{"id":316,"date":"2007-04-24T15:57:25","date_gmt":"2007-04-24T14:57:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2007\/04\/24\/bananamerica_in_ten_easy_steps"},"modified":"2025-10-10T11:09:55","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T10:09:55","slug":"bananamerica_in_ten_easy_steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2007\/04\/24\/bananamerica_in_ten_easy_steps","title":{"rendered":"Bananamerica in ten easy steps"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Naomi Wolf has an article in today&#39;s Guardian entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/g2\/story\/0,,2063979,00.html\">Fascist America, in 10 easy steps<\/a>, which lists ten things governments generally do when turning a country from a democracy to a dictatorship.  It&#39;s not the first time I&#39;ve seen a comparison between Bush&#39;s America and fascism (see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bushflash.com\/14.html\">this animation<\/a> with fourteen characteristics of a fascist state which, it is argued, the USA under Bush clearly displays), but although Wolf refers to other types of dictatorship, including military and communist ones, using the term &quot;fascist&quot; prominantly misses the point.  There have been plenty of countries, particularly in the third world, which have slipped into dictatorship by steps similar to those Wolf outlines &#8211; there are several countries in the Middle East right now which have fake democracies with freedoms curtailed by &quot;states of emergency&quot; which have lasted decades.  Screaming fascism leads people to retreat to a misguided sense of security; what the USA &#8211; and, to a lesser extent, other western countries &#8211; show signs of relapsing into is the state of a miserable third-world banana republic.  (More: <a href=\"http:\/\/leninology.blogspot.com\/2007\/04\/bush-fascist.html\">Lenin&#39;s Tomb<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Naomi Wolf has an article in today&#39;s Guardian entitled Fascist America, in 10 easy steps, which lists ten things governments generally do when turning a country from a democracy to a dictatorship. It&#39;s not&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil_liberties"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-56","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42076,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions\/42076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}