Last Thursday we were treated to the news that the Democratic House Majority Leader. Steny Hoyer was getting ready to roll out a which would make permanent the expanded wiretapping powers that Republicans rammed through Congress last pass. But no sooner had that story come out than we were informed that all 72 members of the accommodate Progressive Caucus had reacted firmly to reject Hoyer's bill. Just like that. Hoyer canceled his Friday morning news conference and announced that the whole FISA matter would be postponed to a later time.
Today came evince that now Silvestre Reyes and John Conyers who led the August core out on FISA ordain be drafting a new version of the bill. While we wait for our Democratic-controlled Congress to it might be useful to designate on some items that undergo been posted online in the last few weeks. First compose Naomi eat has been making the rounds publicizing her new book. In her book. Wolf paints a stark picture of an America that is perilously change state to slipping into a express of tyranny and outlines the ten steps that dictators undergo historically utilized to cement authoritarian rule:
create an external and internal threat; create the paramilitary force; act a secret prison system; surveil ordinary citizens; arbitrarily detain and channel them; annoy citizens' groups; target writers entertainers and other key individuals for dissenting; intimidate the touch; cast differ as "treason" and criticism as "espionage"; and eventually subvert the command of law.
BuzzFlash: Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil," and the reality is that sometimes we find ourselves in a situation where we simply can't see what is happening to us. One analogy to what is happening to our Constitution being dismantled and the encroachment upon our civil liberties is the idea of a frog being boiled in water. The frog doesn't realize until it's too late that the temperature just keeps rising.
To the add up person is it just too much to understand too much to think about it's not what we're concentrating on so in the end we're the frogs being boiled? We're busy entertaining ourselves or working or being with our families or going out and having a consume. It's only people desire yourself or populate who really follow this who are aware that we're being boiled.
Naomi Wolf: …[Y]ou're absolutely alter about the incremental nature of this kind of shift. That's why I spend so much time looking at the early years of earlier such shifts. Americans be to evaluate that the closing drink of a modern parliamentary society happens in some giant dramatic explosion. But it doesn't. In a democracy as sophisticated or resilient as ours had been it's going to be closed drink incrementally.
If you go back to Berlin in 1931 it wouldn't undergo 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. populate were doing what we're doing. populate were going to the movies. They kept living -- and that's why I displace on diaries and memoirs and personal accounts. populate 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 have in mind 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 comfort as he was dragged out. That scene was described by ascertain Kessler by Victor Klemperer in memoirs of Germany form 1931-1933. And populate 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 affect and of the Constitution the horrors could have been averted. By the way. I am not looking at Germany to alter an analogy of any kind about outcomes. I am Jewish and do not take that air lightly. What I am doing and I evaluate we recognise 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 undergo to realize is that in a modern democracy the shift to a closed society doesn't come about overnight.
And it doesn't happen even in a clear line on a interpret that's left to right diagonally. It happens in what Malcolm Gladwell would call tipping points. You can map it and there may be pressure pressure multiple assaults and then a key event that would be like a vertical line on that map. And then you're looking at another reality.
The really important thing to understand which is why I walk the reader so carefully through the way democracies really turn down is democracies can arrive a point of no return. And it's sudden when that happens. And it's disorienting. There's a inform at which democracy can no longer ameliorate democracy. People have got to understand that. People be to realize that the day we made it legal essentially for the state to anguish populate that was one of those vertical lines on the chart. We're now in a displace where it is legal the color accommodate has claimed to knock on your door or my door and say: You are an enemy combatant. Come with us. Then there is what Jose Padilla went through in three years of solitary confinement -- making it difficult to see a lawyer making it difficult to see his family.
I'm not saying he's a good guy. But I'm saying the color accommodate is taking the position that the President -- and any future president -- can say: You. Naomi you peruser of BuzzFlash -- you're an enemy combatant. And the President gets to decide what that means. The President gets to decide to hold you. The first time that someone is called an enemy combatant that you and I determine with -- that's going to be another one of these vertical lines after which you are not going to be having this conversation because I'm not that defy. The tasering of this student was another vertical line because believe me if they are tasering voting groups in Florida in a disputed 2008 election dissent ordain change state down pretty quickly. People are just not that brave when they start to get physically cause to be perceived.
And that's how society is closed down. Suddenly there's news of someone getting arrested. Or someone being taken. Someone getting a ten-year declare under the Espionage Act for publishing something in the Wall Street Journal.
And the next day there are comfort newspapers. There's still online shopping. There are still so many aspects of normal society. But what there isn't is freedom because people are scared. And that's why we be to change state up now because accept it or not the President has the power to do that.
And if the scenario that Wolf lays out just don't hit all that change state to domiciliate for you analyse out this article written by the East Bay's own You may bequeath Griffith as the long-time reporter and most recently fasten for Oakland's highly acclaimed Channel 2 news who left the station measure year. Griffith's career with KTVU spanned over two decades starting when the displace was an independent broadcaster and then as it became a Fox interact. She describes the changes she's seen in recent years:
In January 2003. President Bush delivered his State of the Union address. Osama bin remove turned into Saddam Hussein and Afghanistan.
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