Two weeks ago we were privileged to have Naomi Wolf, author of the bestselling The End of America, as our guest blogger, whose observations about how a democracy turns into a dictatorship were astonishingly timely.

September 19, 2007
Blackwater
I wrote earlier here about the ten steps to a closed society — what I call a "fascist shift." I use that term advisedly — and conservatively — to mean the point at which the state starts to use force against citizens in a targeted effort to close down democratic processes.

The third step in the shift to a closed society is to "Develop a Paramilitary Force." Without a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the people's representatives, democracy cannot be closed down; however, with such a force available to would-be despots, democracy can be drastically and quickly weakened. Every effective despot — from Mussolini to Hitler, Stalin, the members of the Chinese Politburo, General Augusto Pinochet and the many Latin American dictators who learned from these models of controlling citizens — has used this essential means to pressure civilians and intimidate dissent. Mussolini was the innovator in the use of thugs to intimidate what was a democracy, if a fragile one, before he actually marched on Rome; he developed the strategic deployment of Blackshirts to beat up Communists and opposition leaders, trash newspapers, and turn on civilians, forcing ordinary Italians, for instance, to ingest emetics. Hitler studied Mussolini (just as Stalin studied Hitler and later despots studied these supreme dictators); he deployed thugs — in the form of Brownshirts — in similar ways before he came formally to power.

In today's news, the government of Iraq has confronted the hired guns of Blackwater, the North Carolina-based mercenary force that has close ties to Halliburton. According to Iraqi witnesses, these contractors fired on civilians when a car did not obey a command to stop; a civilian couple and their baby were killed. The Iraqi government claims that this is the seventh such incident. Blackwater representatives strongly contest these eyewitness accounts and claim that insurgents opened fire on a convoy the contractors were protecting. Iraqis are distressed that Paul Bremer's "Order 17" gives these private contractors — of whom, at the peak of the war, there were over a hundred thousand in Iraq — immunity from prosecution from what would otherwise be war crimes. (This tactic has strong historical precedents: the National Socialists sought laws shielding their own paramilitary from prosecution for war crimes.) Blackwater contractors in Iraq are a law, essentially, unto themselves....

Click here to read the rest of Naomi's post.

And while you're at it, click here for a chance to win an advanced copy of Joe Hill's forthcoming book 20th Century Ghosts! Enter by Friday, October 5.

Bear mumbles, "Six thousand high-profile jobs." It might as well be a million. Certainly it's more than Bear can conceive.

Fup admits that it's a whole lot of jobs.

The American Association of Retail Cats (AARC) wants Fup to direct its latest campaign: a cat in every coffee shop, starting with that chain out of Seattle. For weeks she's been weighing the pros and cons, seeking advice, reading up.

Just this morning, she turned the AARC down.

"A wise cat once held a pin in the air," she tells Bear. "The cat asked, 'What do you see?' I could barely see the pin from where I was standing, and I told him so, Fup recalls. 'What do you see?' he repeated. So I told him: I saw raspberry vines, a bicycle leaning against a fence, and an old cat holding his paw in the air."

Bear knows the story. The old cat next circled to Fup's other side, raised his paw again, and asked the same question. Now Fup saw the brick exterior of a restaurant, two black garbage cans, and a pile of broken-down cardboard boxes. "My pin is a chameleon!" the old cat crowed. The old cat was Fup's father.

When had Fup told the story before? In the bookstore, some late night. Bear couldn't recall exactly what had brought it on the last time, just that they'd been in the bookstore, same as now.