if we add the UN blockade to the post-911 invasion) and when some europeans are outraged you cry “hatred”.

Stop killing, dude.
Then we’ll talk.

Be angry at the French for having decimated the people of Rwanda (literally, 10% killed) in 3 months in 1994. At least they arent parading the world over claiming to be the do-gooders of the world, or are they? Nobody’s taking them seriously anyway (not even the French themselves), and their guns are far from being as scary as yours.

You do stand a chance that’s why i’m talking to you, Moe !

If you didnt i’d just have given up and wouldnt try to tell you what to do.

We are not hating, we are disappointed and alarmed.
But we still believe you can straighten up.
Provided you stop the bullshit.
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Originally posted by soul of integrity

wow. i guess that was just some stuff that needed to be said by someone, and definatley heard by somebody.

like wordplay???

who’s your daddy now??

FAT plus HER = FATHER

….. and he needed to make HER FAT to become a FATHER …..

just a thought, i’m here all soul long ….

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quintal:
Guess what I’ve been having this same tirade many times in the past years.
It didnt do much so this time I’m saving my posts from this thread to my blog.
I intend to collect this stuff from now on and see where it goes from there.

thx for the fat-her insight too. (but my wordplays were spontaneous and unvoluntary:-))

When Is It Going To Be Enough, America?

I shamelessly stole this piece from Lorie Kramer’s site.

Lorie Kramer
March 15, 2009

Believe it or not, this started being about HR875 & S425, but in the writing of it, it’s just so much more.
This is about the amazing things happening in this nation,
and the inconceivable tolerance the American public has of it all.<

Dear, dear, America,When is it going to be enough? Haven’t you been disrespected, marginalized, misdirected, demeaned, disregarded, ignored, insulted, bullshitted, deliberately misinformed, uninformed, manipulated, controlled, cheated, lied to, poisoned, killed…and generally just plane old screwed for long enough? I’m really starting to wonder about you. Why isn’t all that enough for you America? Yoo Hoo! Are you in there?

How does it make sense that you can be thrown into jail for an unpaid traffic ticket, perhaps for days if it’s on a weekend yet; Bernard Madoff who ruined the lives of thousands gets to hang out in luxury, being available to do whatever one does when they are trying to cover their assets before going to jail? Isn’t that enough for you, America?

You are a number. You are photographed hundreds of times everyday. They intend to track you everywhere, they pretty much already do. They already have your grocery cards, and your cars, and your phones, and your computers. They want to “chip” you, and your animals. You have no privacy. Why isn’t that enough for you, America?

You work, most of you, when you can. Those that don’t work and live off the system just don’t “get it”. Then you pay for their dead weight and their children’s. Hell, you allow yourselves to work a third of the year just to pay taxes! Do you think that’s what our founding fathers had in mind? Is that not enough for you YET, America?

You have worked hard for years, tried to save, invested for the future; only to see your future become a far less comfortable one, if it will be there for you at all. All this because of the legalized gambling known as “the stock market”. All this so that bankers and corporations and politicians can profit, from your losses. And you allow them to throw more and more of your money down the toilet. Your dollar is dying. The domino effect of the situation resulted in a global financial meltdown. Why isn’t THAT enough for you, America?

As the late great Bill Hicks said, “Entertainment is a weapon.” Your “news” is controlled and manufactured. Your comedians are the journalists. You and your children are stupefied and zombified by television. Movies, cars, sports and fashion, and Hallmark holidays; they take your attention and your resources. You are in debt up to your ears. Isn’t that enough for you, America?

Your jobs have already gone overseas or are disappearing daily. Welfare, which used to be an embarrassing thing to partake of, is a way of life for millions. Is that enough for you, America?

Your Constitution might as well not even exist. You allow the marginalizing and silencing of those who would honor it. You call them “possible terrorists”. You watch as they try to deny you your rights. You allow them to ignore our borders and the consequences.

You don’t care enough anymore whether or not the person who “leads” your nation can provide the necessary qualifications to even be considered to run for the office, let alone occupy it. That’s why “they” can slip such schmucks in on you, you make it so easy. Don’t YOU and your children have to throw down your birth certificates for all kinds of things? I thought so. It’s the law. Try and not do it and see what happens. Your current liar in chief didn’t have to do it. Why isn’t THAT enough for you, America?

