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The Fascism Construction Manual
Immediately after the proclamation of this pandemic, many elements of absolute all-around totalitarianism were put into effect in most countries of the West, even in countries that had previously been robust democracies. All of this happened very quickly and comprehensively.
The Fascism Construction Manual
A dictatorial system can be built more quickly than is commonly believed - no time demonstrates this more clearly than ours.
By Rubicon's World Editor
[This article published on 5/19/2021 is translated from the German on the Internet, Die Faschismus-Bauanleitung | Rubikon.news.]
In her book "How to Destroy a Democracy," Naomi Wolf outlined the ten steps that those in power use to eliminate democracies. Wolf believes that "fascist shifts" are currently underway in the United States. If these add up, it could mean "the end of the America that the Founding Fathers intended. To support her theory of fascism, the author draws historical comparisons from different eras and parts of the world: How did Hitler, Mussolini and Pinochet establish their reign of terror? For the most part, they did so not with a "big bang," but in an orderly fashion, according to the rules of democracies that could not resist the dangerous flirtation with self-destruction. Fascism, says Naomi Wolf, does not always have a spectacular, openly cruel face. It rarely reveals itself in its early stages through mass shootings or the smoking chimneys of extermination camps. Sometimes it can be recognized at first only by the way we begin to weigh our words. Sadly, America is now at Step 10, she writes today - at a time when governments are using the pandemic to justify curtailing civil liberties.
By Naomi Wolf
In 2008, I wrote a book called "How to Destroy a Democracy." In it, based on my study of failed democracies throughout the 20th century, I warned that America must beware of an all-too-possible slide into totalitarianism.
I explained that would-be tyrants, whether left- or right-wing, always use the same roadmap to end democracies, and they always complete the same ten steps.
Whether they "invoke an external and internal threat" or "build a paramilitary force" or "restrict the press" or, in the final step, "undermine the rule of law," these steps are always recognizable, and they always work to crush democracies and establish tyrannies. At the time I wrote the book, the "global threat" of terrorism was the specter conjured up by the powers that be to attack our freedoms.
The book was widely read and discussed, both at the time of its publication and over the past twelve years. In the process, people regularly asked me when and if we had reached Step 10.
We - my courageous publisher, Chelsea Green, and I - are now, in 2021, releasing free videos in which I read aloud the first and last chapters (see below) of How to Destroy a Democracy. And I'm calling the sequel to the book I'm writing "Tenth Step" - because since last March we have indeed, I'm sorry to say, arrived at the final step on the road to fascism.
Although I did not explicitly foresee in 2008 that a medical pandemic would be the vehicle to move the entire globe to Step 10, I have warned in various places about the dangers of medical crises that tyrants can use to justify suppression of civil liberties.
Today, a hyped medical crisis serves as a pretext to rob us of core freedoms that fear of terrorism ultimately failed to do, despite 20 years of effort.
In 2015, I was widely mocked in the mainstream media for warning against the hysteria that accompanied Ebola coverage. At the time, I also warned that infectious diseases could be used as justification for suppressing freedoms, always under the guise of emergency measures.
In 2020, in my book Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, I showed how contagious disease epidemics such as cholera and typhoid were exploited by the British state in the 19th century to suppress freedoms and invade people's privacy. I have described how the first anti-vaccination movements arose among British parents in the Victorian era.
That book was fought hard, and its cautionary message continues to be attacked. But this text was also prescient: namely, in early March 2020, a global pandemic was declared: COVID-19.
Immediately after the proclamation of this pandemic, many elements of absolute all-around totalitarianism were put into effect in most countries of the West, even in countries that had previously been robust democracies. All of this happened very quickly and comprehensively.
Ten points
In the U.S., we now have:
1) Emergency measures in many states that override due process of law. This is the hallmark of a police state. COVID-19 is cited as a reason for enacting emergency laws - but there is no end point for repealing these emergency laws.
2) Closing schools that break the social contract with the next generation.
3) Vaccination passport bills that undermine the Fourth Amendment by allowing the government and Big Tech companies to invade medical privacy and create a comprehensive digital surveillance state.
Indeed, the fact that tech stocks have risen 27 percent in each quarter of the pandemic shows a driver of this war on people:
Every minute that people spend in a classroom or pub or restaurant or church or synagogue is time that tech companies are losing money because they can't harvest that data.
The COVID-19 policy, led by the "COVID-19 fightback" - actually by the big tech companies - ensures that people are only allowed to connect through digital platforms. The reason is both profit and social control.
