Aliens, sedition, Naomi Wolf and Operation Endgame.

I heard Naomi Wolf on NPR's Day to Day this afternoon talking about her new book The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot, which posits that what has been going on in the US for the past six years with this administration is a total fascist take-over of our democracy. She looks back into history to come up with the standard way dictators like Hitler and Stalin go about destroying open societies. She lists several historical examples of how Hitler legally subverted the post-WWI Weimar Republic, which was a parliamentary democracy, bit by bit until there as nothing left.

One example she cites is Hitler's setting up of prisons outside the legal framework where torture was practiced. And as he began filling them with people who were at the time were considered to be on the margins of society -- like the Jews and homosexuals and any other non-example of pure Germaniness -- he gained more and more power through the exploitation of the fear of internal and external threats.

Sounds pretty familiar to me, but naturally NPR can't just have some crackpot like Wolf come on and say W. is a fascist wannabe without having an opposing view. That wouldn't be fair and balanced. So they got Josef Joffe the token German to debunk the whole premise.

As a German, naturally, he is qualified to say who is and isn't Hitler. And Naomi, he knows George W. Bush and George W. Bush is no Hitler.

One example he cites for why Wolf is totally off base is the 1798 Alien and Seditions Acts. See, he explains, Americans have had these episodes of government going too far before like the Alien and Sedition Acts and we always came back from the brink.

That sounds great, but what he doesn't point out is that the moment Congress passed those draconian laws the next president was sure to end them. What are the chances either Rudi or Hillary are going to end Gitmo or repeal the Patriot Act?

It's funny he should have mentioned the Alien and Sedition Acts, by the way, because the administration's new Uber-Plan to fight illegal Immigration to round up tens of thousands of illegals and house them in what can only be considered concentration camps of the Nisei round-up era is called Operation Endgame.

The actual government documents that explain the legal basis of Operation Endgame states:

"The Detention and Deportation Program, now the Office of Detention and Removal (DRO),
was established in a 1955 reorganization of the INS to carry out a mission first articulated
in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The Alien and Sedition Acts included the earliest
deportation legislation, which empowered the President to order the departure from the
United States of all aliens deemed dangerous. Legislation since then has expanded the detention and removal operations and redefined the classes of aliens to be deported or excluded. The basic
mission, however, remains the same: Remove all removable aliens."

Glad those olden days are gone!