Naomi Wolf, Occupy Wall Street, and Oppression (Guest Voice)

Naomi Wolf, Occupy Wall Street and Oppression
by Mark Nuckols

While visiting Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, I open the Yahoo webpage and read the headline news that Naomi Wolf has been arrested by New York City police for defending the rights of anti-Wall street protesters. I can easily imagine Wolf frantically trying to bait the cops into arresting her so that she can get her name back in the news and pose as a fearless patriot defending the basic Constitutional rights of a people threatened with state oppression. Naomi Wolf apparently likes this role, the intrepid defender of liberty against encroachment by a menacing police state.

I have spent a lot if time in the former Soviet Union. In Ukraine, the former prime minister and current leader of the opposition was just sentenced to a seven year jail term under the patently false pretext of having violated Ukrainian law by having negotiated an agreement with Russia to pay market prices for natural gas. In Minsk, the capital of Belarus, I have seen OMON shock-troops from the Interior Ministry brutally pummel people with batons merely for marching to protest a rigged election.

And as a student of 20th century European history, I have tried to understand with clarity and sympathetic understanding what police states have been willing to do to their own people. And thus I find it appallingly ugly, pathetic and dishonest for someone like Naomi Wolf to try to appropriate the horrendous and heart-rending suffering of actual victims of tyranny and oppression as the seeming means of self-promotion and self-congratulation.

And in her various published works a very clear pattern emerges: Wolf is willing to employ both wholesale exaggeration and historical inaccuracy in order to concoct a false tale of looming state oppression to tarnish and defame those she doesn’t politically care for and to seemingly glorify herself.

Wolf is famous for, among other things, for a book titled The End of Liberty: A Letter to a Young Patriot, the cover embellished in typeset designed to evoke patriotic pamphlets of the Revolutionary Era. In her book, Wolf clearly fancies herself a modern-day Thomas Paine, issuing a stirring cry to arms to defend our liberties against would-be oppressors and tyrants. Wolf asserts that democracies are overthrown by dictatorships employing a “playbook” that make use a set of interrelated strategies, allowing them to execute a “fascist shift” against the will of the populace and that under George W. Bush a shadowy cabal of interests was laying the groundwork for just such a “fascist shift” in America. And the book is chock-full of exaggerations, distortions and falsehoods that sharply illuminate her technique.

In the documentary based upon her book she describes a friend of hers, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, saying every time the Bush administration undertook a new counter-terrorism initiative “the Germans did that. The Germans did that.” Wolf relates how she was initially skeptical of the seemingly unthinkable notion that the United States was marching down the path to fascism. But that upon deeper historical researches, she was stunned to find a lengthy series of what she calls disturbing “historical echoes.”

Nicely and identically dressed young men shouting at poll workers at a voting booth during the 2000 recount in Florida? Disgruntled fans of the Dixie Chicks publicly burning the group’s CDs? Criticism of a tenured professor at the University of Colorado for saying the victims of 9-11 deserved what they got? Well, for Wolf “these events may seem to have historical echoes because they actually are mirrored in history.”(Wolf, 6) The images that are she clearly wants to invoke are: menacing brown-shirted Nazis, Nazi book burnings, Nazi purges of universities. They are false parallels that Wolf constructs using deceptive methods of distortion, exaggeration, or even seeming outright fabrications of basic facts.

Wolf’s adopted posture of courageous patriot comes off as cheap bravado. She also repeatedly impugns people as unpatriotic and treasonous, even “murderers and torturers,” without offering any foundation for doing so. And her rhetorical stratagem of drawing non-existent parallels between routine airport passenger searches and Gestapo torture trivializes the all too real heartrending tragedies of those who suffered cruelly and horribly under fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. I have been myself been subjected to the heightened airport scrutiny Wolf refers to, and it was a modest, two minute long inconvenience. I might compare it to an average wait in line at McDonald’s. I would not compare it to the “seven grams of lead” that Stalin’s NKVD would administer to the back of the head of innocent civilians caught up in the Great Terror, or being shipped off to Dachau by Hitler’s Gestapo. Wolf exhibits no such inhibitions.

