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WHY BOTHER?  GETTING A LIFE IN A LOCKED-DOWN LAND

Chapter Two:  TARGETS

Imagine living with someone who lied to you every day, took too much and gave too little, manipulated opportunities, denied responsibility, ordered you about, declined to accept advice, and refused to recognize any explicit or implicit contract between the two of you.

Dismal as this sounds, it is not a bad description of the relationship between ourselves and larger institutions with which we must increasingly deal. John McKnight describes the alternative -- what he calls authentic social forms as possessing three basic dimensions: "They tend to be uncommodified, unmanaged, and uncurricularized."

What happens when this is not so? Instead of friends and relatives mourning with us we have bereavement counselors turning grief into a commodity. Instead of a community, we have managers creating a bureaucracy. Instead of practical teachers, we have technocrats building rigid rules of learning.

There is now hardly a part of our lives that we cannot turn over to someone else in order for it to be properly managed and controlled. A poignant example was offered by Dirk Johnson in the New York Times when he described the trend towards Little League personal trainers. One parent was paying $70 an hour to get his son up to par. Said his mother: "We did it for his self-esteem."

The owner of a firm that supplies trainers told Johnson, "On Monday morning, we get frantic calls from parents. They'll say, 'It's an emergency -- the boy struck out twice on Saturday -- we need help right away.'''

Bernard Beck, a sociologist at Northwestern University, told Johnson that child raising had taken a more management-style approach, especially among parents who were well-educated and successful. In some ways, Beck said, children have come to be seen a bit like growth stocks. He summed it up this way:

In an earlier generations, parents were younger, going at life without much of a plan, a little courageous and a little foolhardy, a kind of what-the-heck attitude. But many of today's parents are more serious. They put off having children for a career. And having had success in their careers, they use the same goal-oriented principles when it comes to raising their kids. They study what's needed for success. They look at the competition. It's all a very rational, very market-oriented approach.

Even the humanities have been put in harness for management, as at the Aspen Institute which once offered a course called "Can the Humanities Improve Management Effectiveness?" The primary objectives: "To improve management effectiveness, to develop more competent and socially acclimated managers, and to assist in the success process of managers to executives."

In such ways has the manager replaced the priest, the politician, the teacher, and the artist in turn-of-the-century America. Boosted by the insidious myth that "management skills" can substitute for knowledge of what one is managing, as well as obviating the need for social intelligence and moral vision, Americans have rushed to emulate the very archetype that is successfully dismantling and desiccating their culture.

How strange it would be to find a modern manager writing to his nephew words such as these:

Though you cannot see, when you take one step what will be the next, yet follow truth, justice and plain dealing, and never fear their leading you out of the labyrinth, in the easiest manner possible. The knot which you thought a Gordian one, will untie itself before you. Nothing is so mistaken as the supposition that a person can extricate himself from a difficulty by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice.

Denying his nephew the standard weapons of contemporary business and politics might seem a disservice, but the uncle didn't do all that poorly at management. After all, Thomas Jefferson helped to organize a whole country.

John Ralston Saul put it plainly in Voltaire's Bastards, "Management cannot solve problems. Nor can it stir creativity of any sort. It can only manage what it is given. If asked to do more, it will deform whatever is put into its hands."

Even within the literature of management one can find evidence. Richard Lester in The Productive Edge reported that only a third of 500 surveyed companies felt that their much-touted "total quality management" programs had a significant impact on their competitiveness.

And Saul gives a devastating example of the limits of management:

The Holocaust was the result of a perfectly rational argument -- given what reason had become -- that was self-justifying and hermetically sealed. There is, therefore, nothing surprising about the fact that the meeting called to decide on "the final solution" was a gathering mainly of senior ministerial representatives. Technocrats. Nor is it surprising that [the] Wansee Conference lasted only an hour -- one meeting among many for those present -- and turned entirely on the modalities for administering the solutions ... The massacre was indeed 'managed,' even 'well managed.' It had the clean efficiency of a Harvard case study.

Marshall Rosenberg, who teaches non-violent communication, was struck in reading psychological interviews with Nazi war criminals not by their abnormality, but that they used a language denying choice: "should," "one must," "have to." For example, Adolph Eichmann was asked, "Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people their death?" Eichmann replied, "To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy."

Asked to explain, Eichmann said, "My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache - 'office talk.'" In office talk "you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, 'Why did you do it?' you say, 'I had to.' 'Why did you have to?' 'Superiors' orders. Company policy. It's the law.'''

