The End of America

In letters to Christopher Le—a young American patriot and born activist who helps run a national suicide prevention organization and advocates for various causes—Naomi Wolf shows that there are ten classic steps that dictators and would-be dictators always take when they want to stifle an open society. Germany in the early 1930s was a land of innovative Bauhaus architecture and design, of fashionistas rivaling Paris. It had pop stars and gossip columns. Its citizens relied on civil rights and gay rights organizations. Sex education was a reality in schools. A modern parliamentary democracy. How can we explain, then, that in just a few years it became an authoritarian and repressive regime, responsible for thousands of deaths? A prelude to the deluge that would engulf Europe and shake the world. By studying not only pre-Hitler Germany, but also Italy during the rise of Mussolini, Stalinist Russia, Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, Pinochet's government in Chile, and the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, journalist Naomi Wolf shows how fragile democratic processes are. And that the maxim "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance" is not just a pretty phrase. In "The End of America," adapted for the screen by Annie Sundberg, she points out the weaknesses of the democratic system, the small, successive pressures that can bring a government to its end.