The Sturmabteilung's Place in Modern History

This headline is a pretentious display of pseudo-knowledge, creating the impression that something weighty will be discussed and all that will happen is that I will trot out my trained dog entourage of opinions.

My nephews say that my display of opinions and comments resembles old TV clips from the old Ed Sullivan Show of the acts of acrobats from China balancing dinnerware on sticks.
I am not clear whether this is pro-me or contra-me. I had not the heart to ask for clarification, fearing some further analogies, perhaps to Floyd the Barber this time.

I was reading The Nation again, this time:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060828/buchanan
which is an article entitled Locked and Loaded
written by Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse

It deals with a Mr. Simcox who apparently was the guiding force behind the founding of the Minutemen, a quasi-vigilante group who patrolled the borders in the absence of government patrols.
The article ends:

 Yet these days, what really fires up Simcox is something other than nativist paranoia. Delivering his spiel at Wild Bill's on that Saturday night in June, Simcox looked and sounded almost bored by his own message--until he started extemporizing about Arizona Senator John McCain, that is, and how McCain's immigration reform plan amounts to a "shamnesty." "We need to keep that man away from the White House!" Simcox boomed. The Georgia Republicans cheered and hooted. And when Simcox got carried away enough to declare, "I may just run for his seat in the Senate," their adulation became a roar.  

The points of interest for me are:
1) paramilitary groups take over when and where governments cannot function. This may be totally unbelievable for present day US of A, the most powerful country in history, yet there it is. Parallel: Germany post World War I.

2)even though our President refers constantly to Islamo-fascism, it is not clear to me what that concept means. I gather he means to point a finger at Bin Laden and say something like " He and his ilk !" but that does not seem to be what is being said. "Fascism" appears to be a term meaning "Really, really, really bad guy." and could be applied to Hitler and Saddam Hussein.
However, then we would have to apply it to General Franco also, and there would be a difference of opinion on that score. Fascism, whatever it is, requires the ARMY for external violence, the RICH and LARGE BUSINESS CLASS for economic activity, and ORGANIZATION for internal violence.
The Internal Violence group will bully and beat up internal dissent. This is a job the Army has no taste for, nor do the politicians wish the Army ( possibly with its own ideas) operating within national borders. Parallel: the Sturmabteilung in Germany.

 3) The populace must be compliant. They do not have to be insane. They merely have to be operating at the usual insanity level most of us operate at.

4) Fascism requires a propaganda of fear and violence to justify the workings of the group performing the internal violence.

Now this we already have. The histrionics of various right-wing ideo-poltroons seems to be a reality show entitled "Who Wants to be Julius Streicher?" We have mentioned the phenomenon of Coulter and outrageous comments that seem to incite to violent acts, specializing in the language of violence and discord, catering to the fears of her auditors, relishing the dismay in the faces of the damned as she pricks them with her sulfurous trident. Perhaps she wishes to be a theoretician; the Alfred Rosenberg of the neo-cons.
Note that in the New York Times diatribes, there was a comparison to the other Rosenbergs. I always had trouble with Jewish names beginning with the letter "R". For all I can recall, Arnold Rothstein lost the plans for the atomic bomb to Uncle Joe Stalin in a poker game. Parallel: Alfred Rosenberg, Uncle Joe Goebbels All interesting developments.

I do not mean to imply that Mr. Simcox has any such intentions. I would firmly expect that his organization - if it were to form the nexus of a Sturmabteilung - would be stripped from his control and he would disappear in a "Night of the Long Knives".

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