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and curfews: Mussolini's arditi, for instance, warned Italian citizens to stay indoors during the fascists' mass rallies. In
Mexico, police shot at and wounded student protesters in 1968.25 General Pinochet's forces also fired at protesters in
1982.26 Suppression of protests habituates citizens to the idea that the state has the right to direct their movements and
to disperse large groups or to keep them from gathering in the first place.
In America, citizens are supposed to have the right "peaceably to assemble." But in 2004, during the Republican
National Convention, New York City officials denied demonstrators access to the Great Lawn in Central Park. Mayor
Michel Bloomberg's administration denied that politics had played a role in banning the demonstration. But the
National Council of Arab Americans and the ANSWER Coalition, an antiwar group, brought suit. E-mails revealed that
while Bloomberg's aides gave the rationale of "security" for denying the permit, the true reasons were political: "It is
very important that we do not permit any big or political events for the period between Aug. 23 and Sept. 6, 2004," read
one Parks Department e-mail.27
In New York, that wasn't the end of the pressure against free assembly. In August of 2006, the New York Police
Department sought new rules that made it illegal for groups of more than 35 people to gather for sidewalk marches
without a permit. The NYCLU pointed out that this proposal would have restricted a wide range of citizens' daily group
activities, such as school field trips and funeral processions: "A couple jaywalking or a family riding bicycles without
stopping at every red light would be subject to arrest for parading without a permit," the NYCLU wrote in an op-ed in
the Times.2S
For now, U.S. citizens can still assemble, march, and make their voices heard. You must ally with the many
Independents and Republicans around you who love their country and cherish these rights don't just talk to your
like-minded friends. We must practice our rights now while our voices can still carry raising them together in defense
of freedom.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TARGET KEY INDIVIDUALS
No one can equate the consequences for those who are spied on. (In East Germany: loss of university place, like Young Brecht; loss
of job, like Erhard Haufe; reprisals against your children, as happened to Werner, and imprisonment, as in the case of Dr.
Warmbier, with the court's sentence decided in advance by the prosecution.)
Timothy Garton Ash
All dictatorships and would-be dictators strategically target key individuals. Job loss or career setbacks are the first
kinds of pressure these people are likely to face.
In 2001, the National Science Foundation made it clear that its grants would no longer go to research on the basis of
the science alone if that research undermined the Bush administration's agenda. If a researcher's grant sources are
closed down, he or she is neutered as a scientist. The Bush administration has stacked scientific advisory committees,
which are not supposed to be political, with partisans. In February of 2004, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a
condemnation of these abuses, signed by 6,000 scientists.1
Again, this pressure is not an original idea. Goebbels purged the sciences as well even setting up an institute for
race-based science to replace the degenerate science-based science of non-"co-ordinated" reality. When German
scientists complained that scientific enquiry was suffering because their ranks had been purged of those who did not
agree with the "party line," Hitler remarked that in his view Germany could get along without physics or chemistry for a
hundred years.2
Universities keep alight the campfires of free speech, so it's not surprising that Bush supporters seems have a strategy
to target critics on campus. In California, a bill called SBR, the "Student Bill of Rights," seeks legally to "balance"
classroom discussion. David Horowitz, of the well-funded right-wing Center for the Study of Popular Culture, drafted a
model of this law. His version has found supporters in Congress. (On May 1,1933, the JVeue Studentenrecht law was
passed in Germany, aimed at using student organizations to align universities with the values of the National Socialist
state.)3
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