Then, you are told that you have “no standing” in YOUR own courts to question whether or not these Constitutional requirements have been fulfilled. One or two of you make it part of the way only to be told you WILL NOT BE HEARD, and that’s OK with you! Why isn’t THAT enough for you America? Any of you, and I mean ANY of you has standing to ask this question because it is YOUR Constitution that is OUR LAW.

Should you decide to voice your opinion in disagreement with those in power, you are “allowed” to do so but are penned in cages, or trodden by horses, or beaten or sprayed or tazed. Why isn’t THAT enough for you America?

Your rights have been marginalized; you allow voter fraud to go unchecked. You scream for change but at the next election, you re-elect all but 8 of the 257 about which you complain. Your cities and towns are in disrepair, your infrastructure is crumbling. You devalue your teachers, and reward thieves. You let your schools flounder; therefore many of your children are ignorant (not stupid, there’s a difference). Too many of you are fat, way too many of you are on way too many drugs, legal or not. Your sweeteners cause cancer. You are diseased with mystery illnesses, cancer and HIV/AIDS; and your vaccines are dangerous. Why isn’t all of THAT enough for you, America?

Your families are in shambles. Your children are parents. Divorce is expected. Lying is expected and accepted. Sex is perverted. Morals are old-fashioned. Love is hardly a thing of real value. All this supported by your “media” and “entertainment” industry. Is that still not enough for you, America?

Your fellow Americans have raised valid questions about what actually happened on 9-11. Instead of investigating and insisting on the truth, you demonize them and act as if there could be no possibility of any foul play. There is plenty of evidence that the “official” story is not complete or accurate. You saw with your own eyes how that went down. They continue to lie to you and use the tragedy to further restrict your liberties. Why isn’t THAT enough for you, America?

You are no longer considered one of the good guys in the geopolitical scheme of things. You are hated and reviled for your foreign policy. War profiteering is more important than human life; more important than you and your children’s lives; and those of “the enemy”. Your military and government tortures. Your sons and daughters have died for greed and nation building; and now they want Iran. Why isn’t THAT enough for you, America?

Your drinking water is laced with mind numbing poison. Your cell phones are rotting your brains. You live in an electromagnetic cess pool. Is that enough for you, America?

Your atmosphere, the air you need to breathe, and the waters that you and all other living things on the planet need to live, have been poisoned, often beyond repair; to facilitate military/industrial desires. Why isn’t THAT enough for you, America?

And now, they are after your food, AGAIN. That’s what this started to be about, HR875 & S425. The HR875 bill is in committee in the House with 40, count them, 40 sponsors that will let the government control what you can and cannot do on your own land, with your own crops or livestock, or organic garden. Ixquick it. This bill was introduced by Rosa DeLauro whose husband, Stanley Greenberg, works for Monsanto. This bears repeating. This bill was introduced by Rosa DeLauro whose husband, Stanley Greenberg, works for Monsanto. Do you honestly think this is going to be GOOD for you? Don’t we already have the FDA and the USDA and the FSIS? Why do we need this new agency of control?

Growing one’s own food, local farms, co-ops and ranches are things that do indeed need to be protected. If this global crisis continues, and all indications are that it will; what are you going to do for food if your local growers go away because of government regulation and/or fines and penalties? Remember victory gardens, they used to be a good idea, now they are a threat? It looks to me like what we need to protect our food from is our government. If they finally go after your food, and you’d better know they are, what are you going to do about it? I’ll write more on that and watch it. But, they’ll still try and do it. When they do, which is NOW, will THAT be enough for you, America?

It’s all more than enough for me. Where the hell are you, America?

When is enough going to be enough?

