Tuesday, April 24, 2007

reducing America to Fascism in 10 easy steps

Lists of this sort have cropped up in several different places, but I found this one particularly striking. It's from Naomi Wolf, writing for The Guardian. She argues that there are 10 steps aspiring dictators generally take to close an open society and pave the way for authoritarianism, and that the Bush Administration has at initiated all 10. I have 1 or 2 minor critiques, but all in all, the comparisons are pretty damning. Almost as scary is the probability that, if it's W that pulls the trigger, we would have the most incompetent dictator ever (though maybe that's actually a good thing, it's hard to tell).

Here's another question worth thinking about: if "it" happened, the "it" in "it can't happen here," how, or at what point, would you know for sure? Perhaps more importantly, what would you do?

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