Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Military Commissions Act & The End of America - Part 2

by MoreThanAFlag
Fri Oct 26, 2007 at 03:03:41 PM PST

Welcome to part 2 of our look into Naomi Wolf's "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot [ http://www.amazon.com/End-America-Letter-Warning-Patriot/dp/1933392797 ]", in which she argues that the last seven years have seen Americans living through what she terms the "fascist shift" of society, in which democratic societies move from the rule of law into fascist states through 10 clear-cut steps. While I highly recommend you read the book yourself, I have been compelled to list her 10 steps, and share a few of my thoughts on these and some examples she and others have used to back them up in a semi-short and readable synopsis of the concept.

Wednesday, we addressed the first 5 steps of any fascist shift, and for those of you who have not yet read my previous diary, I recommend you do so here [ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/24/111230/47 (the post to which this post is a reply)] prior to continuing on with the rest of this discussion.

This said, allow me to keep my promise from Wednesday to finish this tale of woe and let us continue on our final 5 steps to fascism. However, these next three points will be rather lengthy, and as such, I may just feel the need to turn this diary into a trilogy, and leave the final two steps for a future part 3, for the sake of length.

THE FASCIST SHIFT:
10 Steps Toward Fascism

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that all must be most aware of change in the air--however slight--lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." - Justice William O. Douglas

"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence." - Charles Beard

As I mentioned Wednesday, in the interests of not having this diary become unreadable, I'm going to try and lay this out as a condensed list. I'll explain a few things as I go (might turn into a book, my history being any indication), but what you're basically going to see is an outline of Ms. Wolf's book, and the talking points I've used so far when talking to others about this. If you would like to add to this, or seek further clarification, well, that's what the comments section is for.

Step VI. Arbitrarily Detain and Release Citizens

Did you know that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), installed in 2002, holds a joint list with the FBI on "potential security threats" which require additional security checks, and also the infamous "no-fly list" where one’s right to travel in or out of the country is removed? If you answered yes, good on you. And if no, listen up. There are several more concerning details than meets the glancing eye.

Prior to 9/11, the "No-fly" list had and estimated 45,000 names on it, while the "potential security threats" list boasted 75,000 names. However, when CBS's 60 Minutes [ http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/05/60minutes/main2066624.shtml ] obtained copies of both lists in 2003, they found both lists had increased over 500-fold, the document containing just the names list for being over 540 pages long. As the CBS investigation noted, the list includes peace activists, movie stars with Arab-sounding last names, priests, nuns, and countless others.

Ok, perhaps it is a mistake, right? At least you have the right to challenge the fact that you're on the list, and free yourself from it. At the very least it would be neat to look over the names to see who is on what. Unfortunately, you can't. In fact, once on the lists, one can never be removed from them, and one is not allowed to know why they are labeled a security risk on the lists. So take a number and, please, remove your shoes...

Of even deeper concern for those whom may have previously known about the lists, the Department of Homeland Security recently began using a "threat ratio" numbering system to rank persons featured on the list. Originally meant to help expedite the screening procedures at airports, this list is increasingly being used to prevent "security risks" from gaining employment or interacting normally in society. Hmm.

Even if these lists don't concern a majority of American citizens, the simple burden of additional searches can last hours, humiliate the searched, and such searches have even been used against foreign diplomats [ http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/23/fm.detained/ ] -- it would seem that no one is exempt, and would appear almost as if the entire process is now being turned into a purely political weapon to intimidate persons at will.

The trends developing through the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA are nothing new historically, however. In 1938, Germany used additional searches to target members of the press and foreign dignitaries that the German government viewed with suspicion or distaste. The Soviets learned the habit well, constantly employing additional searches to detain foreign aid and human rights workers, local dissidents and persons unwanted by the government.

These lists, however, are only the tip of a more deadly assault on our liberties. Our real concern should be this Administration's increasing use of arbitrary search and seizure as authorized under the USA PATRIOT ACT.

The Judiciary can now issue to the Federal Government so-called "blanket warrants" if a case involves terrorism--in other words, the Judge no longer has to be presented with reasonable evidence to justify a search or seizure of evidence by the Federal authorities. Used sparingly? Hardly. Over 4,000 people since 2005 have been arrested, held, and then released without a statement of crime. If a crime is later given as an accusation, they have all been unrelated to the original seizure and are usually petty.

