Stephen J. Ducat: The F-Word: A Letter the New York Times Refused to Print

A BuzzFlash Guest Contribution

January 29, 2006		CONTRIBUTOR ARCHIVES
The F-Word: A Letter the New York Times Refused to Print A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION by Stephen J. Ducat, author of The Wimp Factor New York Representative Jerold Nadler, as quoted in the January 21, 2006 issue of the New York Times, appropriately and articulately drew comparisons between President Bush’s unrelenting accretion of unaccountable executive power, and some of the early strategies employed by the Nazi party to consolidate its authority. Regrettably, shortly after this bold statement, Mr. Nadler’s spokesman, Reid Cherlin, sought to retreat from this frank assessment, saying the Representative had “picked an example that he shouldn’t have.” Due in part to its careless over usage by partisans of all stripes, the Hitler analogy has become a kind of rhetorical third rail in American political discourse. But that does not mean there are not real and profoundly disturbing parallels between the prehistory and certain features of the Nazi epoch and emerging developments in our own era. A partial list would have to include: a massive, warrantless domestic surveillance program implemented at the whim of the Chief Executive and his inner circle, and unimpeded by any oversight; the use of federal law enforcement agencies to spy on political opponents of the administration; an elaborate network of clandestine detention facilities designed to hold people indefinitely without charge or legal representation, and where suspects may be tortured and then, at the discretion of secret tribunals, executed; an executive branch of government that views the notion of checks and balances as a fusty anachronism, if not subversive; the fusion of federal and corporate power; and the monitoring of the reading habits of private citizens –- all of this done under the rationalizing rubric of national security. It is time to call America’s incipient dictatorship by its proper name: fascism. Stephen J. Ducat San Francisco, CA A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION Stephen J. Ducat is a professor of political psychology at New College of California, and the author of The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity (Beacon, 2005)
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