@twobyfour,
My nom de plume is from Hannah Arendt, who invented the phrase.

Contrast the Nazis with the Islamists. The Germans used the scary images to an extent, to whip up and unify the crowd, to emphasize the reduction of the individual to a totalitarian ideal. Robert Hughes pointed out that the same tricks are used in Nuremberg and Mussolini’s EUR and Lincoln Center in New York. Hopefully for the last that effect will be reduced after the current renovation. However on the whole the Germans stressed retaining an appearance of normalcy. They held off even going to a full economic mobilization. It is possible that if the war had lasted longer or the Soviet Union had collapsed that the wilder and more medieval fantasy aspects of the regime would have become more visibly dominant.

The Islamists have the formula backwards. First they stress their unworldly separation from normal society. Even when resident in Western countries they make a point of dressing in the beards, baggy trousers and loose vests that mark a hard core Al Qaedist, and which are rare among men in most moslem countries, as the burkha was rare until recently among most moslem women. It is true however that even at its origins Islam distorted its adherents social relations so as to isolate them and control them. The isolation of women also advanced that goal.

Now this is not unique to Islam. Other groups, for example, Hasidic Jews, the military and the police, also use ritual and costuming to identify and control members of the group. However what any resident of NY knows is that members of the Hasidim and other distinctive minority groups make a point of interacting with the greater host community in a decidedly productive and positive way that imposes the minimum of inconvenience on members of other communities with whom they deal. Even police when off duty do not seek to impose on others.

For Islamists the goal is quit different. They seek to dominate and coerce the submission of others to the will of their group. So they absorbed all of the supremacist ideology from the fascists and the glorification of violence without any of the sense of a need to pay tribute to forms of traditional bourgeois courtesy.