<HTML> <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px"> >Charles:  So it is with the history of fascism. We look to general patterns in it > that > may give insight into fighting "open terrorist dictatorship by the most > reactionary sectors of capital" should it develop in the present or near > future. Well, perhaps. But: a) Establishing the "laws of history," even with the renowned intellectual tools of Marxism, is a lot harder than many people suspect. Every time someone comes up with such a law, someone else seems to refute it. b) Where is the evidence that Weimar/Nazi Germany is about to replicate itself now in this country? If it were, we might presumably learn from that experience what to do about it, but what if the factors defining the situation we are in now bear no particular relationship, even as a "general pattern," to Germany in that period? Charles:  In this case, we start with symptoms not diagnosis ( upon further analogy to biology).  The U.S. recently has made big moves in the direction from a bourgeois democratic republic regime to more open dictatorship, more open terrorist rule by its govenment. As doctors of history we say "where have we seen these symptoms before ? "   Fascist Italy, fascist Germany immediately come to mind from our medical history books because the U.S. is a hypermilitarist, state- monopoly , capitalist power like Nazi Germany, animated by severe national chauvinism and racism, war and anti-communism.  It is a corporatist state, as Mussolini declared Fascist Italy to be.  This could be a genetically mutated virus  , or something, I mean in analogy to medicine and biology. This is just a hypothesis. Many hypotheses must compete for explaining the sick U.S. state. </BLOCKQUOTE> </HTML>