The path taken to collective madness was nearly identical in the case of Nazi Germany.

The Ayatollah Khomeini's regime in Iran is based on the same premise, and secret police are dragging innocent people away in the middle of the night in Teheran. In a world where racism is still a powerful and divisive force in the minds of vast numbers of people, cultural revivals of the ancient and glorious past variety must be viewed by the intelligent with a clear and critical eye.

We live in an age of cults which are in themselves symptoms of the social and communal carcinoma from which modern civilization is slowly but surely dying. Alienated individuals by the millions in the overcrowded urban areas of the world crave a sense of community and turn to everything from punk rock to religious despots. When economic conditions become what they are now, that is, critical, masses of people who are not in the habit of thinking for themselves cast about for something: a vision first of all to relieve the boredom of being unemployed and, second, for someone to blame for the hard times. A dictatorship, if it wishes to emerge in a society which has known democracy, must meet these first two requirements and add to them a third: the promise of better times ahead. A well tried formula, therefore, is:

1   the vision of a glorious past
2   a scapegoat on whom to pin the indignities of the present, and
3   a vision of a glorious future.

(continued)