About Racism...

Racism has many faces and below overt Racism, it is possible to overcome them with a sincere and open effort

Memorial Day.... 2020

Whenever an image of a flag about memorial day is accompanied with the message how you should always be unconditionally thankful because of the freedoms you enjoy are because of those who died in wars, it gives me pause.

It makes me think of two things. On one side those who died at wars of choice. The reason why they went to war is not because of our freedom or to bring people freedom, it is our lifestyle. We need oil, we need rare metals, we need need cheap labor. We need to sell weapons to create jobs and feed the economy.

We are hated, not because people hate our freedom, they hate being our slaves.

The other is those who died committing war crimes. The sound of the American war machine is not one of freedom, peace and prosperity; it is for many one of terror. Yes, we are not the only one and maybe we are not the most brutal choice. We are regardless, participant and enabler in many places.

Every country wants to believe they are the good guys, that we are on the right, we believe in our exceptionalism. Black and white.

Reality is grey.

It is a day of mourning, reflection and remembrance. Sometimes for people and sometimes for ideals.

WE ARE NOT IN THE SAME BOAT …

(Have seen multiple versions - Would love to give the right attribution to the original)

WE ARE NOT IN THE SAME BOAT …

I heard that we are all in the same boat, but it’s not like that. We are in the same storm, but not in the same boat. Your ship could be shipwrecked and mine might not be. Or vice versa.

For some, quarantine is optimal. A moment of reflection, of re-connection, easy in flip flops, with a cocktail or coffee. For others, this is a desperate financial & family crisis.

For some that live alone they’re facing endless loneliness. While for others it is peace, rest & time with their mother, father, sons & daughters.

With the $600 weekly increase in unemployment some are bringing in more money to their households than they were working. Others are working more hours for less money due to pay cuts or loss in sales.

Some were concerned about getting a certain candy for Easter while others were concerned if there would be enough bread, milk and eggs for the weekend.

Some want to go back to work because they don’t qualify for unemployment and are running out of money. Others want to kill those who break the quarantine.

Some are home spending 2-3 hours/day helping their child with online schooling while others are spending 2-3 hours/day to educate their children on top of a 10-12 hour workday.

Some have experienced the near death of the virus, some have already lost someone from it and some are not sure if their loved ones are going to make it. Others don’t believe this is a big deal.

Some have faith in God and expect miracles during this 2020. Others say the worst is yet to come.

So, friends, we are not in the same boat. We are going through a time when our perceptions and needs are completely different.

Each of us will emerge, in our own way, from this storm. It is very important to see beyond what is seen at first glance. Not just looking, actually seeing.

We are all on different ships during this storm experiencing a very different journey.

-Unknown author

'Every Third Thursday' by Joanna Fountaine Crawford

'Every Third Thursday' by Joanna Fountaine Crawford

Every third Tuesday, I am a Buddhist

I empty my mind and lighten my heart

And try to let go of attachments

Every other Friday, I am a Christian.

I look for the least of these

And try to love God and my neighbor

The full moon of the month finds me Wiccan;

I honor the dual nature of God

And find my rhythm as maiden, mother or crone

On the 15th of the month, I am humanist

I respect science, integrity of fellow humans

And all that we have learned and have made

Every fourth Wednesday, I am Hindu

I take a breath, and understand that what is unfinished now

Will remain for me to continue...next life

On alternate Fridays, I am Jewish

'Y'varekh'kha ADONAI v'yishmerekha,

I tell my children, softly touching each head

And the Thursdays and the Mondays, and the Saturdays and Sundays,

And all the other days in between

Find me reading, or listening, or watching

Philosophers, Muslims, Mormons, Baha’i and more

Fill my heart, touch my soul

And yet...

The one thing that none of these provide

To me

Is the certitude that they are The One

They lend me wisdom, sing to my heart

Cause me to question, help me find answers

Make me more me

And at the end of the day, every day,

I am Unitarian Universalist.

In parcel and in pledge

And with all my heart, all my soul,

All my mind and all my strength

I honor this faith

I hold it close

As it lets me run free.

Why do I post (protest, call, write, march,…)? (from 2017)

Why do I post (protest, call, write, march,…)? 

Because I have daughters and I tell them they have the same rights as any other person. Therefore I need to make sure they actually do. 

I want them to be empowered. 

I want them to know that their life, their body and their mind are that, theirs. 

What they do with them is their choice. 

I want them to know that reason and empathy are better ways to move through life, to learn, to connect with others and expand beyond arbitrary borders. I want them to know that anti-women policies, anti-feminism, misogyny, and any form of discrimination are not acceptable; I do not want to see any of those normalized more than they are now. 

 I do not want them limited or hidden in shadows to satisfy some toxic masculinity or religious fanaticism, that abandons reason and embraces authoritarianism.

(From 2017)

Tell me a story…

Tell me a story, said the girl. What story? More important how can you see me?

She sighed with the look where the word obtuse is used to describe intelligence, then with some patience she continued:

Tell me a story where there are black and whites and no grays.

Tell me a story where a heart is open and always rewarded.

