> At those moments when American democracy, such as it
> is, begins to dismantle itself out of fear-instilled
> madness (fear is the mindkiller after all) those
> inside the profiling zone are picked first for abuse.
Quite right -- the climate of fear in the population is a crucial determinant of the arising of "fascism." This belongs to the whole social-psychological/historical level of analysis of fascism, and presents still more reasons for rejecting the "fascist" label for the US as of September 2003.
In brief, if you pick out one incident from '30s Germany, like the Reichstag fire, and a superficially similar one, like 9/11/2001, as I have heard a lot of lefties doing the last couple of years, you can make it sound as though there is some sort of similarity. But that is completely ahistorical and unscientific.
Liked the Mencken quote, too, though he was perhaps being slightly too paranoid there.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax