Both Italian and German fascisms came to power legally and incrementally in functioning democracies; both used legislation, cultural pressure, and baseless imprisonment and torture, progressively to consolidate power. Both directed state terror to subordinate and control the individual, whether the individual supported the regime inwardly or not. Both were rabidly antidemocratic, not as a side sentiment but as the basis of their ideologies; and yet both aggressively used the law to pervert and subvert the law.
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If it is too emotionally overwhelming to think of Italy and Germany, you can consider the more recent fates of Indonesia, Nicaragua, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Guatemala, all of which suffered widespread state terror and the activation of many of the ten steps that I describe, as leaders sought to subdue the people.
The same ten steps have shut down democracies all over the world at many different times. And these steps are no secret: After all, Mussolini studied Lenin; Hitler studied Mussolini; Stalin studied Hitler; and Chinese communist leaders studied Stalin, and so on. Indeed the United States has helped develop a training center, the School of the Americas (now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), to train various procapitalist Latin American leaders in the theory and practice of violent dictatorship.
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It's easy to look around at America in 2007 and choose to believe that this warning is overheated: After all, we are for the most part doing what we have routinely done. We are going online into a vibrant Internet world; clicking through hundreds of TV channels; enjoying Hollywood films; reading bestsellers that present views across the political spectrum. The courts are ruling, newspapers are publishing exposes, protest marches are being planned about the war; a presidential race is underway.
But there are plenty of examples of a shift into a dictatorial reality in which, for several years, while the basic institutions of freedom are targeted and rights are eroding, daily life still looks very normal – even, for many people, pleasant.
Americans tend to think of the shift to fascism in scary set-pieces: the boots on the stairs, the knock in the middle of the night, the marching columns, the massive banners waving over city streets; a Leni Riefenstahl film all the time, or an unrelieved scene of citizen terror with crematoria smoking in the distance. We are so used to seeing depictions of the most sensational aspects of totalitarian societies – the gulag, the death camps – that we don't pay much attention to the fact that there is often an incremental process that led those societies to become places where such things could happen.
The view that fascism looks from the start like a nationwide prison camp rather than a fairly normal society can be comforting when facing an argument like mine. It's natural to wish that the two realities were so categorically different that, of course, "It couldn't happen here."
But as would-be dictators consolidate power, if they are training their sights on a democracy, things proceed fairly routinely in many areas in the earliest years. In the beginning, the horror, as W. H. Auden put it, is usually elsewhere, taking place while other people are going about their normal daily round. Peasants in Italy celebrated their harvest festivals in 1919 in Naples when Mussolini's arditi were beating bloody the local communists in Milan. Journalist Joseph Roth, the star columnist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, filed glitzy reports on urban style and nightlife, on architecture and the avant-garde; he and his colleagues dwelt on the latest fashions and described the trendiest watering holes. As Roth rebutted rising anti-Semitism in print, Hitler was consolidating power around himself. Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of French literature who kept a diary throughout the rise and fall of the Third Reich, cared for his garden, did repairs on his car, chatted with his Nazi neighbors, went to the movies with his wife, even as he became increasingly aware of persecution, arrests, theft of property, and new discriminatory laws; even as he was certain of an inevitable catastrophe. That's what people do.
The neon lights were flashing outside nightclubs in Vienna right through the Anschluss. British travelogues for Italy and Germany from the 1930s depict jolly fascists sharing a nice Marsala with the writers in an osteria. More recently, the day after the 2006 military coup in Thailand, tourists were posing for snapshots next to armed guards; sunbathers will still at the beach.
In 2004, I spent the spring and summer working to help elect John Kerry, even though I already knew I was leaving the US for Canada. It wasn't that I loved Kerry as a candidate, or even that I was unconvinced of the corrupt US election system. I felt compelled to do whatever I could to help, in case I was wrong.
In that group, I worked closely with a woman who was changing her career - changing her entire life - to become a full-time activist. After the campaign, when we talked about where we were going next, she told me she was "dedicating her life to be part of the Resistance". We looked at each other with tears in our eyes, both thinking the same thing. Those words, "the Resistance" carried such a heavy historical echo.
I told her I was moving to Canada. She was happy for me; she said, "We need people everywhere. If all else fails, we'll need people on the other side". I realize now that those were the first seeds of my desire to help US war resisters.
Of course, we have to make sure Canada stays "the other side".
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