Two From the Two Naomis

There's Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf, and you'd think they'd be easy to keep straight but by the disambiguation on each of their Wikipedia entries you'd imagine otherwise. And then there're their works, which you could imagine coming from the same person.

In the cases of both authors, I find their work chilling, and unfortunately I find it plausible.

Klein explains "disaster capitalism" here, and the ways that "shocks" to the body politic, from terrorism to economics, render it maliable.

Wolf exposes the ten easy steps to converting a democracy into a dictatorship, and makes several persuasive points that America is most of the way there. Thanks to the suspension of habeas corpus all the government would need to do is declare martial law "for our safety." Anyone who dissented could then disappear into the gulag, never to be heard from again.

Btw, you know that habeas corpus has been suspended, right? You know that the government merely needs label you a terrorist or sympathizer, American citizen or no, and you lose your rights: rights to a hearing, rights to an attorney, rights to any judicial review. You would disappear and there would be no legal avenue for pulling you from the black hole that is Guantanamo Bay and the other overseas prisons. For God's sake, we're not facing an enemy like the Soviet Union, which had more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy America. We're facing an enemy that can only wound us, but not mortally. 9/11 wasn't a mortal wound. Even the nuclear destruction of a major city wouldn't be a mortal wound. Terrorism isn't an existential threat to this nation. Only our reactions, our overreactions, to it can destroy America: the removal of our rights to be heard in court, the quiet loss of our privacy to government surveillance, the offshoring of an American gulag and the nearly constant repetition that the terrorists will get us if. America won't be destroyed from without, but within.