I think I mentioned this book in the very beginning entries of this blog. I misplaced it, hadn't finished reading it when I did, so I began the re-read it a couple of days ago.
Wow.
Though you might consider this feminist to be a flaming, hard-nose liberal, you're wrong. It was written in 2007, and it was truly the portent of things to come. It could have been called, "The Ten Steps to Tyranny".
It chills me to read it. It belongs next to "1984" and the Declaration of Independence. It is a grave reminder of what was, the prelude to what is our plight in Obama's Amerika today.
Let me give you a couple of highlights from the last day's reading. You will find this on pages 25-29.
From "What is Freedom?"
"We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults. But the Founders would have thought we were dangerously naive, not to mention lazy, in thinking of democracy in this way. This view - which we see as patriotic - is the very opposite of the view that they held. They would not have considered our attitude patriotic - or even American: The Founders thought, in contrast, that it was tyranny that was eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults, whereas democracy was difficult, personally exacting, and vanishingly fragile. The Founders did not see Americans as being special in any way: They saw America - that is, the process of liberty - as special.
In fact, the men who risked hanging to found our nation , and the women who risked their own lives to support this experiment in freedom, and who did what they could to advance it, were terrified on exactly what we call dictatorship. They called it "tyranny" or "despotism." It was the spector at their backs - and they all knew it - as Americans debated the Constitution and argued about the shape of the Bill of Rights."
She writes that the Founders and the people of the time, the revolutionaries, "saw as the real prospect of a tyrannical force rising up in America. This repressive force could take many forms: the form of a rapacious Congress oppressing the people; the form of an out-of-control executive; or even the form of the people themselves, cruelly oppressing a minority." The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were set forth not as a flag flying merrily but as a bulwark: a set of barriers against what the Founders and their fellow countrymen and women saw as people's natural tendency to oppress others if their power is unchecked."
If you are old enough, you remember what the taste of liberty and freedom and pride feels like when you bathe in it. We do not have that today.
"Arbitrary arrest, state intimidation, and torture were the tactics of the tyrannical monarchs of eighteenth century Europe - tactics that the Founders sought to banish from American soil forever."
And what do we have today in our country?
Wolf continues:
"Here's what we're not taught: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. These men and women who supported their work were walking further out into the unknown - betting on ordinary people's capacities - than anyone had ever walked in the history of the human race. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.
You weren't taught that the way they brought the freest nation in the world into being was by reading passionately about fledgling democracies of the past; by positioning their imaginations directly against the violent repressions they had fled; and by carefully, delicately crafting a mechanism of checks and balances, and a bill of rights, that would protect these extreme manifestations of freedom. The Founders set out to prove that ordinary people could be entrusted with governing themselves in a state where no one could arbitrarily arrest them, lock them up, or torture them."
This is a book I hope you will download to your Kindles, buy the book, borrow the book and read the book.
It's required reading for anyone who knows in the pit of the stomach that something has run amok in our government; that freedom and liberty is threatened and/or destroyed bit-by-bit every single day under the regime in Washington, and we need to stop it because we are a unique people, from brave, courageous people. Whether your family came to Plymouth as a Pilgrim; immigrants to Ellis Island, new, legal immigrants, you need to read this book.
Naomi Wolf's lectures using this book (available from Amazon, new and used) and others she has written appear on Youtube.
You will find her fascinating.
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