Lorie Kramer
Houston, TX

[snipped email address]

“As stern as it sometimes appears to be, the truth is love and is
never anything but love.”
Vernon Howard

Lorie Kramer has updated the above article on her site :
So, You Want Some Ideas, America?

credo mutwa on barack obama

An actor walks upon the floodlit stage of life
wearing a mask of an angel beneath a demon’s gown.
Pretence smiles upon the crowded hall of life
holding out hope as bright as it is false.
Son of a woman in whose veins flows the blood
of ancient Ireland and dark Africa’s plains.
You are Obama, nick-named the standing king
You are Barack, oh, son born to deceive
The suffering hoards of Africa look up to you,
See a black saviour where nought but a Judas strides.
An entrapper of nations, bringer of dismal war
Behind the robes and the nylon wings of hope
Oh, may those who look upon you, see you as you are.
May those who hope in you behold you as you be
A prince deceitful to bring down Africa’s shrines
A siren who leads Africa’s ships onto rocks of obliteration.
Your rule my lord will not be one of peace
Your reign my king will not be one of smiles
Even as we speak in caves both dark and dank
Enraged fanatics plot your dark demise
They will put around your head a bloodwet martyr’s crown.
Oh black Kennedy following the one before
May God forgive thee and thy fiery spouse
As you walk in silence from the stage of life
Barack Obama, blessed son, Oh standing king.

Found on David Icke’s website.

bush on trial

also, if i hadn’t done it someone else would have.

classic (americans’ education)

Propaganda – nobody does it better than America

By Paul Weber, 9th August 2002

source page

Over the years, I have had the privilege of meeting and having discussions with people who came to America from countries known for their adherence to totalitarianism: China, Russia, and former east European satellites of the Soviet Union. When we discussed how the state managed to control public opinion under totalitarianism, these people would usually produce a weary, knowledgeable, cynical smile and point out that propaganda in those countries was really done quite incompetently.

If you really want to know propaganda, they said, you need to study American propaganda technique. According to them, it is, undeniably, the best in the world.

“How can that be?” I asked, honestly puzzled.

Propaganda in those countries was too obvious, they told me. As soon as you read the first sentence you knew it was a bunch of propaganda, so you didn’t even bother to read it. If you heard a speech, you knew in the first few words that it was propaganda, and you tuned it out.

“But,” I then queried, “How do you know when it’s just propaganda?”

The expatriates explained that bad propaganda uses obvious terminology that anyone can see through. Anyone hearing the phrase “capitalist running dogs”, knows he’s listening to incompetent propaganda and tunes it out. Lousy propaganda, these knowledgeable but jaded individuals would tell me, appeals to an abstract theory, to a rational thesis that can be disproved. Even though communists had total control of the press, the people just tuned it out (except for those who were the most mentally defective). Most people, they assured me, just went about their lives as best they could, paid lip service to the state, and just tried to keep out of the way of the secret police. But hardly anyone really believed the stuff. The result, after many decades of suffering, was the eventual collapse of the old order once The Great Leader expired, whether his name was Brezhnev, Mao, or Tito.

American propaganda, however, is much cleverer. American propaganda, they patiently explained, relies entirely on emotional appeals. It doesn’t depend on a rational theory that can be disproved: it appeals to things no one can object to.

American propaganda had its birth, so far as I can tell, in the advertising industry. The pioneers of advertising – a truly loathsome bunch – learned early on that people would respond to purely emotional appeals. Abstract theory and logical argument do nothing to spur sales. However, appeals to sexiness, to pride of ownership, to fear of falling behind the neighbors are the stock in trade of advertising executives. A man walking down the street with beautiful women hanging on his arms is not a logical argument, but it sure sells after-shave. A woman in a business suit with a briefcase, strolling along with swaying hips, assuring us she can “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, but never let you forget you’re a man” really sells the perfume.

Let’s take a moment and analyze the particular emotions that this execrable ad appealed to. If you guessed fear, you win the prize. Women often have a fear of inadequacy, particularly in this confused age when they are expected to raise brilliant kids, run a successful business, and be unfailingly sexy, all the time. That silly goal-foisted upon us by feminists and popular culture – is impossible to reach. But maybe there’s hope if you buy the right perfume! Arguments from intimidation and appeals to fear are powerful propaganda tools.

American advertising and propaganda has been refined over the years into a malevolent science, based on the assumption that most people react, not to ideas, but to naked emotion. When I worked at an ad agency many years ago, I learned that the successful agencies know how to appeal to emotions: the stronger and baser, the better.

The seven deadly sins

The seven deadly sins, ad agency wags often say, are the key to selling products. Fear, envy, greed, hatred, and lust: these are the basic tools for good propaganda and effective advertising. By far, the most powerful motivating emotion – the top, most sought-after copywriters will tell you in an unguarded moment, is fear followed closely by greed.

