Is America
on the road to becoming a fascist state? If so, what should journalists do
about it?
Those questions come in response to an elaborate argument in
Naomi Wolf’'s latest book "The End of America," an argument she summarized in a
recent C-SPAN interview. I caught a
piece of that interview and heard her use the word "fascism" to describe her
fear of where post 9/11 America
is heading. Wolf's use of the term is
not just name-calling, like Rush Limbaugh's "femi-nazi," or the more current "Islamo-fascism." She is dead serious,
subtitling her book "a citizen's call to action."
The question for journalists and the citizens they serve is
whether "fascist" is an accurate and appropriate description of the
transformation of the American government since 9/11; or whether it is such an
irresponsible and insensitive use of loaded language that it requires us to
challenge the author — not just quote her.
Having studied the totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th
century, from Mussolini to Stalin to Hitler to Mao to Pinochet, Wolf sees
some common signposts on the road to tyranny, compiling a 10-step program for recognizing
emerging fascism within a democratic society.
Each of the steps becomes a chapter title, so if you want to be the new
Fuhrer all you have to do is:
- Invoke an
external and internal threat
- Establish secret prisons
- Develop a paramilitary
force
- Subject ordinary citizens to surveillance
- Infiltrate citizens' groups
- Arbitrarily
detain and release citizens
- Target key individuals
- Restrict the press
- Cast
criticism as "espionage" and dissent as "treason"
- Subvert the rule of law.
You can imagine the examples she uses to show the congruence
between these historic expressions of fascism and the actions and policies of
the Bush/Cheney administration. It is
not the purpose of this essay to argue for or against the points she makes in
her indictment. Instead, I'd like to
call attention to the dangers of loose language (as I've done
in the past with Bush's use of "crusade" or MoveOn.org's "General
Betray Us" ad).
A word like "
fascism," derived from an Italian word meaning
a "bunch" or "bundle," carries a specific historical and political meaning, but
over the course of a century now bears a heavy freight, a cargo of associations
so overpowering it may have lost its ability to be tested by argument and
evidence.
Let me offer a different example, the word "holocaust." I choose it because Wolf asserts, "I had to include Nazi Germany in my
scrutiny of repressive governments. Many
people are understandably emotionally overwhelmed when the term 'Nazism' or the
name 'Hitler' is introduced into the debate.
As someone who lost relatives on both sides of my family in the
Holocaust, I know this feeling."
Now "holocaust" is an ancient word that denotes the act of "burning
something completely," as in a ritual sacrifice. By the 1950s
"Holocaust" began to be used to
describe the suffering of the Jews under the genocidal machinations of
the
Third Reich. My guess is that Wolf has heard "right to
life" adherents describe millions of abortions as "the Holocaust of our
time." I bet that Wolf, as a supporter
of women's rights and legal abortion, would detest that use of the word
"holocaust."
While the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary
supports the use of "holocaust" to describe something such as the effects of
nuclear war, opinion shifts when it is used by extension to describe the
effects of famine, drought, or disease. The AHD defines "fascism" as "a system
of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent
socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and
censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism."
In his book "Interpretation of Fascism," scholar A. James
Gregor argues that the term "fascism" has been used so promiscuously that it
has lost its meaning except as a generic "term of abuse." He adds that without critical analysis, it
has not been helpful to use the word "fascist" to describe a long list of
complaints that include "racism, genocide, oppression, anti-feminism, and
homophobia."
Wolf's book is full of analysis, some of which any neutral
critic would find persuasive. But in
addition to her unwise dependence upon words like "fascism," her argument
suffers from an affliction that a Shakespeare professor of mine called "Fluellenism." Fluellen was a comic
character in the play "Henry V" who speaks in a funny accent, and whose
elaborate similes are misunderstood.
Near the end of the play, he compares the young King Harry of Monmouth
to Alexander the Great. When challenged,
he argues that Harry was from Monmouth and Alexander from Macedonia,
and that there are rivers in both places, and that salmon swim in both
rivers. In other words, the associative
imagination lets everyone, including fools and rogues, compare anyone to
anything, with little attention to degree.
Can we find comparisons between Bush and Mussolini? Probably.
But we can just as easily compare him to Lincoln or Elvis or Ronald
McDonald.
My passion for this topic comes from an experience I had in
graduate school in the early 1970s.
Allard Lowenstein, a brilliant anti-war congressman from my home
district in New
York, gave a lecture at Stony
Brook University
on Long Island. America
was still mired in Vietnam,
Richard Nixon was still president, Watergate was up ahead of us, the
assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were terrible recent memories, a
group of National Guardsmen had killed four students at Kent
State. In other words, things sucked.
Lowenstein, who would be murdered himself by a crazed assassin,
answered an accusation by a student that America
was becoming a fascist state. The
congressman disagreed, arguing that, in spite of America's
terrible problems, to call America
fascist was to misunderstand both America
and fascism. Another student stood up
and threw something at Lowenstein. It
turned out to be a water balloon, but in an era of political assassinations, it
was a frightening moment.
The balloon hit the lectern and splattered some water on the
speaker, who, with the help of a professor, straightened himself out.
He then said something like this: "What do you think would happen in a
fascist
state to a protesting student who threw a water bomb at a government
official? Do you think he would be able
to sit down in his seat and quietly listen to the rest of the talk?"
The audience burst into applause.
A few years later I was in St.
Petersburg, and Ronald Reagan was running for
president. He was greeted by admirers in
a downtown rally, and there were protesters on hand with signs
comparing Reagan to Hitler and Republicans to Fascists. With the political savvy that marked his
presidency, Reagan called attention to the sign and said something like, "If it
wasn’t for my generation, young man, you might really be living under fascism."
Finally, I am struck by the narrowness of the audience Naomi
Wolf's 10 theses might persuade. Who would be swayed by the argument that America
is heading toward fascism -- except those who already believe that? How much more
persuasive is the argument of a Francis Fukuyama, who, in his book "America
at the Crossroads," argues against the abuses of the neoconservative movement
he helped create.
Which leads me to these bits of advice for journalists
covering politics and elections at such a troubling time:
- Be
skeptical of all claims that the sky is falling. Ground yourself in American history so
that you can compare and contrast your own times to other troubled times,
such as the Civil War, the Depression, the World Wars, the Cold War,
Vietnam, the Civil Rights era, and Watergate.
- Challenge
any language and assertions that are fraught with emotional and historical
weight. (One morning many years ago on NBC's "Today"
show, a celebrity guest kept calling The New York Times "Pravda," and host
Edwin Newman showed him the door.)
- Challenge
any language that sounds like a slogan:
right to life, right to choose, cut and run, mission accomplished,
freedom on the march.
- Analyze political language as part of your
reporting process. This is one of the strategies that make "The Daily
Show" and "The Colbert Report" so popular and persuasive. They pay
close attention to the language of public figures, and, through satire
and humor, reveal the "truthiness" of it.
- Learn
the complex relationship between political corruption and language abuse
by reading "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell.
- Give
special weight to sources and analysts who do not adhere slavishly to a
particular ideology. Look for the
long time member of the NRA who favors some restrictions on gun ownership. Look for the feminist who is troubled by
some of the consequences of legal abortion. People willing to reflect upon and
question some of their own normal affinities can offer powerful testimony.
- Do not
just quote political metaphors and analogies, but test them. Is Iraq
another Vietnam? Would leaving Iraq
be akin to Chamberlain’s accommodations to Hitler through the Munich Pact?
[What do you think when you hear someone like Naomi Wolf
comparing America
to a fascist state? If you were
reporting about her arguments and claims, how would you proceed? -- Comment here.]