This isn't something new, though. Germany used random arrests and quick releases constantly between 1938 and 1940 to intimidate members of the society or non-party members. The Soviets once again followed suit and would often break into homes, arrest people without charge, and then release them at a later date with no explanation. The obvious effect was that the society became increasingly paranoid and self-censoring.

Yet if a society is seeking to target individuals, they must get these individuals, well, alone. So an obvious precursor to assaulting the individual within the political sphere is to curtail the right of citizens to "peacefully assemble."

At the 2004 Republican National Convention, NYC police denied access [ http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/08/24/rnc.protests/index.html ] to the Great Lawn in Central Park--some distance from the actual convention, and prevented demonstrator access to sidewalks, thus eliminating the ability for citizens to be seen anywhere, let alone demonstrate for or against the event.

A trend even more disturbing that has been long-ignored by the media is President Bush's instituted policy of "protest zones" for those wanting to protest at his public appearances. These zones are cordoned off outside of sight and sound distance of his public events. Event attendees to his speeches are routinely screened and then forced to sign "supporter pledges" to gain access to the events. No pledge, no access. No arguments. Yet this trend isn't unique to President Bush: Hitler used protest zones and pledges at all of his public functions.

Step VII. Target Key Individuals

Ok, so arbitrarily detaining citizens doesn't seem to be doing the trick--at least not for some of the more "pesky" citizens of the nation. What's a fascist government to do, you ask? Target the key individuals fully.

Job loss or career setbacks are usually the easiest way to go.

First, use this trick against the sciences and education:

In 2001, the National Science Foundation stated grants would no longer go to research on the basis of the science alone if that research "undermined" the Bush Administration’s agenda. Note, if a researcher’s grant sources are closed down, he or she is practically neutered as a scientist.

Continuing on, the Bush Administration has stacked scientific advisory committees, which are not supposed to be political, with partisans. In February 2004, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a condemnation of these abuses, signed by 6,000 scientists [ http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/scientists-signon-statement.html ]. It would be later signed by another 12,000 scientists after its release. Apparently for not, as it went unheeded.

But once again, why take the time and energy to develop such complex plans when you can just copy the preexisting plans of history? Goebbels in Germany purged sciences as well, setting up a race-based science institute to replace the degenerate science-based science of non-"coordinated" reality. When German scientists complained that scientific inquiry was suffering from the purges of those who did not agree with the "party line", Hitler remarked that Germany could get along without physics or chemistry for a hundred years.

Moving from science to education, one takes not that it is traditionally the Universities that keep alive the fires of free speech. Knowing this, it is not surprising that they are some of the first institutions targeted during a fascist shift.

In California, a bill called SB5 [ http://www.asccc.org/icas/Agendas/Downloads/EnclosuresJan05/ENCL%207B_%20SB%205%20Senate%20Bill%20.htm ], the "Student Bill of Rights," seeks legally to "balance" classroom discussion. The law was drafted by David Horowitz, of the well-funded right-wing Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which among other agenda items, seeks to have SB5 placed at the Federal level for implementation. Ok, history buffs, why does this sound familiar? That's right! On May 1, 1933, the Neue Studentenrecht law was passed in Germany, aimed at using student organizations to align or "balance" universities with the values of the National Socialist state.

What else is happening around the school yard as of late?

Campus Republicans, helping their Senator introduce SB5, said "certain instructors at SRJC (Santa Rosa Junior College) are in violation of California State Law."

On February 24, 2005, someone posted bright red stars on the doors of ten left-wing faculty members at Santa Rosa Junior College-—a state-funded institution.

State legislators are putting pressure on regents to in turn, put pressure on academics who criticize the Bush agenda. Professor Ward L. Churchill was a tenured professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado. He wrote essay arguing metaphorically that many of the 9/11 victims were not "innocent." Ill-timed? Callous? Certainly. But in an open society, hearing offensive language is the price we pay for open debate. Yet a group of alumni supportive of the Bush Administration called on the Board of the University of Colorado to take action against Churchill. Republican state legislators added their pressure. Note, the state legislature oversees the Board of Regents, and the Board of Regents oversees the President of the University of Colorado. So, in June 2006, Churchill, who has tenure (means you pretty much cannot be fired), was accused of "academic misconduct."