4) Forced closures of businesses. By intervening directly in the economy and allowing certain companies - Amazon, Walmart, Target - to thrive at the expense of small businesses, stores, restaurants, and sole proprietors in general, the state has merged government and business in a way characteristic of Italian fascism and modern Chinese communism.
5) Assembly Restrictions. Some states, such as California, penalize people for meeting their friends in their homes and prohibit children from having play dates with their friends. Massachusetts restricted gatherings of more than 10 people and forced synagogues and churches to remain closed, despite a Supreme Court ruling against states that forced churches to close. Parks, playgrounds, and beaches were closed. In countries like the United Kingdom, people are fined if they leave their homes for more than one hour of exercise a day.
6) Forced face coverings. In Massachusetts, people are fined for not wearing a mask outdoors - even children as young as five are forced to do so by law. Again, this regulation has not been backed up by peer-reviewed studies demonstrating medical necessity. And no endpoint is given for these extraordinary violations of personal freedom.
7) Suppression of free speech. Big tech companies censor critics of COVID-19 and vaccine policies, as well as views that are on the right side of the political spectrum. Sedition - a word that has a long history in the 20th century of being used to shut down free speech - has been weaponized by the left to deny the First Amendment right to free expression. In other forms of censorship and management of speech and public debate, a mogul like Bill Gates funds major news outlets with millions of dollars for "COVID-19 education." As a result, dissenting voices are marginalized or even threatened with legal action or loss of employment.
8) Science is hijacked in the interest of biofascism. Through massive funding of scientific commentators such as Dr. Fauci in the U.S., Imperial College and SAGE in the U.K., and Dr. Christian Drosten in Germany, dominant policies with pronouncements about COVID-19 that benefit a small group of bad actors-particularly technical and pharmaceutical players acting in collusion with governments-have built an army of safe, credible supporters. But when other scientists or institutions seek debate or transparency, they are threatened with losing their jobs or have their reputations attacked, as in the case of Dr. Simon Goddeke of the Netherlands, who was told by his university to keep quiet when he questioned the flawed COVID-19 PCR testing protocols.
9) Data is hijacked to serve the interests of biofascism. This manipulation, which I alluded to in "How to Destroy a Democracy," is typical of Soviet censors. COVID-19 platforms like the COVID Tracking Project and Johns Hopkins University, funded by technocrats like Michael Bloomberg, provide unverifiable COVID-19 data that directly affects stock markets. Again, while this un-American conflation of corporate interests and public policy is reminiscent of Italian fascism, the distortion created by digital data presentation and its relationship to the stock market is entirely 21st century.
10) Attacks on religious minorities. The Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn and Christian churches in California were punished for not following COVID-19 rules - an attack on religion characteristic of communist policies of the left, especially in China.
11) Policies that weaken ties between people and the family are being introduced and policed. This is the most serious development of all.
The new biofascism, pushed very hard by Big Tech leaders, is a war on people and the qualities that make us human.
Masks cut off people's ability to see each other face to face and enjoy human contact, smiles and jokes. Masks limit the effectiveness of human "technology" by making it difficult for us to "read" each other and pick up on social cues.
The ban on assembly prevents us from forming human alliances against these monstrous interests. Banning people from gathering also prevents new cultures, new heroes, and new business models from emerging. We are all stuck with the ideas we had in March 2020.
Forcing children to disassociate and wear masks in school ensures a generation of Americans who don't know how to form human alliances and who don't trust their own human instincts. These are counterrevolutionary training techniques.
Moving all learning to distance learning platforms - already prepared - ensures that children do not know how to behave in the interpersonal space, a space that is not mediated by technology.
Many COVID-19 policies seem designed to ensure that people no longer have an "analog" space or culture - no way to gather in a room, touch each other amicably, or bond.
Finally, moving all human interactions to Zoom - a window for the Chinese Communist Party, since China owns the platform - is not only a way to harvest all of our technology, trade secrets, and intellectual property, but also a means to ensure that intimacy and connection will happen online in the future, killing off face-to-face human contact.
Why is this happening? Why are policies being developed that punish, burden, and restrict human contact in analog, unsupervised spaces?
Because human contact is the great revolutionary force when it comes to freedom and resistance to this form of comprehensive biofascism, the biofascism represented by the new normal, medical fascist level 10.
