LINKS, ZWEI, DREI, VIER. Via Milt Rosenberg, the abnormal psychology of goose-stepping.

Today, the goose step lives on at Iranian military parades. The Kremlin honour guard does it in slow motion. It even shows up at skinhead keg parties, where it's common to find revellers in heavy boots stomping around a roaring fire and sharing drunken dreams of Aryan empire.

The underlying idea is always the same: a heavy boot coming down hard on the enemy. There is no escape.

As George Orwell famously opined, a goose step is "an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face."

The step, in fact, bears a message so laden with terrifying meaning that it is one of the few human gestures outright banned by a state — as was the case in West Germany shortly after the Second World War. True to its Soviet state of mind, East Germany retained it.

"It is almost a way of forcing large groups of people unnaturally in unison," Schimmelpenninck explains. "And that is what a fascist society is about or a totalitarian regime is about, whether it be Russian or Soviet."

[I think "Schimmelpennick" refers to University of Toronto psychologist Ulrich Schimmack, who is quoted earlier in the article.]

Frank Capra made a similar point in The Nazis Strike, one of the training films he directed under the Why We Fight rubric. That lesson hit home with Sgt. Karlson, who could be counted on to react to news coverage of those "historic" summit conferences with Communist dictators by grousing, "Never trust a country whose soldiers goose-step." (The other military lesson he could be counted on to deliver was an unfavorable evaluation of marching by the Great Lakes sailors who would participate in Milwaukee parades.)