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The End of America: A letter of Warning to a Young Patriot [new book]

April 28, 2007 By AmberPaw

My own family left our country of origin because to be a member of our ethnic group, our religion, had become a death sentence.  I remember my great-uncle showing me the scars of bullets.  Riders galloped through his village shooting as many of my people as they saw, simply because we were the “wrong” race.

Another quote:

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 U.S. citizens realizing it yet — the power over U.S. citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

I see this in the lack of over sight of DSS – the discretion is so total.

I see this in Washington where accused are held without charges, in secret, and taken to black holes to be tortured in other countries.

Another quote:

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 W.H. 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.”

Maybe the most radical act of all would be to demand civics in the schools, 100% televised coverage of all sessions and hearings on Beacon Hill, and to support reining in the Imperial Presidency in Washington.

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Filed Under: User Tagged With: checks-and-balances, constitution, democracy, fascism, government, patriotism, terrorism, tyranny

Comments

  1. charley-on-the-mta says

    April 29, 2007 at 8:37 pm

    … and heck, a little warning hysteria is not all bad. As she says, it’s a process of erosion, and our freedoms are surely eroding.

    <

    p>
    The interesting thing about Wolf’s various steps to fascism is that none of these occur as an exercise of absolute power; each one occurs with the consent of the other branches of power, or that of the press, or of the populace. Bush didn’t have to win in 2004, eg. — the people put him back there.

    <

    p>
    That’s what we have some power over, and that’s where we’ve got to start: Stop putting up with it, and encourage our press and neighbors to do the same.

    • amberpaw says

      April 29, 2007 at 9:21 pm

      I agree.  I pretty much ignored everything beyond work and family between 1983 and 2003 – except for a couple issues in child welfare law.  It was actually Romney’s “style” and actions that caused me to wake up again in 2003. The reasons I became so apolitical  for those prior years are personal, but I am glad to be awake, alive, and involved once again.

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