A Letter of Warning

TimeWatch Editorial
May 31, 2016

What is truly incredible is the fact that many today recognize the shift in the personality of the United States. What is even more incredible is that most of them identify the shift in a similar way. Naomi R. Wolf was born November 12, 1962 and is an American author, journalist and former political advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton. According to her internet biographies, Wolf was born in San Francisco, to a Jewish family. Her mother’s name is Deborah Goleman; her father is the Romanian-born gothic horror scholar and Yiddish translator Leonard Wolf. She attended Lowell High School and debated in regional speech tournaments as a member of the Lowell Forensic Society. Wolf then attended Yale University where in 1984; she received her Bachelor of Arts in English literature. From 1985 to 1987, she was a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford.

In her book, “The End of America: letter of warning to a young patriot; A Citizen’s call to action,” published in the year 2007, Naomi Wolf on page 6 explains the urgency of her communication:

“I have written this warning because our country—the democracy our young patriots expect to inherit—is in the process of being altered forever. History has a great deal to teach us about what is happening right now—what has happened since 2001 and what could well unfold after the 2008 election. But fewer and fewer of us have read much about the history of the mid-twentieth century—or about the ways the Founders set up our freedoms to save us from the kinds of tyranny they knew could emerge in the future. High school students, college students, recent graduates, activists from all walks of life, have a sense that something overwhelming has been going on. But they have lacked a primer to brief them on these themes and put the pieces together, so it is hard for them to know how urgent the situation is, let alone what they need to do.”Naomi Wolf, “The End of America: letter of warning to a young patriot; A Citizen’s call to action,” page 6.

So the question is; what exactly is she referring to when she says that “High school students, college students, recent graduates, activists from all walks of life, have a sense that something overwhelming has been going on?” Could it be that there are things occurring that even though they remain for the most part unidentified, leave us with the sense that our nation has drastically changed? Listen to her very next paragraph.

“Americans expect to have freedom around us just as we expect to have air to breathe, so we have only limited understanding of the furnaces of repression that the Founders knew intimately. Few of us spend much time thinking about how "the system" they put in place protects our liberties. We spend even less time, considering how dictators in the past have broken down democracies or quelled pro-democracy uprisings. We take our American liberty for granted the way we take our natural resources for granted, seeing both, rather casually, as being magically self-replenishing. We have not noticed how vulnerable either resource is until very late in the game, when systems start to falter. We have been slow to learn that liberty, like nature, demands a relationship with us in order for it to continue to sustain us.” Naomi Wolf, “The End of America: letter of warning to a young patriot; A Citizen’s call to action,” page 6.

What is stunning is that by the time we reach page 12 of her book, we begin to examine the concept of fascism. Using the Columbia Encyclopedia, she defines fascism as a "philosophy of government that glorifies the state and nation and assigns to the state control over every aspect of national life.... It’s essentially vague and emotional nature facilitates the development of unique national varieties, whose leaders often deny indignantly that they are fascists at all.” then Ms. Wolf lays out why she has carefully defined Fascism in her very next paragraph.

“Throughout this letter of warning, I will use the term "a fascist shift." It is a wording that describes a process. Both Italian and German fascisms came to power legally and incrementally in functioning democracies; both used legislation, cultural pressure, and baseless imprisonment and torture, progressively to consolidate power. Both directed state terror to subordinate and control the individual, whether the individual supported the regime inwardly or not. Both were rabidly antidemocratic, not as a side sentiment but as the basis of their ideologies; and yet both aggressively used the law to pervert and subvert the law.” Naomi Wolf, “The End of America: letter of warning to a young patriot; A Citizen’s call to action,” page 13.

In 2007, then, Naomi Wolf’s warning is clear. Another writer, Ellen G. White, wrote the following:

Republicanism and Protestantism became the fundamental principles of the nation. These principles are the secret of its power and prosperity. The oppressed and down-trodden throughout Christendom have turned to this land with interest and hope. Millions have sought its shores, and the United States has risen to a place among the most powerful nations of the earth. {The Great Controversy, Page 441.1}

Then she warned:

“When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near.”--Testimonies Volume 5, page 451 (1885)

Naomi Wolf’s letter of warning is certainly not far off the mark.

Cameron A. Bowen