The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot

I had actually meant to get to this some time ago. Naomi Wolf has written a book entitled The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot. She discusses her theory in an interview with Buzzflash.

Wolf looks at the direct comparisons between events today in the United States and past regimes in which democracy and freedoms were crushed by dictators. What she discovers is that almost all of them use the same 10 steps to curtail personal liberty and suspend democracy.

If you go back to Berlin in 1931, it wouldn't have looked so unrecognizable to us. There was a Parliament that was meeting there. There was a constitution. There were abortion rights organizations, human rights lawyers and activists. There were gay rights organizations. There was modern art. People were doing what we're doing. People were going to the movies. They kept living -- and that's why I draw on diaries and memoirs and personal accounts. People were doing what we're doing. They were shopping. They were leading their lives, even as the catastrophe was tightening and tightening around them.

There are scenes in the books I cite that are exactly the same as the scene that played out in the University of Florida last week when the kid was tasered for asking a question and everyone sat still as he was dragged out. That scene was described by Count Kessler, by Victor Klemperer, in memoirs of Germany form 1931-1933. And people then were saying what we are saying: surely this can't get worse; people will come to their senses.

Historians such as Richard Evans point out that, at that point, if the people of Germany had arisen and confronted the abusers of parliamentary process and of the Constitution, the horrors could have been averted. By the way, I am not looking at Germany to make an analogy of any kind about outcomes. I am Jewish and do not take that issue lightly. What I am doing, and I think we honor the victims of the Holocaust by doing so, is looking at how there are threads that recur in the early years of a fascist shift, and lessons we have to learn in time. What we really have to realize is that in a modern democracy, the shift to a closed society doesn't happen overnight.

Interestingly, this book by Naomi Wolf identifies the methods taken to replace democracy with totalitarian leadership.

Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine actually identifies similar activities and draws on the same events. While the theories are different, they actually seem to compliment each other, Klein identifying how a population in shock allows government to proceed with an agenda they would otherwise reject, and Wolf laying out the steps used by dictators once they have set their agendas in motion.

In light of this, we need to pay close attention to what both Klein and Wolf are saying.

I'll be producing a review of The Shock Doctrine towards the end of this month. Once I've gotten a copy of The End of America, I'll see about putting up a review of that too.

H/T reader SB