Yet for all the words we have devoted to the Holocaust, go into almost any bookstore and you'll find far more works on how to manage, manipulate and control others -- and how to use "office talk" -- than you will on how to practice the skills of a free citizen. Some of the most important lessons of the Holocaust are simply missed. Among these, as Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, is that it could only have been carried out by "an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy."

In The Cunning of History, Rubenstein also finds uncomfortable parallels between the Nazis and their opponents. For example, in 1944 a Hungarian Jewish emissary meets with Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, and suggests that the Nazis might be willing to save one million Hungarian Jews in return for military supplies. Lord Moyne's reply: "What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?" Writes Rubenstein:

The British government was by no means averse to the 'final solution' as long as the Germans did most of the work.

For both countries, it had become a bureaucratic problem, one that Rubenstein suggests we understand "as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the 20th century."

These tendencies are not alien to America. General Curtis LeMay ran the air war against both Japan and North Korea, became head of the sacrosanct Strategic Air Command, and was one of the military heroes of his time. Here are just a few of his accomplishments as reported by Richard Rhodes in the New Yorker:

• The destruction of nearly 17 square miles of Tokyo with the loss of at least 100,000 civilian lives.

• The destruction of 62 other Japanese cities. Only Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared -- reserved for their own special horror. In sum, more than a million Japanese civilians were killed. LeMay himself would admit years later, "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."

• The bombing of North Korean cities, dams, villages and rice paddies. Civilian deaths: more than two million.

In short, with the enthusiastic blessing of the American government, LeMay was directly responsible for the slaughter of about half as many civilians as died in the Holocaust. And LeMay had even grander schemes. His plan for defeating the Soviet Union included the obliteration of 70 Soviet cities in 30 days with 33 atomic bombs and the deaths of 2.7 million citizens.

One of the reasons we don't hear much about such things is because the political center limits both the topics and the range of the debate. For example, imagine turning on C-SPAN and hearing a high government official say of another:

[He is] actuated by views, in my judgment, subversive of the principles of good government and dangerous to the union, peace and happiness of the country.

And another high official replies the next day:

His system flowed from the principles adverse to liberty and was calculated to undermine and demolish the republic.

This sort of language would cause extreme anchor anxiety but, in fact, is found, in the first case, in a letter by Alexander Hamilton concerning James Madison and, in the second instance, in a letter from Thomas Jefferson concerning Hamilton. At the time the letters were written, Hamilton was Secretary of Treasury and Jefferson was Secretary of State, both serving at the pleasure of George Washington, to whom each penned his screed.

Today, outlets such as C-SPAN and PBS function as karaoke bars of political centrism. Far from encouraging the sort of vibrant debate our country needs, they apply a verbal tourniquet to democracy by limiting how one may speak about it. In fact, what shocks some about less restrictive talk radio is really just the sound of democracy happening.

It's not just the media, though, that keeps debate in check. How many school children are taught that, worldwide, wars in the past century killed over 100 million people? In World War I alone, the death toll was around ten million. Much of this, including the Holocaust, was driven by a culture of modernity that so changed the power of institutions over the individual that the latter would become what Erich Fromm called homo mechanicus, "attracted to all that is mechanical and inclined against all that is alive." Becoming, in fact. a part of the machinery - willing to kill or to die just to keep it running.

Thus, with Auschwitz-like efficiency, over 6,000 people perished every day during World War I for 1,500 days. Rubenstein recounts that on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British lost 60,000 men and half of the officers assigned to them. But the internal bureaucratic logic of the war did not falter at all; over the next six months, more than a million British, French and German soldiers would lose their lives. The total British advance: six miles. No one in that war was a person anymore. The seeds of the Holocaust can thus be found in the trenches of World War I. Individuals had became no better than the bullets that killed them, just part of the expendable arsenal of the state.

***

Today almost every principle upon which this country was founded is being turned on its head. Instead of liberty we are being taught to prefer order, instead of democracy we are taught to follow directions, instead of debate we are inundated with propaganda. Most profoundly, American citizens are no longer considered by their elites to be members or even worker drones of society, but rather as targets -- targets of opportunity by corporations and of suspicion and control by government.

It is not surprising, therefore, that an increasing number have come to accept our culture's message that their choices are largely ones of association: what they join (a corporation, church or organization), their innate "identity" (ethnicity or sex) or that which they consume (wine, clothing, car).

