charles, i swear, you are a pipsqueak. you know that i pointed out to you that the early roots of nazism/fascism were NOT racist in the sense you think, that the move toward racism was clearly a response to the need to gear up and mobilize stronger political support. when they first started herding people into the camps, those people were GERMANS: classified as mentally insane, degenerates, communists, and hardcore criminals. and fascism as you've already admitted does NOT have to be racist. italy's fasism was not racist.
nazism, a type of fascism, was indeed racist as it turned out. but it did not necessarily have to be so. the basic underlying move of fascism is to create a highly solidaristic *nationalism* by defining the nation, the people, the soil *against* some Other. that other can be anything. it easier to create an Other(s), as ange has noted, by attaching Otherness to some physical marker of identity. but as you *must* know that wasn't especially easy to do with jewish people was it? hence the need for the star of david, the id's, the inquisition about names, blood lines, the scrutiny of noses, hair color and texture.
this is why your insistence on marking this as racist in such an ahistorical fashion scares the living daylights out of me sometimes. you are recycling something that is the *particular* result of a particular set of historical circumstances and universalizing it. we have to recognize that fascism isn't fundamentally about race as a biological, genetic, physical category but that the Other it seeks out can be defined in terms of a set of naturalized and demonized set of behaviors too.
racism has NOT been around forever, not the racism that we know today.
what some of the people on this list have used to exemplify racism as existing throughout history is actually a fundamental fact of the human condition. defining a group, a community, a polity, a nation-state, etc is always always about defining identity against Others. it's a fucking fundamental fact of social life. that is what makes us human, among other things. and yes, it is the source of misery and, yet, is also (perversely?) the source of solidarity.
happens on this damn list all the time. you're doing it right now. i'm doing it.
the deal is this: we need to figure out to deal with this condition in just ways.
kelley