In 2006, Kevin Barrett, lecturer on Islam at the University of Wisconsin (another state school) was also under fire for "[disputing] official findings on the perpetrators of the Sept 11 attacks." Shortly after, conservative talk radio attacked him and sixty-one Wisconsin state legislators—-60 of them Republicans—-condemned Barrett’s "academically dishonest views" and asked that he be fired. The resolution was sent to university officials. Provost Patrick V. Farrell, whose own budget and salary is determined by the state legislature, tried to resist [ http://revcom.us/a/056/barrett-en.html ]: "I want to avoid as much as we can creating some kind of political test for instructors or faculty."

Stanley Fish, professor of law at Florida International University, wrote an op-ed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/opinion/23fish.html ] for The New York Times that argued that professors who introduce partisan ideas in their lectures deserve to be fired. Academic freedom, he wrote, does not include the right to express such views in the classroom. He follows in the footsteps of a one Martin Heidegger, whom wrote in a 1933 essay entitled "The Self-Assertion of the German University", that "academic freedom" was a passé notion that should be expelled from German universities.

One of the important lessons to take from these examples, is that actions such as these can create more self-censorship, and prevent proper teaching. In the direction our country is now headed with education, simple observations on material, such as on political science, journalism, economics, or Constitutional law may be easily construed by partisan hacks as "a political opinion." Under this flawed assumption, professors could get in trouble for teaching the history of the Bush Administration’s failure to sign accords to stem global warming, or the history of the Constitution in light of recent events, etc.

Again, the fascist state leans on university administrators, who in turn lean on professors and students. Italian Fascists leaned on university rectors to scrutinize the politics of those they oversaw, with the rector of Milan’s Catholic University actively informing on politically anti-Fascist students to the secret police. Germany forced by 1933, about 2,000 of the nation’s premier artists and writers to flee for being either Jewish or communist academics and scientists, The Nettle, a Nazi periodical, depicted the emigration as "a triumph for the German nation."

The National Socialist German Students’ League, set up in 1926, sought to get independent professors fired and direct the universities’ resources toward Nazi goals rather than toward pure research. Propaganda Minister Goebbels said, "by the beginning of the academic year 1933-34, 313 full professors had been dismissed... by 1934, some 1600 out of 5000 university teachers had been forced out of their jobs... very quickly, newly Nazified Education Ministries made political criteria central not only for appointments but also for teaching and research."

Fascist societies also target artists and entertainers.

In 2001, Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher said the 9/11 hijackers were "not cowards." Right-wing media attacked, Maher’s advertisers withdrew their support and ABC canceled the show when the season ended. Not too long after, during a London concert on the eve of the Iraq War, Natalie Maines, the Dixie Chicks’ lead singer, said that "We’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." Right-wing bloggers attacked the group, calling for a consumer boycott. By the end of the week there was a 20 percent decline in airplay of their songs. Cumulus Media, which owns 262 stations, stopped 42 of them from playing their music. The New York Times reported in 2006 that other recording artists were scared to express views critical of the Bush Administration—out of fear of being quote, "Dixie Chicked."

A Cumulus station in Shreveport, Louisiana, held an event that included a bulldozer crushing [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2867221.stm ] the Dixie Chicks CD’s. There were also "spontaneous" burnings of piles of these CD’s. Realize that in Germany, students often had "spontaneous" book burnings of books from authors critical of the Nazi’s or Nazi ideology.

Most recently, in an event I'm sure most of you are aware of, in 2007, the Bush Administration even threatened to confiscate Michael Moore’s new film, Sicko before it had a chance to be released in theaters. The Germans in the 1930s and the Czech arts scene in 1948 suffered serious censorship and control similar to this. Castro’s Cuba and Somoza’s Nicaragua are also prime examples...

In the 1950’s, McCarthy and his friends in Congress threatened movie studio heads with boycotts if they did not pressure their actors, producers, and screenwriters to cooperate in Senate hearings related to communism in America. Those who still refused to comply were blacklisted, including at the time, CBS, which found it difficult to work.