These are the brands we display on our clothes and in our speech and, most importantly, that march through our minds. Increasingly, our lives are being run by logos rather than logos, symbols rather than reason. The alternative notion -- that one's identity is created by the conscious choices one makes -- seems odd and archaic. Few are telling people -- certainly not the government, media, or corporate America -- that they still have a latent, common power to shuck their symbolic uniforms, to become themselves, to change what is happening to them.

Contemporary America actively opposes choice. Choice is repressed by a government that increasingly interferes in its citizens' personal lives; choice is manipulated by advertising and public relations; choice is distorted by mass media and the politicians it creates; it is limited by the growing homogeneity of commercial and cultural life, it is ignored by schools that prefer teaching driver's education to analytical skills, and it is suppressed by a cornucopia of illegal and legal drugs that allow one to avoid the pain and hard work of decisions -- seductive relief from what Sartre called the "vertigo of possibility."

We easily observe and deplore the absence of choice when we see it in its adolescent form -- such as in the gang -- but we are less perceptive when it happens to us, especially when it occurs incrementally and in a climate that permits the evocation of what we used to be to conceal what we are truly becoming.

One example of these trends is the increase in laws aimed at social control rather than traditional criminality. Juvenile curfews, the penalizing of parents for the misdeeds of their young, and the drug war are all examples of government acting not only to prevent dangerous deviance but to enforce its definition of normalcy. Aside from frequently violating the Constitution, these acts steal freedom from citizens and habituate them to still further encroachments.

Why this happened so dramatically in the last two decades of the 20th century is a matter of conjecture. Certainly external factors didn't justify it, even using the crudest logic. But then, perhaps that was part of the problem. At the end of the Cold War, a top Soviet official promised America one last horrible surprise: the loss of an enemy. It was as the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy had written early in the century:

Night is here but the barbarians have not come. And some people arrived from the borders, and said that there are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were some kind of solution.

A decade after the Cold War, a Pentagon office sported a sign that read, WANTED: A GOOD ENEMY. In fact the military was still shopping for new enemies to buck up the welfare fathers of the defense industry. These enemies were initially vague enough that they were known by such abstractions as a generic composite peer competitor, myriad formless threats, and even, God forbid, normal asymmetrical niche opponent. The search was not entirely futile; in a few years the military was in the air against Yugoslavia.

But there was another target starting to turn up in the planners' mind: the US citizen. For the first time since the Civil War, American government officials began seriously considering the possibility of armed conflict in, and occupation of, their own country. There was a growing assumption that the interests of those with power and those without might diverge to the point of insurrection.

The major media steadfastly ignored the trend despite ample evidence lying about. For example, Defense Week reported that "Army Chief of Staff Gen. Dennis Reimer said the Army needs to focus more on homeland defense and welcomes a 'mission creep' into that area." According to the Army Times, Defense Secretary William Cohen warned in 1998, "Terrorism is escalating to the point that Americans soon may have to choose between civil liberties and more intrusive means of protection." One year later, unheralded in most of the media, Cohen established a new homeland military command. Wrote USA Today, "The military must 'deal with the threats we are most likely to face,' Cohen said, brushing aside concerns about federal troops operating at home. 'The American people should not be concerned about it. They should welcome it.'"

What neither Cohen nor the media told the public was that the number of international terrorist attacks had actually declined 59% in the previous decade and that the total American casualties from terrorism in 1998 had been 24, compared with over a thousand five years earlier.

Still, a 1996 article by military historian and strategist Martin van Creveld in the Los Angeles Times argued that

As the 20th century draws to an end, it is time that military commanders and the policy makers to whom they report wake up to the new realities. In today's world the main threat to many states, including specifically the US, no longer comes from other countries. Either we make the necessary changes, or what is commonly known as the modern world will lose all sense of security and dwell in perpetual fear.

Perhaps most startling was an article in the Winter 1992 issue of Parameters, a quarterly published by the US Army College. The author was Lt. Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a graduate of Villanova School of Law, the Armed Forces Staff College, and a distinguished graduate of the National War College. He had been named by the Judge Advocates Association as the USAF's outstanding career armed services attorney. In short, not your average paranoid conspiracy theorist.

