Fascist warning sign: Belief in irrational theories

Okay, follow me on this one...

Earlier today I was reading the blog done by the staff of "Hellboy: The Animated Series." And they were explaining how the energy that brings Hellboy to Earth (you know, the stuff harnessed by Rasputin in his Glove of Doom) was basically inspired by "vril," a science-fiction theory about energy published in the late 1800s, that was accidentally treated as real by a lot of people at the time. So that then led me to the Wikipedia entry for vril, which is of course fascinating; I guess the whole thing started as this fantastical novel during the Victorian Age, about this subterranean master race who all looked like angels and used this vril energy force both as a weapon and as a healing agent. But then I guess some prominent ambassador back then basically went nuts, and started telling people that he had actually met this master race during one of his many exotic travels; and that started this entire chain of events that led to this whole group of people treating vril as if it were a real substance, and devoting just massive amounts of resources into attempting to capture and bottle it. Like I said, pretty fascinating, and also fits nicely into the Hellboy storyline, for anyone who's familiar with it.

But anyway, in 1947 this German rocket scientist named Willy Ley wrote a non-fiction article for this science-fiction magazine he was a fan of, attempting to explain how it could be that so many of his countrymen had fallen under the Nazi spell a few decades previous. And one of the things he ends up prominently mentioning, supposedly, is just how many Germans at the beginning of the 20th century sincerely believed that vril existed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and how he sees a direct connection between this and a population who is open to fascist ideas (emphasis below added by me)...

"In 1947, he published an article entitled 'Pseudoscience in Naziland' in the science fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction. There he attempted to explain to his readers how National Socialism could have fallen on such a fertile ground in Germany. He explained this with the high popularity of irrational convictions in Germany during the time."

And you know, just the moment I read that paragraph at Wikipedia, the very first thing I thought of was just how many Americans right now believe in Creationism; of just how many people here actually want us to literally remove scientific theories from our educational textbooks, and replace them with a story about a giant finger in the sky that runs around touching things and saying, "Make it so." Man oh man -- according to Ley, no fucking wonder the Bushists have been able to get away with so many fascist things for so long now.

Anyway, just thought it was interesting, the direct link this guy made between embrace of the irrational and embrace of fascism, and how it's yet one more thing from the Nazi era that can also be directly applied to the United States post-9/11. Just thought I'd share.