Wolf not merely uses mischaracterization, distortion, and contrived parallels to buttress her arguments. Wolf cites extensively The Coming of the Thrid Reich, the first part of a trilogy chronicling the history of Nazi Germany by Cambridge professor Richard Evans, a work widely considered to be the authoritative work on this subject. And, Wolf also relies heavily on Let History Judge, Russian dissident and historian Roy Medvedev’s account of the working of the Soviet system of massive repression under Joseph Stalin. And at times it seems as if she makes up her own version of “history” out of whole cloth.

In 2001 both houses of the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly passed the U.S. Patriot Act, which Wolf wishes to portray as a silent coup of sorts. She then turns to the passage in 1933 by the Reichstag of the Enabling Act, by which the Reichstag gave Adolf Hitler far-sweeping powers to rule entirely by executive decree, effectively give Hitler all state power over a one-party dictatorship.

Here is how Wolf describes the circumstances surrounding the passage of the Patriot Act.

After September 11, 2001, we Americans learned in dramatic new ways that we were facing a terrifying external threat. We saw it in the carnage in lower e Manhattan, but the administration also used a new set of phrases that defined for us a new reality. “Evildoers” who envied us and hated our freedoms were determined to annihilate us. By October 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act – that in the end, when it became law, topped 400 pages – rushed through Congress. Lawmakers passed it overwhelmingly – though many said they had scarcely read it. Someremarked that it would have seemed unpatriotic to resist passing the law. (35)

She then proceeds to compare the passage of the Patriot Act to the passage by the German Reichstag of the Enabling Act of 1933. The enabling act was passed in the immediate aftermath of an act of arson in which the Reichstag building itelf was burned to the ground, and it granted Adolf Hitler sweeping and dictatorial powers. «Appalled at the terrorist threat, and not wanting to be seen as unpatriotic, there was little debate: lawmakers of all parties passed the Enabling Act by a wide majority: 441 to 94.” (Wolf, 41)

This is an obscenely distorted retelling of the passage of the Enabling Act, one that portrays the Reichstag deputies who voted it through as well-meaning men acting out of fear of terrorism. Richard Evans, the leading historian of the Third Reich, tells things very differently in his magisterial account The Coming of the Third Reich.

The 100 Communist deputies had already been expelled from the Reichstag. The Centre party (which was primarily the representative for Germany’s largely middle class Catholics), according to Evans, “had long since ceased to be a supporter of democracy. Following the general trend of political Catholicism in interwar Europe, it had come to support the principles of authoritarianism and dictatorship out of fear of Bolshevism and revolution. ” (Evans, 352) With the Communists expelled, the Centre Party reluctantly willing to support Hitler, and of course the Nazis and their far-right nationalist allies guaranteed to vote for the Enabling Act, it fell to the moderate left Social Democratic delegation of 94 deputies to cast the sole votes
against the effective death sentence for German democracy. Evans describes the scene at the Reichstag meeting, which took place at the principle Berlin opera house since the Reichstag fire destroyed its customary home.

The deputies arrived at the Kroll Opera House in an atmosphere heavy with violence and intimidation. The Social Democrat Wilhelm Hoegner remembered: Wild chants greeted us: “We want the Enabling Law!” Young lads with the swastika on their chests looked us cheekily up and down, virtually barring the way for us. They quite made us run the gauntlet, and shouted insults at us like ‘Centrist pig,’ Marxist sow.’ In the Kroll Opera it was swarming with armed SA and SS… The debating chamber was decorated with swastikas and similar ornament… When we Social Democrats had taken our places on the far left, SA and SS men placed themselves along the walls in a half-circle. Their attitude did not bode well for us. (Evans, 352-353)

Hitler spoke for the Nazis, boasting of having suppressed the Communists, and offering the Centrists renewed promises of protecting the interests of the Church however, with an unmistakable threat of violent repression should the measure be rejected. “The government of the nationalist uprising,” he declared, was “determined and ready to deal with the announcement that the Act has been rejected and with it that resistance has been declared. May you, gentlemen, now take the decision yourselves as to whether it is to be peace or war.” (Evans, 353)