Dunlap's article was called "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012." In it, he pretended to be writing to a fellow military colleague in 2012, explaining how the coup had occurred. He accurately described America's current state:

America became exasperated with democracy. We were disillusioned with the apparent inability of elected government to solve the nation's dilemmas. We were looking for someone or something that could produce workable answers. The one institution of government in which the people retained faith was the military. Buoyed by the military's obvious competence in the First Gulf War, the public increasingly turned to it for solutions to the country's problems. Americans called for an acceleration of trends begun in the 1980s: tasking the military with a variety of new, non-traditional missions, and vastly escalating its commitment to formerly ancillary duties.

Dunlap quoted one of Washington's journalistic cherubs, James Fallows, who wrote in a 1991 article

I am beginning to think that the only way the national government can do anything worthwhile is to invent a security threat and turn the job over to the military ... The military, strangely, is the one government institution that has been assigned legitimacy to act on its notion of the collective good.

Fallows was not alone within the Washington establishment. Stephen Rosenfeld of the Washington Post wrote a column praising an Army advocate of Dunlap's nightmare. Rosenfeld described US Army Major Ralph Peters this way:

At home, use of the military appears inevitable to him --  though not yet to an American consensus -- "at least on our borders and in some urban environments" ... He deplores our military's reluctance to join the war on drugs, which he attributes to a fear of failure. He would dutifully prepare for the traditionally 'military' missions, plus the new one of missile defense. But he would be ready to engage with drugs and crime, terrorism, peacekeeping, illegal immigration, disease control, resource protection, evacuation of endangered citizens ...

What Dunlap described and Peters advocated was not a bold military stroke against the civilian government, but simply a coup by attrition. Wrote Dunlap:

By the year 2000 the armed forces had penetrated many vital aspects of American society. More and more military officers sought the kind of autonomy in these civilian affairs that they would expect from their military superiors in the execution of traditional combat operations ... They convinced themselves that they could more productively serve the nation in carrying out their new assignments if they accrued to themselves unfettered power to implement their programs.

Dunlop's timing was a bit off, but there is little doubt he had spotted a trend. Since the article appeared, the military has, for example, engaged in numerous mock urban invasions and assaults, often unannounced and sometimes scaring the wits out of citizens with low-flying helicopter sorties in the middle of the night. Even some of the participants have had a hard time adjusting to the idea of invading one's own country. Said a Marine colonel of a West Coast exercise that was garnering local opposition, "Normally, we go into a country that's in some fatal stage. We work with those who are with us, and shoot those who are not. The part that's missing here is that you can't shoot the Coastal Commission."

In such ways have we become targets -- part of the potential enemy. The game plan of America's mandarins assumes a widening gap between the governed and the governing and between rich and poor, one that may have to be met by force of one sort or another. Those in power are prepared to do business with most favored nations abroad and to suppress the least favored citizens at home.

This is a policy without redemption. It is not only economically cruel and profoundly anti-democratic, it is deeply subversive and destructive of American ideals and culture, not to mention our constitution. Those who run the country, whether in government, business or media, seldom speak of this land anymore with feeling, affection or understanding. They too often carry forth their affairs unburdened by place, history or culture -- without conscience, without country, and without any sense of the pain they have caused.

America is no longer a place to serve and to love. Because they have, in the name of global glories, cut themselves off from their own land, it is becoming for them increasingly a place of danger -- a place of long, grim shadows, the sort of shadows that too often conceal a foe.

How far are we along this road? David Ross, a science fiction author, sat down with a George Orwell scholar and found that more than 100 of the 137 predictions or indicators used in the novel 1984 had come to pass, including sensitive omni-directional microphones, two-way television, restricted turnoff options, wide angle lens, personal databanks, prose-writing machines, tone-of-voice analyzers, remote detection of a human heartbeat, rapid destruction of documents, police patrol helicopters, think tanks to plan future wars, doomsday research, self-propelled bombs, more lethal nerve gases, and tailored genetic diseases.

Orwell was prescient in less specific ways as well. One of the characteristics of his inner party, the less than two percent that controlled the rest, was that there was no sexual or racial discrimination. He understood that ethnic eradication, while characteristic of nazism, was not required for fascism, a point that would be missed by later generations who assumed that if a gay or a black was running the show we must still be in democracy mode.

In fact, one of the characteristics of the modern propaganda state is the use of positive ethnic and sexual iconography to cover its tracks. Thus Richard Nixon was slurring Jews in Oval Office conversations even as he set a new record in their high-level appointments. W. J. Clinton was called our first black president by Toni Morrison even as the government was sending young black males to prison in unprecedented numbers. And German Greens joined a governing coalition for the first time only to find themselves being used as part of the moral justification for the bombing of Yugoslavia.

