The men who were originally chasing Grace are gangsters, but they include her mob-chief father (James Caan, in a cute bit of casting). Given the power by him to destroy the town, Grace seizes it, has the population machine-gunned and the place burned to the ground.
Call her a terrorist, because that's what she is. But that's not what she was -- she initially fled the terrorists, her own people as it were, seeking what she thought would be a better life, based on seeing the best in people. Those people, whose village should have provided a safe haven for someone like Grace, instead exploited and abused her.
For any American, seeing such nakedly hateful sentiments expressed by a filmmaker such as Von Trier should be as terrifying as a replay of those jets ploughing into the World Trade Center. It is equally terrifying to think that those sentiments will be dismissed, a la Variety, as "anti-American" in the sense that they are a fad, or a stage the rest of the world is passing through. Von Trier may be displaying a fascist instinct in Dogville, but he is not without a sense of history, be it political, religious or revolutionary. And history would seem to be on his side.
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