This time we are not just dealing with a war against freedom. This time we are dealing with a war against human beings and against everything that makes us human.
Naomi Wolf, born in 1962, is a writer and political activist. She studied first at Yale University in the United States and later as a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford University in the United Kingdom.
Editorial note: This text appeared under the title "We've reached 'step ten' of the 10 steps to fascism." It was translated by Max Stadler of the volunteer Rubicon translation team and proofread by the volunteer Rubicon proofreading team.
A dictatorial system can be built more quickly than is commonly believed - no time demonstrates this more clearly than ours.
By Rubicon's World Editor
[This article published on 5/19/2021 is translated from the German on the Internet, Die Faschismus-Bauanleitung | Rubikon.news.]
In her book "How to Destroy a Democracy," Naomi Wolf outlined the ten steps that those in power use to eliminate democracies. Wolf believes that "fascist shifts" are currently underway in the United States. If these add up, it could mean "the end of the America that the Founding Fathers intended. To support her theory of fascism, the author draws historical comparisons from different eras and parts of the world: How did Hitler, Mussolini and Pinochet establish their reign of terror? For the most part, they did so not with a "big bang," but in an orderly fashion, according to the rules of democracies that could not resist the dangerous flirtation with self-destruction. Fascism, says Naomi Wolf, does not always have a spectacular, openly cruel face. It rarely reveals itself in its early stages through mass shootings or the smoking chimneys of extermination camps. Sometimes it can be recognized at first only by the way we begin to weigh our words. Sadly, America is now at Step 10, she writes today - at a time when governments are using the pandemic to justify curtailing civil liberties.
By Naomi Wolf
In 2008, I wrote a book called "How to Destroy a Democracy." In it, based on my study of failed democracies throughout the 20th century, I warned that America must beware of an all-too-possible slide into totalitarianism.
I explained that would-be tyrants, whether left- or right-wing, always use the same roadmap to end democracies, and they always complete the same ten steps.
Whether they "invoke an external and internal threat" or "build a paramilitary force" or "restrict the press" or, in the final step, "undermine the rule of law," these steps are always recognizable, and they always work to crush democracies and establish tyrannies. At the time I wrote the book, the "global threat" of terrorism was the specter conjured up by the powers that be to attack our freedoms.
The book was widely read and discussed, both at the time of its publication and over the past twelve years. In the process, people regularly asked me when and if we had reached Step 10.
We - my courageous publisher, Chelsea Green, and I - are now, in 2021, releasing free videos in which I read aloud the first and last chapters (see below) of How to Destroy a Democracy. And I'm calling the sequel to the book I'm writing "Tenth Step" - because since last March we have indeed, I'm sorry to say, arrived at the final step on the road to fascism.
Although I did not explicitly foresee in 2008 that a medical pandemic would be the vehicle to move the entire globe to Step 10, I have warned in various places about the dangers of medical crises that tyrants can use to justify suppression of civil liberties.
Today, a hyped medical crisis serves as a pretext to rob us of core freedoms that fear of terrorism ultimately failed to do, despite 20 years of effort.
In 2015, I was widely mocked in the mainstream media for warning against the hysteria that accompanied Ebola coverage. At the time, I also warned that infectious diseases could be used as justification for suppressing freedoms, always under the guise of emergency measures.
In 2020, in my book Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, I showed how contagious disease epidemics such as cholera and typhoid were exploited by the British state in the 19th century to suppress freedoms and invade people's privacy. I have described how the first anti-vaccination movements arose among British parents in the Victorian era.
That book was fought hard, and its cautionary message continues to be attacked. But this text was also prescient: namely, in early March 2020, a global pandemic was declared: COVID-19.
Immediately after the proclamation of this pandemic, many elements of absolute all-around totalitarianism were put into effect in most countries of the West, even in countries that had previously been robust democracies. All of this happened very quickly and comprehensively.
Ten points
In the U.S., we now have:
1) Emergency measures in many states that override due process of law. This is the hallmark of a police state. COVID-19 is cited as a reason for enacting emergency laws - but there is no end point for repealing these emergency laws.
2) Closing schools that break the social contract with the next generation.
3) Vaccination passport bills that undermine the Fourth Amendment by allowing the government and Big Tech companies to invade medical privacy and create a comprehensive digital surveillance state.
Indeed, the fact that tech stocks have risen 27 percent in each quarter of the pandemic shows a driver of this war on people:
Every minute that people spend in a classroom or pub or restaurant or church or synagogue is time that tech companies are losing money because they can't harvest that data.