Pressure is put on civil servants in a fascist shift: the Bush Administration purged civil servants who did not follow the "party line", long before the United States Attorneys scandal. And when Washington Post reporter Dana Priest exposed the secret CIA prisons, the Bush Administration fired the civil servant who leaked the information.

The Justice Department also let it be known that it was opening a criminal investigation into the leak of information to the New York Times about the NSA eavesdropping program

In 2003, Lt. Commander Charles D Swift was assigned to represent Salim Hamdan, 26-year-old Yemeni taxi driver accused of having been a driver for bin Laden. The Bush Administration wanted the military lawyer to get his client to plead guilty as a condition for meeting with him. Swift was appalled and refused, defending his client. The Navy killed his military career shortly thereafter.

Private lawyers who aided detainees were also threatened with career hits. In January 2007, Charles Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, expressed "shock" that American law firms would represent the detainees, and suggested that companies refuse to do business with them. In essence, a boycott. He read out a list of the names of those very law firms on a radio station. This sounds strangely similar to Senior Nazis whom boycotted Jewish-owned law firms, among other boycotted businesses. Actions such as these also serve to create "no-go zones" in which ordinary citizens understand that if they speak up for the "others" they, too, will face reprisals.

Step VIII. Restrict the Press

In all fascist states, targeting the free press begins with political pressure--loud, angry campaigns for the news to be represented in a way that supports the group that seeks dominance. Attacks escalate to smears, designed to shame members of the press personally; the editors face pressure to fire journalists who are not parroting the party line. A caste of journalists and editors who support the regime develops, whether out of conviction, a wish for advancement, or fear. Then the regime promotes false news in a systematic campaign of disinformation...

America's press--all its many other problems aside--is still a fairly open press, thanks in no small part to the modern and thriving Internet community which can tear apart false facts and allegations. Yet even with this, opinion is being penalized, and false news is being disseminated.

Early on, the Bush Administration pushed back against the press, telling reporters critical of the administration that they could be cut out of the information loop. Ok, aggressive, but still fair game. Yet then the pushback escalated to personal smears. When anti-terror czar Richard Clarke wrote Against All Enemies, the White House attempted to discredit him by sending negative personal information about him to all the major news networks. Ok, personal smears in the press go back to the Revolutionary War, so, don't like it, but no reason for impeachment here.

Until, 2003. Soon, people who published or broadcast information damaging the Bush Administration began to lose their jobs. The most famous case was diplomat Joseph Wilson's wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, who was "outed" by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff in retaliation against her husband's op-ed in The New York Times arguing that the "weapons of mass destruction" rational for the Iraq War was fabricated with false information.

In 2004, Dan Rather, then-CBS News anchor, ran a segment on documents that purported to detail George Bush's failure to show up for his duties during the Vietnam War as a member of the Texas Air National Guard. When the documents were reported as "fake" (though noone can never know for sure in the realm of classified papers), Creative Response Concepts, a Republican PR group that also led the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack on John Kerry's campaign, led a similar assault against him and CBS forced him into early retirement.

Then the Bush Administration began to exert pressure on employees of PBS and NPR.

In 2004, Bush installed a supporter, Kenneth Tomlinson, as chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tomlinson immediately hired a firm to tabulate a list accounting for the political leanings of different pundits involved with PBS, in order to purge the network of its "liberal" bias. This easily followed in the lines of Goebbels in Germany when he did the same to state radio employees in 1933. Tomlinson later resigned n 2005 under heavy public pressure, but the public knowledge that the government could track a person's political leanings sets a dangerous precedent.

In July of 2006, Melanie Martinez, presenter of the PBS children's show The Good Night Show, was found to have many years previously acted in a video spoof of abstinence education programs, PBS executives fired her. They didn't claim that she had lied, or even failed to do her job in any way, but said that the video made her "inappropriate" for the role. I can hardly think of a single employee of PBS or NPR that has not been engaged in political speech at some point in time. This was just a kids' TV show, but recall that this tactic tends to start inoffensively, but set a precedent. Many viewers have begun to notice a more reserved tone on PBS.

