The Fascism Construction Manual

by Naomi Wolf Monday, May. 24, 2021 at 11:47 AM
marc1seed@yahoo.com www.academia.edu

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.

Original: The Fascism Construction Manual