Good propaganda appeals to neither logic nor morality.

Morality and ethics are the death of sales. This is why communist propaganda actually hastened the collapse of communism: the creatures running the Commie Empire thought they should appeal to morality by calling for people to engage in sacrifice for the greater good. They gave endless, droning speeches about the inevitably of communist triumph, based on the Hegelian dialectic. Not only were they wrong: their approach to selling their (virtually unsellable) theory was not clever enough. American propagandists (we can be jingoistically proud to say) would have been able to maintain the absurd social experiment called communism a little longer. They would have scrapped all the theory and focused on appealing images. Though the Commies tried to do this through huge, flag-waving rallies, the disparity between their alleged ideals and the reality they created was just too great.

One tyrant who did take American propaganda to heart was Adolph Hitler. Hitler learned to admire American propaganda through a young American expatriate who described to him, in glowing detail, how Americans enjoyed the atmosphere at football games. This American expatriate, with the memorable name of Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstängl, told the Führer how Americans could be whipped up into a frenzy through blaring music, group cheers, and chants against the enemy. Hitler, genius of evil as he was, immediately saw the value in this form of propaganda and incorporated it into his own rise to power. Prior to Hitler, German political rhetoric was dry, intellectual, and uninspiring. Hitler learned the value of spectacle in whipping up the emotions; the famed Nuremberg rallies were really little more than glorified football halftime shows. Rejecting boring, intellectual rhetoric, Hitler learned to appeal to deeply emotional but meaningless phrases, like the appeal to “blood and soil.” The German people bought it wholesale. Hitler also called for blind loyalty to the “Fatherland,” which eerily echoes our own new cabinet level post of “Homeland” Security.

If you study Nazi propaganda, you will be struck by how well it appeals to gut-level emotions and images – but not thought.

You will see pictures of elderly German women hugging fresh-faced young babies, with captions about the bright future the Führer has brought to German. In fact, German propaganda borrowed the American technique of relying, not so much on words, but on images alone: pictures of handsome German soldiers, sturdy peasants in native costume, and the like. Take a look at any American car commercial featuring rugged farmers tossing bales of hay into the backs of their pickups, and you’ve seen the source from which the Nazis borrowed their propaganda techniques.

The Germans have a well-deserved reputation for producing a lot of really smart people, but this did not prevent them from being completely vulnerable to American-style propaganda. Amazingly, a nation raised on the greatest classical music, the profoundest scientists, the greatest poets, actually fell for propaganda that led them into a hopeless, two-front war against most of the world. Being smart is, in itself, no defense against skilled American propaganda, unless you know and understand the techniques, so you can resist them.

Emotional, gut-level appeals

American politicians learned, early in the twentieth century, that using emotional sales techniques won elections. Furthermore, they learned that emotional appeals got them what they wanted as they advanced towards their long-term goal of becoming Masters of the Universe. From this, we get our modern lexicon of political speech, carefully crafted to appeal to powerful emotions, with either no appeal to reason, or (better yet) a vague appeal to something that sounds foggily reasonable, but is so obscure that no one will bother to dissect it.

Franklin Roosevelt understood this, which is why he called for Social Security. Security is an emotional appeal: no one is against security, are they? Roosevelt backed up his campaign with a masterful appeal to emotions: images of happy, elderly grandparents smiling while hugging their grandchildren, with everything in the world going right because of Social Security. All kinds of government programs were sold on the basis of appealing images and phrases. Roosevelt even appealed to America’s traditional love of freedom, spinning that term by multiplying it into the new Four Freedoms, including Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. Well, what heartless human being could possibly be against that? The Four Freedoms were promoted with images of parents tucking their children cozily into bed, and a happy family gathered around a Thanksgiving dinner, obviously free from want. The campaign was also based on that most powerful of all selling emotions: fear. If you don’t support Social Security, the ads suggested, you will live your last years in utter destitution.

Putzi Hanfstängl, viewing Roosevelt’s evil brilliance from Nazi Germany, was probably jealous.

American advertising executives learned the value of presenting a single image or slogan, and repeating it over and over again until it became ingrained in the public’s consciousness.

