It Can’t Happen Here? It has already begun.


I had lunch with a lawyer friend of mine recently; we talked about Bush and the law. “Did you ever think,” he said, lowering his voice, “that you’d live to see this in our lifetime? The suspension of habeas corpus! Secret military tribunals! Torture…”

“Do you ever think," he said, after a moment, "that we’re like the Germans after Hitler came to power?”

I asked him if he’d ever read Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” “How funny you should ask,” he said, “I just picked it up. It was re-released in 2005.”

First published in 1935, “It Can’t Happen Here” is Lewis’ story of fascism coming to America. Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip is an oafish, folksy senator who's elected president on a platform very like “compassionate conservatism.” Once he’s in office, however, it quickly becomes clear that Buzz is a pawn of big business. “I can't tell if he's a crook or a religious fanatic,” observes one character in the novel. (Sound familiar?)

Buzz’s first order of business is to make the media a wing of the military. (Embedded reporters, anyone?) He’s hostile to scientists, academics and journalists—except for his buddy William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers cover him as lovingly as Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News network covers the Bush administration.

In the midst of an economic crisis, Buzz bullies Congress into signing over unprecedented powers to the military and passing unconstitutional laws which punish critics of the government. He convenes military tribunals for civilians and terrorizes the populace with his Minutemen, a foreshadowing of Hitler’s S.S. (These fictional viglante groups rather resemble the real-life Minutemen who now patrol our Mexican border, hunting for incoming immigrants.)

The hero of the novel—which I’ve already said Oprah should make her next Book Club selection, for a national debate worth having—is a courageous newspaper editor, Doremus Jessup. In one of the opening scenes, just before Windrip’s election, Jessup is seen talking with some friends, colleagues, who insist, “It can’t happen here.”

Jessup warns: “Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real fascist dictatorship!”

“Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough [a local businessman]. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.”

“The answer to that” suggested Doremus Jessup, “is Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!–than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia!

"Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimee McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?… Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children?

"Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryant, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?… Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in *America*! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!”

I was thinking of this scene—and of conversations I’ve had with friends, colleagues who snort as I recount it, comparing it to today—as I read, “America’s Shame,” by New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof in the International Herald Tribune, on October 17. (The column was originally headlined “Sami’s Shame, and Ours,” when it first appeared in the Times—inexplicably, for the Sami to whom it refers has no shame whatever, that I can see. The shame—and guilt—is all America’s.)

“America’s Shame” by Nicholas D. Kristof:

“There is no public evidence that Sami al-Hajj committed any crime other than journalism for a television network the Bush administration doesn’t like.

"But the U.S. has been holding Mr. Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera, for nearly five years without trial, mostly at Guantánamo Bay. With the jailing of Mr. Hajj and of four journalists in Iraq, the U.S. ranked No. 6 in the world in the number of journalists it imprisoned last year, just behind Uzbekistan and tied with Burma, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

"This week, President Bush is expected to sign the Military Commissions Act concerning prisoners at Guantánamo, and he has hailed the law as “a strong signal to the terrorists.” But the closer you look at Guantánamo the more you feel that it will be remembered mostly as a national disgrace.

"Mr. Hajj is the only journalist known to be there, and, of course, it’s possible that he is guilty of terrorist-related crimes. If so, he should be tried, convicted and sentenced.

"But so far, the evidence turned up by his lawyers and by the Committee to Protect Journalists — which published an excellent report on Mr. Hajj’s case this month — suggests that the U.S. military may be keeping him in hopes of forcing him to become a spy.

"Mr. Hajj, 37, who attended university and speaks English, joined Al Jazeera as a cameraman in April 2000 and covered the war in Afghanistan. He was detained on Dec. 15, 2001, and taken to the American military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan.

"'They were the longest days of my life,' Mr. Hajj’s lawyers quoted him as saying. He told them he was repeatedly beaten, kicked, starved, left out in the freezing cold and subjected to anal cavity searches in public “just to humiliate me.”

"In June 2002, Mr. Hajj was flown to Guantánamo, where he says the beatings initially were brutal but have since subsided somewhat.

"At first, interrogators said Mr. Hajj had shot video of Osama bin Laden during an Al Jazeera interview, but it turned out that they may have mixed him up with another cameraman of a similar name. When that assertion fell apart, the authorities offered accusations that he had ferried a large sum of money to a suspicious Islamic charity, that he had supported Chechen rebels, and that he had once given a car ride and other assistance to an official of Al Qaeda.

"One indication that even our government may not take those accusations so seriously is that the interrogations barely touched on them, Mr. Hajj’s lawyers say.

"'About 95 percent of the interrogations he went through were about Al Jazeera,' said one of the lawyers, Zachary Katznelson of London. “Sami would say, ‘What about me? Will you ask about me?’ ”

"He added, “It really does seem that the focus of the inquiry is about his employer, Al Jazeera, and not about him or any actions he may have taken.”

"Mr. Katznelson also says that interrogators told Mr. Hajj they would free him immediately if he would agree to go back to Al Jazeera and spy on it. He once asked what would happen if he backed out of the deal after he was free.

"'You would not do that,' Mr. Hajj quoted his interrogator as saying, 'because it would endanger your child.'

"The Defense Department declined to comment on Mr. Hajj’s case, saying that in general, it does not comment on specific detainees at Guantánamo.

"While Mr. Hajj is unknown in the U.S., his case has received wide attention in the Arab world. The Bush administration is thus doing long-term damage to American interests.

"Mr. Hajj’s lawyers say he has two torn ligaments in his knee from abuse in his first weeks in custody, making it exceptionally painful for him to use the squat toilet in his cell. The lawyers say he has been offered treatment for his knee and a sitting toilet that would be less painful to use — but only if he spills dirt on Al Jazeera. And he says he has none to spill.

"And while Defense Department documents indicate that he has been a model inmate at Guantánamo, he protests that he has been called racial epithets (he is black) and that he has seen guards desecrate the Koran.

"When Sudan detained an American journalist, Paul Salopek, in August in Darfur, journalists and human rights groups reacted with outrage until he was freed a month later. We should be just as offended when it is our own government that is sinking to Sudanese standards of justice.

"This doesn’t look like a war on terrorism, but a war on our own values.”


“....'You would not do that,' Mr. Hajj quoted his interrogator as saying, 'because it would endanger your child....'"

And to think that the justification for this horror is a crime which has never been fully investigated or prosecuted: 9/11.