Journalist Sam Yette described the function of minorities in such situations:

• They provide credibility for otherwise invalid products

• They are neutralized by being taken away from potential radical roles

• They provide minority leadership that can take responsibility for anti-minority policies and decisions.

Orwell also had a clear understanding of how an elite could control the rest of the masses. He described the "proles" who made up the better part of the country and the least part of its power:

Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party ... From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is....

Orwell would not have been surprised that the Washington Post a few years ago published Nathan Gardels' arguments for the US becoming an authoritarian society like Singapore. Said Gardels,

Perhaps it is time to consider the possibility that the Western attitude that has all but cast away the notion of appropriate social authority might be outmoded. After all, the key problem of Western civilization now is not the absence of tolerance, it is how to cope with so much freedom.

Gardels quoted a senior Singapore official as saying. "The top three to five percent of a society can handle this free-for-all, this clash of ideas. If you do this with the whole mass ... you'll have a mess." To be sure, the Post did run a blistering countering article. Nonetheless, the articles in tandem left the feeling of having witnessed a thoughtful debate on the virtue of using torture or reviving segregation. Besides, that same year the Post ran an article suggesting that democracy was not appropriate for many small countries. The article argued, among other things, that "freeing markets and foreign trade can be more important than freeing ballot boxes." And the ultra-establishment Atlantic Monthly promoted an article by Robert Kaplan saying, "The global triumph of democracy was to be the glorious climax of the American Century. But democracy may not be the system that will best serve the world ..."

Why would a hard-won democracy willingly drift in such a direction? One reason is that if one is going to tolerate a growing divide between rich and poor, between those with power and those without, it is necessary to deal with the anger and alienation that results. If the traditional democratic approach -- making the system fairer -- is ruled out, then some form of oppression is required.

Besides, while a democratic redistribution of wealth and power might leave the country as a whole better off economically, it would be hard to convince those throwing million-dollar weddings or buying $70,000 personal submarines out of the Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog that this is the case.

Here is some of what has already happened in America's gated economy:

• 13% of black men have lost their right to vote because of felony convictions -- 31% in Alabama.

• The number of misdemeanor charges in New York City increased 85% during the 1990s.

• 40% of all post-Civil War federal criminal laws have been passed since 1970.

• By the end of the 1990s, nations whose combined prison population could fit inside just California penal institutions with space left over included France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands.

• The incarceration rate has tripled since the 1970s.

• In 1999 there was a one in four chance that a black child born that year would end up in jail.

If your goal is the economic well-being of the inner party rather than the general welfare, a strong case can be made that most people will accept their exclusion with quiet despair. Thus you can cut their services and deny them aid and they will not revolt. For those few who show signs of trouble, you simply write laws that restrict their employment, take away their driver's license, or ensure them incarceration using whatever ruse, such as drug laws, that works.

We know who might cause trouble. They are black, Latino, and white males with a high school education or less. They are the only sizable socio-economic minority in the country without a movement, without advocacy organizations, without media support. If they act out, if they smoke pot, have the wrong papers or otherwise get into trouble, we simply throw them in jail.

For less disruptive members of the society, the goal is not that they feel pain but that they not feel restless. Writing before the rise of Hitler, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World understood this principle; the people of his world took daily drugs, had plenty of access to sex, and were absorbed in such pre-Nintendo activities as obstacle golf. There were "feelies," movies that allowed you to touch as well as hear and see; diseases had been abolished; and death had been made as pleasant as possible.

Some traits of Huxley's world sound eerily familiar, such as genetic engineering, a stress on identity instead of individuality, psychological conditioning, the planned and controlled pursuit of happiness, the use of drugs as a cultural sedative, mindless consumption and the destruction of the family.

***

One of the reasons we have such difficulty perceiving our current conditions is our aversion to a single word: fascism. While there is no hesitation by politicians to draw parallels with the Holocaust to justify whatever foreign adventure appeals to them, or for the media to make similar analogies at the scrawl of a swastika, we seem only able to understand -- or even mention -- the climax of fascism rather than its genesis.

So removed is the true nature of fascism from our consciousness that it has even become a fashion statement, as the New York Times' Ruth La Ferla described in a stunningly offhand manner:

The brute aesthetic of fascism -- a blend of classical style and modern functionalism advanced by 20th-century totalitarian regimes -- is widespread these days, having muscled its way from the worlds of architecture and fashion photography onto movie screens and runways ... Fashion's flirtation with fascism has, to be sure, been stripped of its darker political content. Still, the ponderous style identified with tyranny retains an allure. "Fascism -- I hate to say it, but it's sexy," said Ned Cramer, a senior editor at Architecture magazine. The style generally is attractive, he said. "It expresses the idea of taking and then relinquishing control" ...