Thus we are all aware that Ivory Soap is so pure that it floats: a point that has been repeated for the better part of a century. I’m not sure why I should be impressed that a bar of soap floats, but on the other hand, it’s not intended that I think that far. Politicians now sell their programs the way the advertising creeps sell soap: they dream up a slogan and repeat it over and over again. Thus we get empty slogans like The New Frontier, The New World Order (that one was poorly chosen; it sounds too much like an actual idea), or Reinventing Government (an idea that everyone should favor, except that the idea behind it really means Keeping Government the Same, only no one is supposed to think that far). Empty grandeur sells political products.

Both German and American politicians carried the use of banners to new heights. Flags are impressive emotional symbols, particularly when waved by thousands of enthusiastic people: it’s a rare individual who can resist the collective enthusiasm of thousands of his fellow human beings, cheering about their collective greatness. Putzi Hanfstängl understood this, advising Hitler to fill his public spectacles with not just a few, but countless thousands of swastika flags. The swastika, too, was a brilliant stroke of advertising and propaganda: it has become, in the public consciousness, the official emblem of Nazism, even though it had nothing to do with Germany. In fact, swastikas were used by ancient Hindus and American tribes, but I’m not aware of it being used by anyone in Germany prior to Hitler.

Now observe how Americans in the current crisis have taken to displaying huge flags on their cars. Flags are not rational arguments; they are instruments for whipping up the Madness of Crowds. Observe how many Americans have, with a straight face, called for a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag desecration, oblivious to the obvious contradictions such an amendment would have with the rest of the Constitution. But again, if you learn nothing else about propaganda, learn that it must not appeal to rationality.

Politicians don’t just use warm, fuzzy images to sell us on the road to tyranny. They also need emotional appeals to intimidate their enemies. Thus the small percentage of the population that really does use thought and reason more than emotion must be demonized. Roosevelt managed this with some masterful propaganda strokes. Those who opposed him were Isolationists, and Malefactors of Great Wealth! (The gut-level emotion appealed to here is envy.) Roosevelt thus showed himself to be an early master of what former California Governor Jerry Brown called “buzz words”; that is, words intended to silence counter-argument by appealing to unassailable emotional images. No one is for Isolation, and almost everyone reacts to an appeal to hate anyone who has a lot of money. The latter appeal, of course, had great power during the Great Depression, which Roosevelt managed to maintain for the entire length of his presidency, all the while blaming others for its evils. Was this guy an evil genius, or what?

The propaganda cleverness used in successfully branding anti-war people as Isolationists is breathtaking. After all, a rational person (ah, keep in mind, that’s not a common individual) realizes that those who oppose war are the exact opposite of isolationists. The Old Right at the time called for peaceful, commercial relations with all nations, based on neutrality in foreign affairs. If anything, those who oppose war and meddling in other countries’ affairs are the opposite of Isolationists as they really stand for open, profitable relationships with other countries. The people who stand for such ideas do not “sell” them by means of strictly emotional appeals, so they tend to lose the propaganda wars. When Roosevelt succeeded in whipping the country up into a war-frenzy after steering us into the Pearl Harbor fiasco, the Old Right realized their opposition to the war was hopeless.

Schools – propaganda camps

The role of the government propaganda camps known as public schools cannot be discounted in all this. Schools are not so much centers of learning as they are behavior conditioning camps in which children are taught to be unquestioningly obedient to authority. Since reason and morality are the death of propaganda, schools busy themselves with systematically stunting students’ ability to reason and think in moral terms. Because the government owns the propaganda camps, it’s not surprising that the beneficiary of the propaganda is almost always the government. Americans accept obvious absurdities because they were drilled into their heads, year after year, in the government propaganda camps until they became true and unquestionable.

Use of propaganda by “great presidents”

Thus, everyone knows Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression, even though the worst depression years were precisely those in which he and his party controlled every branch of government. Everyone knows Lincoln was a great president because he saved “government by the people” and freed the slaves, even though he became a war tyrant and only freed the slaves when it was politically convenient to do so. Wilson, everyone knows, made the world “safe for democracy”, evidently by instituting a draft and getting America involved in a European war that was fought for reasons no-one to this day can fathom. When minds are young and pliable – government experts understand this principle – you can fill them with nonsense that is practically impossible to root out. Laughable falsehoods in effect become true because everyone knows them to be true.

