Description
Book SynopsisA New York Times Bestseller!
“I hope we wake up quickly because history shows it’s a small window in which people can fight back before it is too dangerous to fight back.”—Naomi Wolf on Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight
In a stunning indictment, best-selling author Naomi Wolf lays out her case for saving American democracy. In authoritative research and documentation Wolf explains how events parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century’s worst dictatorships such as Germany, Russia, China, and Chile.
The book cuts across political parties and ideologies and speaks directly to those among us who are concerned about the ever-tightening noose being placed around our liberties.
In this timely call to arms, Naomi Wolf compels us to face the way our free America is under assault. She warns us–with the straight-to-fellow-citizens urgency of one of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlets–that we have little time to lose if our children are to live in real freedom.
“Recent history has profound lessons for us in the U.S. today about how fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders seize and maintain power, especially in what were once democracies. The secret is that these leaders all tend to take very similar, parallel steps. The Founders of this nation were so deeply familiar with tyranny and the habits and practices of tyrants that they set up our checks and balances precisely out of fear of what is unfolding today. We are seeing these same kinds of tactics now closing down freedoms in America, turning our nation into something that in the near future could be quite other than the open society in which we grew up and learned to love liberty,” states Wolf.
Wolf is taking her message directly to the American people in the most accessible form and as part of a large national campaign to reach out to ordinary Americans about the dangers we face today. This includes a lecture and speaking tour, and being part of the nascent American Freedom Campaign, a grassroots effort to ensure that presidential candidates pledge to uphold the constitution and protect our liberties from further erosion.
The End of America will shock, enrage, and motivate–spurring us to act, as the Founders would have counted on us to do in a time such as this, as rebels and patriots–to save our liberty and defend our nation.
Trade ReviewLibrary Journal (starred review)-
This latest offering from best-selling author Wolf, The Beauty Myth, is a harbinger of an age that may finally see the patriarchal realm of political discourse usurped. Here is Wolf's compellingly and cogently argued political argument for civil rights, not women's rights. She contributes this call to action to a canon that from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke and forward, with a few exceptions (e.g., Hannah Arendt), has been largely populated by men. Wolf's work is actually closer to the agitated, passionate polemics of Emma Goldman than the ponderous, philosophical musings of Arendt. Readers will appreciate her energy and urgency as she warns we are living through a dangerous "fascist shift" brought about by the Bush administration. Her chapters outline the "Ten Steps to Fascism" citing historical corollaries (as well as the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm), with headings like "Invoke an External and Internal Threat," "Establish Secret Prisons," and "Target Key Individuals." In other words, fascism can exist without dictatorship. Her book's publication through a small press in Vermont that is committed to "the politics and practice of sustainable living" rather than through a large trade house is itself a political act. Highly recommended for all collections.
-- Theresa Kintz, Wilkes Univ., Wilkes-Barre, PA
"One of the most important books that's been written, certainly in the last decade or two, and perhaps in my lifetime."--Thom Hartmann, best-selling author and host of The Thom Hartmann Radio Program
"Naomi Wolf 's End of America is a vivid, urgent, mandatory wake-up call that addresses momentous issues of tyranny, democracy, and survival."--Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of the three-volume Eleanor Roosevelt and distinguished professor at John Jay College
"Naomi Wolf sounds the alarm for all American patriots. We must come together as a nation and recommit ourselves to the fundamental American idea that no president, whether Democrat or Republican, will ever be given unchecked power."--Wes Boyd, co-founder, MoveOn.org
"The framers of our Constitution fully understood that it can happen here. Patriots like Madison, Paine, and Franklin would certainly applaud Naomi Wolf and recognize her as a sister in their struggle."--Mark Crispin Miller, author of Fooled Again
"You will be shocked and disturbed by this book. Most Americans reject outright any comparison of post 9/11 America with the fascism and totalitarianism of Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile. Sadly, the parallels and similarities, what Wolf calls the 'echoes' between those societies and America today, are all too compelling."--Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction: Ten steps
1. The founders and the fragility of democracy
2. Invoke an external and internal threat
3. Establish secret prisons
4. Develop a paramilitary force
5. Surveil ordinary citizens
6. Infiltrate citizens' groups
7. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens
8. Target key individuals
9. Restrict the press
10. Cast criticism as "espionage" and dissent as "treason"
11. Subvert the rule of law
Conclusion: The patriot's task