The aggressive style of totalitarianism retains a power to seduce because it "comes from a lineage of darkness," said Yeohlee Teng, a New York fashion designer ... Brutal granite and travertine structures, the dictator's pet mode of propaganda, "are all about power," Ms. Teng said, "and power is the greatest turn-on."

Italians, who invented the term, also called it the estato corporativo: the corporatist state. Orwell rightly described fascism as an extension of capitalism. It is an economy in which the government serves the interests of oligopolies, a state in which large corporations have the powers that in a democracy devolve to the citizens.

Today, it is no exaggeration to call our economy corporatist, defined by British scholars R.E. Pahl and J. T. Winkler as a system in which the government guides privately owned businesses towards order, unity, nationalism and success. "Let us not mince words," they said. "Corporatism is fascism with a human face."

The Nazis had their own word for it: wehrwirtschaft, semantically linking wehr (for defense, bulwark, weapon) with wirtshaft (for housekeeping, domestic economy, husbandry) to describe an economy based on the assumption of warfare. The concept was not new, however. "William Shirer points out in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that 18th- and 19th-century Prussia devoted 70% of its revenue to the army and "that nation's whole economy was always regarded as primarily an instrument not of the people's welfare but of military policy."

In Hitler's Germany even the pogroms were part of national economic planning, seizing Jewish shops and companies and replacing Jewish workers with the Ayran unemployed. Hitler argued that "private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy," and denounced "the freedom to starve," in a country which had known as many as six million without jobs. Wrote Shirer, "In taking away that last freedom, Hitler assured himself of the support of the working class."

The link between business and fascism was clear to German corporatists. Auschwitz was not just a way to get rid of Jews, it was also a major source of cheap labor. As Richard Rubenstein points out, "I.G. Farben's decision to locate at Auschwitz was based upon the very same criteria by which contemporary multinational corporations relocate their plants in utter indifference to the social consequences of such moves." I.G. Farben invested over a billion dollars in today's money at Auschwitz and, thanks to the endless supply of labor, adopted a policy of deliberately working the Jewish slaves to death.

In such ways do economics and freedom become intertwined. Those who think it can't happen here should consider that four days before Mussolini became Premier he met with a group of industrialists and assured them that his aim "was to reestablish discipline within the factories and that no outlandish experiments.... would be carried out." In Friendly Fascism, Bertram Gross notes that Mussolini also won "the friendship, support or qualified approval" of the American ambassador, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Thomas Lamont, many newspapers and magazine publishers, the majority of business journals, and quite a sprinkling of liberals, including some associated with both The Nation and The New Republic.

Little we do as individuals will matter much if we make the same mistakes as the liberal democrats of pre-Hitler Germany and Italy. If we lose the precious product of a struggle for free will that began only a few hundred years ago, no one will later ask us if we want it back.

The most necessary work of anyone who wishes to be free themselves is to protect the freedom of everyone around them. But constitutions, laws and courts offer no guarantees of this freedom. When the Supreme Court decided against the wishes of Andrew Jackson, the president reputedly said, "The court has made its decision, now let it enforce it." Judge Learned Hand argued that constitutions and such are false hopes: "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there is no constitution, no law, no court that can save it."

We still act and talk as though we are the legitimate offspring of those who declared that we possessed certain inalienable rights. But increasingly, we are become only virtual descendants, finding comfort in seductive but ultimately useless symbolism.

Such as Visa's "free speech" web site where you could "express your opinions, place your vote, make your choices. See whether others agree ... Vote your conscience, vote your mind." The questions, however, were ones such as how often do you read your horoscope and what's the most overexposed TV show.

Nadav Savio, whose father launched the free speech movement of the 1960s. argued on his own web site that Visa was "substituting brand preference for freedom of expression." Free speech, he argued, now means "little more than making consumer decisions." For corporate managers of our own brave new world -- as with the military planners -- you are the target.

The ultimate danger is the one of which Thomas Jefferson spoke when he warned that following the Revolution,

It will not be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves save in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore ... will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.

Now it is our turn in history. We flip the page and see the ad: "Southwest Airlines. The symbol of Freedom."

And of a country that has forgotten what freedom really is.

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