The COVID-19 policy, led by the "COVID-19 fightback" - actually by the big tech companies - ensures that people are only allowed to connect through digital platforms. The reason is both profit and social control.
4) Forced closures of businesses. By intervening directly in the economy and allowing certain companies - Amazon, Walmart, Target - to thrive at the expense of small businesses, stores, restaurants, and sole proprietors in general, the state has merged government and business in a way characteristic of Italian fascism and modern Chinese communism.
5) Assembly Restrictions. Some states, such as California, penalize people for meeting their friends in their homes and prohibit children from having play dates with their friends. Massachusetts restricted gatherings of more than 10 people and forced synagogues and churches to remain closed, despite a Supreme Court ruling against states that forced churches to close. Parks, playgrounds, and beaches were closed. In countries like the United Kingdom, people are fined if they leave their homes for more than one hour of exercise a day.
6) Forced face coverings. In Massachusetts, people are fined for not wearing a mask outdoors - even children as young as five are forced to do so by law. Again, this regulation has not been backed up by peer-reviewed studies demonstrating medical necessity. And no endpoint is given for these extraordinary violations of personal freedom.
7) Suppression of free speech. Big tech companies censor critics of COVID-19 and vaccine policies, as well as views that are on the right side of the political spectrum. Sedition - a word that has a long history in the 20th century of being used to shut down free speech - has been weaponized by the left to deny the First Amendment right to free expression. In other forms of censorship and management of speech and public debate, a mogul like Bill Gates funds major news outlets with millions of dollars for "COVID-19 education." As a result, dissenting voices are marginalized or even threatened with legal action or loss of employment.
8) Science is hijacked in the interest of biofascism. Through massive funding of scientific commentators such as Dr. Fauci in the U.S., Imperial College and SAGE in the U.K., and Dr. Christian Drosten in Germany, dominant policies with pronouncements about COVID-19 that benefit a small group of bad actors-particularly technical and pharmaceutical players acting in collusion with governments-have built an army of safe, credible supporters. But when other scientists or institutions seek debate or transparency, they are threatened with losing their jobs or have their reputations attacked, as in the case of Dr. Simon Goddeke of the Netherlands, who was told by his university to keep quiet when he questioned the flawed COVID-19 PCR testing protocols.
9) Data is hijacked to serve the interests of biofascism. This manipulation, which I alluded to in "How to Destroy a Democracy," is typical of Soviet censors. COVID-19 platforms like the COVID Tracking Project and Johns Hopkins University, funded by technocrats like Michael Bloomberg, provide unverifiable COVID-19 data that directly affects stock markets. Again, while this un-American conflation of corporate interests and public policy is reminiscent of Italian fascism, the distortion created by digital data presentation and its relationship to the stock market is entirely 21st century.
10) Attacks on religious minorities. The Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn and Christian churches in California were punished for not following COVID-19 rules - an attack on religion characteristic of communist policies of the left, especially in China.
11) Policies that weaken ties between people and the family are being introduced and policed. This is the most serious development of all.
The new biofascism, pushed very hard by Big Tech leaders, is a war on people and the qualities that make us human.
Masks cut off people's ability to see each other face to face and enjoy human contact, smiles and jokes. Masks limit the effectiveness of human "technology" by making it difficult for us to "read" each other and pick up on social cues.
The ban on assembly prevents us from forming human alliances against these monstrous interests. Banning people from gathering also prevents new cultures, new heroes, and new business models from emerging. We are all stuck with the ideas we had in March 2020.
Forcing children to disassociate and wear masks in school ensures a generation of Americans who don't know how to form human alliances and who don't trust their own human instincts. These are counterrevolutionary training techniques.
Moving all learning to distance learning platforms - already prepared - ensures that children do not know how to behave in the interpersonal space, a space that is not mediated by technology.
Many COVID-19 policies seem designed to ensure that people no longer have an "analog" space or culture - no way to gather in a room, touch each other amicably, or bond.
Finally, moving all human interactions to Zoom - a window for the Chinese Communist Party, since China owns the platform - is not only a way to harvest all of our technology, trade secrets, and intellectual property, but also a means to ensure that intimacy and connection will happen online in the future, killing off face-to-face human contact.
Why is this happening? Why are policies being developed that punish, burden, and restrict human contact in analog, unsupervised spaces?
