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One of the most blatant features of the fascist state is its distrust of its own people, and the way by which it attempts to eliminate everybody it has doubts about through ruthless methods, even to the extent of murder. Nearly all fascist regimes institute "secret police" forces to keep their own populations under control and weed out the opposition. The infamous Gestapo is a proof of the scale of the torture and savagery that the paranoia of fascist regimes leads to. In his book The True Believer, Eric Hoffer describes the policy of fear implemented by the Nazis to keep the public under control.
The ran-and-file within the Nazi party were made to feel that they were continually under observation and were kept in a permanent state of uneasy conscience and fear. Fear of one's neighbors, one's friends and even one's relatives seems to be the rule within all mass movements. Now and then innocent people are deliberately accused and sacrificed in order to keep suspicion alive.42
Fascism believes that if people are left to their own devices they will both betray the regime and become decadent. The way to bring the people to heel is by the use of repression. The French philosopher George Sorel (1847-1922), one of the ideologues of fascism, and who was a particular influence on Mussolini, heads the list of those who believed in the idea. Sorel maintained that societies naturally became decadent and disordered. In his view, this decay had to be prevented by the use of force, through the establishment of a totalitarian order.
Fascist paranoia still continues today. It is this suspiciousness that lies behind Saddam Hussein's having his closest relatives killed on possibility of "betrayal." After ousting President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr in 1979, Saddam had more than half the Baath Party, of which he was a member, killed. The criteria for eliminating people were their intentions, he said, to avoid the harm they might cause the family in the future. His son Uday is in charge of the terror machine of liquidating the "traitors" in the family. Saddam's gang of assassins—all thugs, psychopaths and killers from his own clan—became the core of a special security apparatus that he moulded in 1960's on the Nazi SS style. It is known that Saddam showed them the video of the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu's fall and execution reminding them that they could meet an end similar to that of the securitate if the regime was to fall.43
