Joshua Rosenblum > Status Update

But the truly monstrous genocides, the ones with tens of millions of victims, depended not so much on gradually shifting political forces as on a few contingent ideas and events. The appearance of Marxist ideology in particular was a historical tsunami that is breathtaking in its total human impact.

Why should utopian ideologies so often lead to genocide? At first glance it seems to make no sense. Even if an actual utopia is unattainable for all kinds of practical reasons, shouldn’t the quest for a perfect world at least leave us with a better one—a world that is 60 percent of the way to perfection, say, or even 15 percent? After all, a man’s reach must exceed his grasp. Shouldn’t we aim high, dream the impossib