Naomi Wolf Cries Fascism

Perhaps it's because I am of a certain age, but the people who compare the Bush administration to Fascism don't have any idea about Fascism. But that seems to be the case. The decent into unreality does not stop with the country described a being in the iron grip of a Fascist dictatorship, it also enters discussions of what is torture. There is something surreal about equating loud music, sleep deprivation or waterboarding with physical beatings, branding, gouging out eyeballs or using electric drills on kneecaps.

The problem comes in when real fascism takes over and real torture occurs. If the language has been debased so that we can no longer distinguish between the two, what defense do we have against the reality if ever it should occur?

Aaron Goldstein writes:

One of my pet peeves with the Left is the tendency, almost by default, to liken the Bush Administration to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It is a significant reason I could no longer bring myself to associate with the Left.

Naomi Wolf is a textbook case of this tendency. Last month, Wolf released her sixth book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. The book is based on ideas she presented in an article titled, “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps” which appeared in The Guardian last April. In the article, Wolf argued there is a blueprint the Bush Administration is following to close down an open society and that the blueprint was established by Hitler, Stalin and other lesser despots. “As difficult as this is to contemplate,” Wolf writes, “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.”

The first of these ten steps is to identify an all encompassing enemy.
...
Two of Wolf’s other steps are the establishment of a gulag and the development of a thug caste. Yes, Wolf uses the word gulag in describing Guantanamo Bay echoing the sentiments of Irene Khan, the Secretary General of Amnesty International. It is a curious use of language considering millions of people were killed in Stalin’s gulag whereas at Gitmo all of four people have died by way of suicide. ...

Read the rest.