A story where nothing bad ever happens and mistakes are solved, and pain is not there.

Where the “bad” ones always lose and vanish on a undefined oblivion.

Tell me a story with no darkness.

A story where the protagonist will always be loved.

Tell me a story where there always is sun in the face and brings laughter

If you can’t then tell me a story where it is dark and monsters abound.

Tell me a story where power and darkness go hand in hand and there is nothing but pain.

So now you know, tell me a story that is not real.

Because if you try to tell me a real story, you will say that a heart can be broken and mended

That tears and laughter intertwine.

Where all is gray, and you have to decide in an ambiguous world.

A story where the “bad”ones sometimes stay.

A story where beyond all reason hope stays.

Where beauty can be found in darkness.

Where darkness is found in beauty.

A story where day follows the night again and again and again.

Where sometimes the sun and the rain provide laughter and quietness, life and dead, joy and sadness.

That sometimes you need to scream and others breath.

And that story can only be mine, so it is not yet written, it is not your story to tell, but you can walk, sit, run with me to witness it.

If I stop telling it, remind me of the other stories, the unreal ones, so I do not become one.

I promise it will be better than any story you can think.

I agreed.

Reflection on a little Buddhist ritual...

In Buddhism when a person dies, people turn their back during the funeral to the person. The belief is that on its way to a higher plane, the soul sees as horrors its mistakes or things that tie it back to their previous life and panics. While it tries to escape these horrors or chains, it jumps to the same plane or on a lower one.

I take that a second aspect if the ritual is to let go for ones sake, if I hold to the person I am also holding to my sadness, anger and lack of comprehension to what happened a see through my eyes. I am actually forging the horrors and chains that will tie me up. The consequence is also that then we lose sight of our life and the life around us. So for our own well being, you need to do it.

It is the living creating the chains inside their mind. We are the one who decide to hold to a memory or emotion and try to keep it in an idealized past, a still picture in the chaos of a world of individuals and changing tides.

You can honor the memory of the person but without any sort of judgment, which translates into memories of the actions of the person and its consequences, not the interpretation of the will and judgement; that allows to keep on living, moving forward. So in the end the goal is to thin our chains and although I do not know if Buddhists are correct, I hope to see you all in the next plane, to have a good chat and laugh.

Hope...

Can you give hope? Given the season it is a topic in the air. From what I can see the answer is No. If we look to the story of Pandora (who was framned I am sure), after all the ills in the world left all was left in the box was Hope.

Pandora held to the box or hope, still it was only significant as long as she held it. She could drop it or give it out, making it a very nice box (although no descriptions actually exist), so worthless. It is only valuable or usefull as long as she helds to it.

So hope seems to be more of a personal/individual state of mind, therefore you can find it in places (like a concentration camp) where against all reason it is there. You have to "buy" its premise.

What you can do is help enable it, removing stress on someone so they can deal with the ugly aspects of life. Religions serve that purpose in part, you put your faith in something external that will fix things. It is also not dependant on a religion, it is again a personal belief, based on irrational conclusions that keeps you alive, its source may be deep into our reptilian brain, then we put a nice coat of rationality to explain it.

Yet it all goes back to the individual, as long as you hold the box, you can believe you will be fine.

So despite all, it is always good to keep that box. Thank you Pandora for keeping it safe.

What we are and the empty space between us…

I am fascinated by the idea of matter, its construction and interaction. When I press my finger against a table all that happens is that the electromagnetic bonds between the atoms of the table are far more aligned that the ones in my fingertip, they repel the fields created by the atoms in my molecules.

They are strong enough not just to avoid my finger passing between them, pushing the particles as I do with air. They are so “solid”, that the surface created by my bonds, flexes.

This in turn sends a series of electromagnetic echoes into the molecules of my brain that are not just aligned to assemble a cell, but are also capable of re-alignment to create a memory of the phenomenon.

They are also constructed in a way that allows me express conscience of the event. The funny thing is that the space between these particles is huge in relation to their size, maybe some of it filled with dark matter. Then we have the interaction of energy fields across a distance between really small particles and yet powerful enough for the ones in my brain to be able to express the sensation, to be able to “see” this text as I type it on a screen, my limited senses, perceive as a continuous surface.

From an older blog...

god and other entities...

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 12:41pm

There is a series on NPR called “This I Believe” where people from different sides of life write down their ideas and thoughts, one I heard some time ago was from Pen Jilette, the magician-comedian, and i was surprised on how deep his train of thought was.

The essay (attached below from http://www.thisibelieve.org) talks about why he does to believe in God.

I consider myself more of on the Agnostic Theism side of life (I have decided to believe there is a god although I cannot prove it), which pares really well with my firm belief in rational humanism.
I refuse to believe in “the God”, more than anything because I do not think an all powerful, omniscient and omnipresent entity actually can be defined in anthropological terms as many religions do. I rather call it “What Is”. It cannot have or express human emotions or needs, considering it is not human and has no needs (see the omni’s list). This puts me somewhere between Islam and Judaism.

I believe, if the omnipresent part is true, that then in reality we are all part of It, actually everything is a part of It. Now, in a Universe where everything has its counterpart, then the dark side, evil, the Devil etc is defined as “What is Not”. Hell is the absence of being.