Yet a more disturbing trend is in how the press is increasingly being threatened with prison at home and with horrific violence abroad.

No one hurts reporters in the United States in 2007. But reporters are dying under U.S. oversight in Iraq in circumstances that journalists' rights organizations have called suspicious.

In 2003, respected BBC correspondent Kate Adie told [ http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/0321256 ] Irish Radio in an interview that the Pentagon had threatened to fire on independent reporters' locations from the air if they detected the electronic signals that indicated that the reporters were transmitting stories. The Pentagon was also demanding that independent reporters reveal their political positions on the war.

Throughout 2003 then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld constantly attacked the coverage of Iraq by unembedded journalists (the Iraq War press coverage was already being severely restricted by forcing reporters to go only where the Pentagon wanted them to). He targeted Al-Jazeera specifically, claiming they were biased and a radical supporter of terrorist states (anyone who bothers to examine their coverage will note that they are the most balanced and fair Arab news station out there...) His targeting seemed like just words, but many people missed how deadly work has been for Al-Jazeera and other reporters since then.

Al-Jazeera cameraman and bureau chief, Tarek Ayoub, 35, died [ http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0408-03.htm ] when a U.S. missile hit the offices of Al-Jazeera. Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk, 35, died [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,968952,00.html ] shortly thereafter, as did a 27-year-old Spanish cameraman when the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad was hit by a U.S. tank crew. Reporters Without Borders noted that the US keeps track of all places that contain journalists, and journalists check in daily as to their residences and hotel arrangements with US CENTCOM so as to prevent accidents from occurring. A film by a French TV station shows that outside the hotel before the explosion, a US Abrams Tank pulled into the street, carefully adjusted its gun, and only then did it fire. The Army claims that if fired in self-defense...

Many non-embedded journalists have complained of being held and interrogated by US forces for several hours.

Al-Jazeera English-speaking cameraman Sami al-Hajj was detained by the United States while covering the war in Afghanistan and taken to Guantanamo. Associated Press (AP) Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Bilal Hussein was arrested by the US military claiming that he was a "security threat". Hussein's images of children and women suffering in the war are famous. Yet he has never been official charged and is still in prison.

CBS cameraman Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein was wounded by the US military and then taken into custody. Larry Doyle, the CBS News bureau chief in Baghdad , only found out about the incident after receiving an email telling him that the US military would place Hussein [no relation to the AP photographer] on trial in less than 12 hours. The US military never held the trail, for they never produced any charges. But CBS's Hussein was eventually released after the Iraqi attorney general cleared him, over US protests.

If you haven't heard much about these two cases, it may be because CBS and AP management, understandably, do not want to jeopardize their imprisoned staff further. But imagine what this means in the larger context. Say you're the management at CBS or AP and you know that you can't get one of your reporters a fair trial, let alone get him or her out of jail. Yes, this happened in a country far away, but does this act not sent a ripple effect back home? If one is now a reporter or manager for such an organization, they'll be hesitant--if only unconsciously--to write something that might anger the administration or jeopardize one's colleague further.

To add further to this, reporters are facing escalating numbers of investigations and subpoenas in the United States. In August 2006, a New York appeals court ruled that the prosecuter could seize Judith Miller and reporter Philip Shenon's phone records from a story they were reporting on an Islamic charity. That same month, the Department of Homeland Security accused Greg Palast, author of the bestselling critique of the Bush Administration, Armed Madhouse, and TV producer Matt Pascarella of "unauthorized filming of a 'critical national security structure.'" Palast and Pascarella were in Louisiana, filming evacuees who had been made homeless by Hurricane Katrina. They filmed an Exxon Mobil refinery behind the encampment, to give a sense of how unhealthful the setting was for children and the elderly...

Ok, you say, interesting examples, but how is it similar to past fascist states?

In 1923, Italian reporters were often arrested for revealing "state secrets" or "classified information", and the Nazi's would follow suit in the 1931 with this tactic, starting with Carl Ossietzky, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for publishing documents that showed that the German army was engaged in combat that violated the Treaty of Versailles. He would be arrested, released, rearrested, and tortured throughout the Nazi era and, despite international outcry and a Nobel Prize, he would die from the abuse he suffered.