The role of “independent experts”, housewives
and “the guy on the street”

Advertising executives learned, early on, that companies could not be too obvious in using their propaganda. If their agenda could be clearly seen, then it could also be rejected. The answer to this problem was the American propaganda technique of the “independent expert” and the “guy on the street.” One of these appeals to our timidity before authority, and the other to our smugness when dealing with someone at or below our perceived social level. Of course, these two techniques are really just two sides of the same coin. In product advertising, sports heroes and celebrities are used to sell corn flakes because no one would listen to the president of Kellogg telling us why corn flakes are so good. In selling detergent, plain-looking housewives are preferable to sexy models because they look just like us. In political propaganda, “experts” are often trotted out to tell us, in convoluted, circular reasoning, why minimum wage laws are really good for us, why a little bit of inflation is good, or why we just can’t rely on the free market for something so crucially important as education. Or, using the “guy on the street” approach, we are told to support idiotic wars because the common soldiers (“our boys”), cannot function unless they know we stand united behind them. If the rare sensible person tries to argue against war, he is accused of making things harder for “our boys.”

War on Terror

This brings us to the latest iteration of masterful American Propaganda: the War on Terrorism. Any attempt to explain why the terrorists (crazed as they obviously were) felt motivated to attack the World Trade Center is looked on as “siding with the terrorists.” Indeed, Ashcroft and Bush have said, in so many words, that if you don’t support them in everything they do, you stand with the terrorists. Ashcroft and Bush have evidently studied their propaganda lessons from World War II, when Roosevelt silenced all opposition by accusing anyone who stood against him of undermining the war effort. Anyone who suggests we should not risk World War III by invading the Middle East is alternately accused of siding with the terrorists, of slandering the memory of those who died, or (of course) of not “standing by our boys” in times of great need. It’s easy to feel alienated in a nation of flag-wavers singing patriotic hymns. The fact that they are marching lockstep to a world in which the government will monitor their e-mail, snoop into their bank accounts, and eventually throw them in jail for voicing opposition doesn’t seem to bother them one bit.

Now, most libertarians or otherwise thoughtful people will react with dismay when told that most of their fellow human beings react so unthinkingly to sock-you-in-the-gut emotional propaganda. Unfortunately, most people are not capable of really thinking things out. Most people really do buy perfume because of the emotional imagery. Most people really do believe the “independent expert”, whether in politics or buying a car. Most people want to go with the crowd, or follow the leader. To do otherwise requires independent thought and the willingness to be ostracized, which is an unbearable psychological burden for many.

If you want to take heart, remember that the Vietnam War ended because a few people just continued to speak against it, despite the overwhelming government propaganda for it. The fact that a lot of the anti-war protesters were motivated by the wrong reasons (support of commies), doesn’t matter in light of the fact they were able to turn the tide. They were right, even if for the wrong reasons. If advocates of freedom continue to speak against the creeping tyranny that our masters justify on the phony grounds of the War on Terrorism, we might just be able to prevent the transition from Republic to Empire.

The thing about propaganda is that, once it is exposed for what it is, no one listens anymore. People tune it out, just as the slaves in Russia and China learned to tune out their official propaganda.

riddles in stone

sirius was everything to ancient egyptians

sirius is what is worshipped through the sun

the five pointed star, the pentagram, is the symbol of sirius

sirius (the dogstar) was the most evil god of the egyptian pantheon

link to the video on the google video site

—> an extract of the video containing the part about sirius from 3:50 onward:

link to the video on the youtube site

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps — by Naomi Wolf

[traduction française]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.

——
<< Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy – but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree – domestically – as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government – the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors – we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security – remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” – didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable – as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. 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”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space – the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”

Creating a terrifying threat – hydra-like, secretive, evil – is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain – which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks – than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

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.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders – opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists – are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA “black site” prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

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. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode – but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order”.

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China – in every closed society – secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens’ groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four – you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: 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”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

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. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government – after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.

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

“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”

“That’ll do it,” the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

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. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s – all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; 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.

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.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America – it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. 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. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year – when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 – the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually – for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence – it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model – you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests – usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

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.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night … Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act – which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere – while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” – a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president – without US citizens realising it yet – the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions – and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack – say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani – because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

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.

We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before – and this is the way it is now.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

· Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.