This definition allows a couple of things like free will, you move between both sides, your choice where you go; also explains why the entity is not intervening directly in human affairs as a separate being (putting me close to Deism); It allows to explain the tenants of Christianity like the holy trinity, Jesus as the son of God, the need for him to die, etc., which puts me close to the Catholic Church.

I also like the part of no intervention because, as the essay points out, I am good to others because I truly believe it is the best (notice not the right) thing to do. I value Ethics over morality. Anyway I really liked the essay, I share many of its views and this puts back into Humanism.

So anyway, here is the essay:

There is No God

As heard on NPR’s Morning Edition, November 21, 2005.

I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy—you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do. You can’t prove that there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word “elephant” includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.

But, this “This I Believe” thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life’s big picture, some rules to live by. So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God.”

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Believing there’s no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I’m wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don’t travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that’s always fun. It means I’m learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

Penn Jillette is the taller, louder half of the magic and comedy act Penn and Teller. He is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and has lectured at Oxford and MIT. Penn has co-authored three best-selling books and is executive producer of the documentary film, “The Aristocrats.”

Independently produced for NPR by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with Emily Botein and Viki Merrick. Photo by Nubar Alexanian.

The American Tradition

A few weeks ago, I saw an exchange between Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) and Bill O'Reilly about what are the "traditional American values". As you may be be aware, I tend to favor the progressive side of the conversation.

The point from BO'R was that America is a faithful and moral society, where Bible inspired morality, family and capitalism as an expression of self-reliancew are the norm. The funny thing about this view is that it has never been real.

It seems the image many people have in their head s is a consequence of the 1950's propaganda efforts that the American government initiated to "sell" America in the third world. Part of a global image campaign (remember the Cold War?). This image was sold in part via TV shows, which extended well beyond the original effort and went all the way into the Reagan era (80's). A world where a perfect family with deep christian values, where the American Dream always delivered came to us via the magic screen. Think sitcoms.

On the other hand, JS made the point that the real "American Value" was that of being a progressive society. A society where through time individual freedom, equality, anti-slavery, desegregation, women's rights, etc. were always being adopted into the society. Therefore Gay Marriage is the next step into this progression (which I support).

Interesting to see that many of those progressions were not adopted or driven by the society at large (the masses, as in the culturally challenged majority), they were driven by fringe groups and through the judicial system, at least on the beginning.

So it turns out, that it is the "activist judges", derided by the Conservative movement, are the ones who keep this country aligned or true with its core values.

The right to die initiative and other topics...

Here in Washington, there is right now an  initiative in the upcoming ballot to allow terminally ill patients to request for a prescription that will end their lives (they have to administer the drugs themselves).  

This week was "Life week" at the Catholic church. The pro-life argument expanded over this initiative and it was as expected, the main topic on the sermon last Sunday.

On going to church, I see the time as a structured time for reflection/meditation more than anything, I also see the benefit of my daughters seeing a community that in many occasions does the right thing in providing services and support for people in need. Of all the different religions and churches/temples I have seen, catholics (specially Jesuits) can be a reasonable crowd.

Now, my problem is that I honestly do not believe in the need of all the rites and ceremony involved, and more often than not, I end up having a silent discussion with the priest on the sermon, which although it is stimulating intellectually, it kills the quiet meditation time idea. 

So, going back to the initiative idea, I can see why the church opposes it and I understand where their arguments come form. Still I do not oppose it. Opposing it, means to me that I am telling someone who hopes their next breath is their last and curse their last one was not, that I know better. Even I am not you or in your situation I know what is best for you. Not because I am doing the right thing for you, but because by doing so I prove that my beliefs are right. 

I take away the options from you.

I think that is my issue with the whole thing. Taking your options away. It is not that you did the right thing, it is that you have no option but to do what I think is right. So forget about all that rhetoric around free will. 

Free will means that I make a decision based on my needs and knowledge, and in many cases my fears. But that is not allowed. If you are anti-abortion you can claim that you need to remove the free will of the woman expecting because the fetus cannot defend itself. But I see the problem a little different. 

I believe that abortion is not the first option a woman takes, but the last (and yes, I know you can always find an example that proves this wrong, but  it is the exception not the rule). I see that my efforts, and I hope others is to make sure that there are other options. This defines me as a pro-life pro-choicer, or some other word game like that.

More often than not, a single mother is guaranteed a life of poverty. Why not provide support services for them (job and education)? Why not provide comprehensive sexual education, so there is no pregnancy in the first place? 

But I know, it is easier to preach compassion than to act, abstinence only is expected, where being a single mother is still a stigma and you can show violence but never sex, when poverty is seen as a character flaw, all this is a very tough sale. 

So there you have the paradox created, you want people to make the right choice, without giving them the tools to make them and by pretty much giving them a single option, so there is really not choice.

Naomi Wolf...

You may agree or not with her, but she is quite thought provoking. 

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

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

• Naomi Wolf
• The Guardian, 
• Tuesday April 24 2007
• Article history

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.