During the 1933 purges in Germany, Goebbels fired 13 percent of the state radio's employees in six months. Radio managers and reporters who were seen as being friendly to the prior liberal broadcasting regime were arrested on corruption charges and taken to the Oranienberg camp, where they were later condemned in a public show trial.

Need I mention that false news and faked documents also come into play as a form of public propaganda?

The Nazi film, Triumph of the Will, showed Hitler's plane descending through the clouds to land. Uniformed paramilitary personnel and civilians gather around the plane's door to welcome him. Hitler emerges to review the troops, dressed identically and massed in orderly rows. Hitler is wearing his own military uniform, greeting and then addressing the crowd in an epic scene of troops hailing their leader. Huge vertical banners are visible and backing the parade ground is Speer's enormous stylized eagle with its wings outspread, in the center of which is a circle containing the intersecting lines of a swastika. In a motif later filmed at one of Hitler's Nuremberg Rally speeches, Hitler says, "I ask... for your support for the accomplishment of this mission... ours is a great mission."

Hmm, this seems familiar...

In the "Mission Accomplished" photo opportunity, Bush descends in a plane over the water to land on the aircraft carrier. He emerges to review and address the gathered troops. Uniformed military personnel clamor to open his plane's door and welcome him. Bush is dressed in a military flight suit, and a horizontal banner reading "Mission Accomplished" stretched behind him. The troops are standing in a vast expanse of orderly rows.

The USS Lincoln event was state-managed by a team of TV production experts: Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer; Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman and lighting expert; and Greg Jenkins, formerly a Fox News producer. Hitler's film was state-managed by Leni Riefenstahl, a visual artist and up and coming filmmaker.

Fake documents, you ask? Need I even mention the build up to the Iraq War?

On May 10, 1940, Colonel Joachim von Ribbentrop explained at a press conference that the Reich had found it necessary to send its troops to invade the Low Countries in order "to safeguard the neutrality of Belgium and Holland." Ribbentrop presented a faked document that purported to show that those countries were about to invade the Ruhr as evidence in favor of the Nazi decision. Nazi propagandists also claimed--falsely--that three million ethnic [Sudeten] Germans in Czechoslovakia were being persecuted and abused. Ok, folks, break out those WMDs...

Tom Kean, the co chair of the 9/11 commission, ok'd an ABC miniseries, to be broadcast without commercials on the five-year anniversary of 9/11, that portrayed scenes of former Clinton White House staff that were fictional. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other Clinton officials protested. Kean was unapologetic, even though the video was being peddled to high schools as a teaching aid. Now listen as Mr. Kean introduces a new epistemology into American discourse: an ordinary lie distorts or hides the truth; the fascist lie is the assertion that truth is not a marker anymore. "I don't think the facts are clear whether Sandy Berger, if the CIA [hung up] or if the line went dead," Kean said. "But they [the producers] chose to portray it this way. My memory is that it could have happened any number of ways."

"It could have happened any number of ways."

In democracy, lying is at most a sneaky tactic in the game. But in a fascist system, lies are the game board itself. Why should Soviet leaders have bothered to have party members who had been purged airbrushed out of official photographs? Not just to diminish their memory--but to assert to citizens that the state held power over memory itself. Why, in Animal Farm, do the pigs, the ruling caste, erase elements of their mission statement, and then deny to the other animals that they have done so? Not simply to advance a specific outcome, but also to make the other animals lose their ability to trust in their own judgment.

Orwell wrote of "a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past." Once you accomplish the flooding of the plain of discourse with lies, you are much closer to closing down an open society. If citizens can't be sure you are telling the truth or not, you can manipulate people in supporting almost anything the state wants to undertake; and it is also much more difficult for citizens to advocate or mobilize on their own behalf: How can they be sure what is right or wrong?...

...Well, fellow citizens, as this has become quite long, I'll end it here for now and ask that you please chew on this for a while, and wait patiently. I'll get to the final two steps later this weekend when I have time. As such, if you have comments or questions, or want to make additions, or call me unpatriotic, or bat-sh**-crazy, that's what the comments section is for. Cheers.

© Kos Media, LLC (emphasis in original)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/26/18342/198 [with comments]

[F6 note -- the promised Part 3 has not (yet) been published]