The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
by Naomi Wolf
(Click here)
Book Summary Information
Author: Naomi WolfEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-05
ISBN: 1933392797
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9781933392790
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Book Reviews of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
Book Review: Needs to Be Said, Needs to Be Read, A Solid First Step
Summary: 5 Stars
I disagree with those that criticize this book. This is PRECISELY the kind of book we need to see, at a reasonable price, being discussed in schools, clubs, and churches.
QUOTE page 27: "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 book resonates with me, in part because for the past ten years I have been reading heavily and observing the decline of America in all respects--see my chapter on Paradigms of Failure in Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography), both free at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog (as will all my books, but I do recommend the Amazon hard copies).
I might mention that in recent years I have felt I am reading for all of us, and especially for my colleagues in the government who are good people trapped in a bad system. This book is a perfect counterpoint to the fictional angst in TYRANNICIDE (The Story of the Second American Revolution). Our White House is theater, our Congress is corrupt, Goldman Sachs is out of control, and as Thom Hartman puts it so well, we are Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - And What We Can Do about It (BK Currents (Paperback)) at the same time that right here in America we have The Working Poor: Invisible in America and Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy.
The author is elegant, polite, and straight-forward. She compares the downturn in democracy here in the USA to the rise of Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's Russia, and Hitler's Germany, pointing out that Mussolini and Hitler both came to power "legally" within a democracy.
Early on the author mentions the Alien & Sedition Act and this resonates with me, I took a lot of hits for my review of What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States from saying similar things back then.
The heart of the book is a chapter on each of what the author calls the ten steps to dictatorship, and I list them here after observing that the author hits it out of the park in pointing out that all previous wars were of limited duration, while the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is the first open-ended constant state of emergency to be declared in America.
01 Invoke an External and Internal Threat
02 Establish Secret Prisons
03 Develop a Paramilitary Force
04 Surveil Ordinary Citizens
05 Infiltrate Citizens' Groups
06 Arbitrarily Detain and Release Citizens
07 Target Key Individuals
08 Restrict the Press
09 Cast Criticism as "Espionage" and Dissent as "Treason"
10 Subvert the Rule of Law
Virtually all 1500 books I have reviewed here at Amazon and in more easily sorted fashion at Phi Beta Iota support the tandem thesis that we have lost it here in America, and at the same time have imposed terrible--genocidal--costs on the rest of the world.
The author provides ample detail within each of the chapters and in my view is very restrained. She ends by calling for an American Awakening, and at the end are a full page "The American Freedom Campaign" and a half page "The Pledge of the American Freedom Campaign," both of which will be linked from Phi Beta Iota where I have more freedom to connect.
QUOTE page 29: "The Founders never expected us to fall asleep or get lazy. They counted on us to keep the web of the precious system intact so that an American despot could never arise. They trusted us to cherish liberty as they did. The price of liberty, the generation that debated and created the Constitution understood, is eternal vigilance."
The author does not seek to address the concentration of wealth or the many corruptions of our government and the two political parties that have sold out to Wall Street, but her bottom line word is the one we can all rally around: LIBERTY. We are no more free today than were the pigs in Animal Farm: Centennial Edition.
Three other books within my limit (see the other 1500 in 98 topical areas at Phi Beta Iota, all with links back to Amazon):
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country
Summary of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
Winner of the 2008 NAUTILUS SILVER AWARD in the category of Social Change/Activism
In a stunning indictment of the Bush administration and Congress, best-selling author Naomi Wolf lays out her case for saving American democracy. In authoritative research and documentation Wolf explains how events of the last six years 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 efforts 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.
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