Otto Wels, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party, gave the last opposition speech that would be heard in the Reichstag for twelve years. He defended the accomplishments of the Weimar Republic, adding “Freedom and life can be taken from us, but not honor.” Evans provides context:

Wels was not exaggerating: several prominent Social Democrats had already been killed by the Nazis, and he himself was carrying a cyanide capsule in his waist pocket as he spoke, ready to swallow should he be arrested and tortured by the brownshirts after delivering his speech.(Evans, 353)

The differences between the true version of events and Wolf’s version are stark. By various tricks of verbal legerdemain, she manages to make the democratic passage of legislation that she disagrees with sound like the most brutal coup against democracy in modern European history. And she does so knowingly. In an email correspondence I had with Richard Evans, the historian of the Third Reich that she cites extensively throughout her book, Evans explicitly stated to me that he had rejected her invitation to appear in her documentary based on the book, and that he felt that the comparisons she was seeking to draw were profoundly wrong. Wolf also extensively cites wrter Anne Applebaum, who has written several well-researched books about the horrors of Stalinist oppression in the Soviet Union. Applebaum has expressed to me by email literal outrage at the misuse of her work.

Wolf’s misuse of German history finds parallels in her misuse of Soviet history. Wolf makes a series of glib comparisons between totalitarian prison systems and current U.S. practices at Guantanamo, which she calls “fingerprints from other prison systems.” (Wolf, 60) One of these “fingerprints” is “the use of water.” It has been confirmed that the U.S. has waterboarded three detainees. Citing Soviet historian Roy Medvedev, Wolf finds a suitable parallel in Soviet history involving the use of water: “The NKVD poured icy water on uncooperative prisoners held on shipboard prisons.” (Wolf, 63) In the specific passage Wolf cites, Medvedev writes about the cruel horrors of prisoner transport in the gulag system. After describing the miseries and death concomitant with transporting people by cattle car, for example 200 women in a wagon made for eight cows, in weeks long journeys across Russia, Medvedev describes prison ships.

Conditions were even worse on the ships taking prisoners from Vladivostok to the Kolyma region. In their crowded holds people often lay on top of each other, bread was thrown to them threw the hatches as if they were beasts. Those who died during the voyage – and there were many – were simply thrown into the sea. A riot or an organized protest was met with icy water, poured into the hold from the Sea of Okhotsk. Thousands of prisoners died after such a bath, or were delivered frostbitten to the hospitals of Magadan. (Medvedev, 278)

The fuller account describes a systematic and murderous pattern of senseless cruelty, compared to Wolf’s sanitized version. If fact, Wolf effectively is an apologist for the gulag system; if you took her account at face value, that system was not a millionth as bad or evil as described by its victims. There is a wide chasm of meaning between “poured icy water on uncooperative prisoners” and “met with icy water, poured into the hold from the Sea of Okhotsk. Thousands died after such a bath….” But in her zealous desire to compare a rarely used U.S. interrogation practice to Stalin’s secret police, Wolf is literally willing to whitewash history and present unspeakable cruelty in as kind a light possible.

These are no isolated instances. Her book is replete with gross mischaracterizations of the grim and tragic history of the brutal practices of facist German and Soviet police states in order to lend legitimacy to her facile arguments that essentially democratic America is itself either a police state or on the verge of becoming one.

As of this morning I have not seen any further news regarding Ms. Wolf’s arrest. However, I am quite confident that during her brief detention she has not been subjected to anything resembling physical coercion, that she has been handled in accordance with New york law and the U.S. Constitution, and that she has had access to a highly paid, Ivy educated lawyer to defend her rights. I am equally confident that Ms. Wolf is going to eagerly use her stunt as yet another opportunity to compare herself to victims of actual state terror and police oppression. If so, she will defame the constitutional order in America and its actual defenders as she also dishonors people who have made real sacrifices of blood and liberty in the defense of freedom and democracy.

Mark Nuckols is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He travels extensively. In recent years he has practiced corporate law in London and Washington, led an economic research team in Moscow, and advised on energy policy in Tbilisi. He strives to opine less and to understand more.