Because human contact is the great revolutionary force when it comes to freedom and resistance to this form of comprehensive biofascism, the biofascism represented by the new normal, medical fascist level 10.
This time we are not just dealing with a war against freedom. This time we are dealing with a war against human beings and against everything that makes us human.
Naomi Wolf, born in 1962, is a writer and political activist. She studied first at Yale University in the United States and later as a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford University in the United Kingdom.
Editorial note: This text appeared under the title "We've reached 'step ten' of the 10 steps to fascism." It was translated by Max Stadler of the volunteer Rubicon translation team and proofread by the volunteer Rubicon proofreading team.
For more information:
http://www.freembtranslations.net
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wolf
Her many changes in position in her 58 year life indicate that she is mentally unstable.
This writer enjoyed exercise, sunshine and fresh air everyday for as many hours as I wanted right here in San Francisco. Nobody stopped me; I did not need any permission from anyone to leave my home; there is no one at the doors of our homes to keep us inside.
The health code has always had police powers to stop pandemics. It was very lightly applied in most of the United States. Wearing a light, cheap, small mask on public transit, in stores and in offices is very easy to do and is not asking much of us to do to save lives. Vaccines are not always good, but in this case, the COVID19 vaccine has stopped the spread of COVID19, including its mutations. There is no vaccination passport so far, although it is possible that entrance to school will include the COVID19 vaccine, as they already require other vaccines. Young adults, ages 18 to 34, are still behind in getting their vaccines, which is why we do not yet have the 70% vaccination rate needed for herd immunity. We have about 50% of adults vaccinated in 5 months, not bad in a country of 332 million people, 75% of whom are adults. The largest anti-vaccine crowd are Nazi Trump supporters, a group that is best known as being mentally ill, mentally backward, fascist thugs. We saw them in action at the January 6, 2021 seditious insurrection at the US Capitol building.
The health department has always had the authority to close businesses, especially bars and restaurants, when they are not complying with the health code, and they have always had the authority to shut them down the minute the inspector walks into the bar or restaurant, with no hearing required. In a pandemic where the virus is transmitted by breathing on someone, for the safety of all concerned, including the labor force in these restaurants and bars, they had to be shut down. We all can eat at home, or in a park, or at the beach. There is no need for alcohol at all as it is poison by definition. Restaurants have been open since May 2021 for both in person and outdoor dining. Restaurants have had outdoor dining this year since April 2021, and had the same last year in the spring and summer, until November 2020.
Exercise salons, where people breathe heavily with exertion, were shut down for a long time but are now open since April 2021. They were open for a short time last summer.
Retail clothing stores have been open since June 2020. Grocery stores have always been open as they are essential businesses. Hospitals, medical clinics and dental clinics have always been open as they are essential businesses.
Parks, playgrounds and beaches have been open most of the time in the spring and summer of 2020 and since April 2021.
Children do learn at Zoom School and there is no public school teacher who dared step into a classroom until we moved into the yellow tier in May 2021. High school students learn better than 5 year olds but learning does take place. The children were lucky we had a remote learning system using computers. That certainly did not exist before 1987, and did not exist at all in the 1918 pandemic. The preoccupation with education as entertainment is out of order. We learn by concentrating on the lesson at hand. It was once said that reading books was anti-social when in fact reading books is basic to education. Children are now in public school, grades Pre-K through 8, and to some extent in high school since May 2021, and all children and young adults will be in their classrooms from Pre-K through college starting with the fall semester, 2021 in California.
The protests of the Black Lives Matter movement were not stopped by social distancing requirements. After all, they were all outdoors. As to anti-science superstition called religion, since the religious believe that their supreme being is everywhere, they can just sit at home and do their abracadabra routine.
Fascism is the naked force of capitalism; it is when capitalism coughs up its barbarism. We do not have fascism in the USA; we have an oligarchy running a capitalist state where maximization of profit is the primary rule. Fascism and communism are not the same. A communist state is a non-profit society where the wealth that we, the workingclass, create is shared as equitably as possible with everyone. China has had capitalism since 1990 when the stock market was set up in Shanghai. Because China has socialized medicine, allowing it to raise life expectancy from age 35 in 1949, the revolution year, to age 78 today, the same as the American workingclass, they have done much better in coping with this pandemic than backward USA which unlike the rest of the industrialized world, has private profit medicine.
It is the drivel of Naomi Wolf that stinks like rotten meat, not the effort to end the COVID19 pandemic in this country with all deliberate speed.