Why nations fail

But the rest of your comment makes very little sense to me. Blokhin seems to have been an instrument of state power. I don't see any relationship, necessary, causal, or otherwise, between an executioner and a pragmatic principle of equality.

I also haven't "excommunicated" philosophies on the grounds of association. Rather, I have explained a rationale for a taboo around discussion of certain topics. If "association" with the reprehensible is sufficient grounds for "excommunication", a random walk through Wikipedia should be sufficient to convince oneself that one can trivially "excomunnicate" everything; reductio ad absurdum, hence mere association is not enough.

I don't see any relationship, necessary, causal, or otherwise, between an executioner and a pragmatic principle of equality.

But you do see a relationship between racist/nationalist/fascist ideology and racist/nationalist/fascist executioners, right?

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/battal...

I certainly can't interpret your post in any other way. (Although I can't interpret "pragmatic principle" in any way at all - it makes me think of jumbo shrimp.)

So essentially, you see a necessary and causal relationship between fascist ideology and fascist terror, but you don't see a necessary and causal relationship between communist ideology and communist terror. Or to use the Russian color codes, you see a relationship between White Terror and White ideology, but not between Red Terror and Red ideology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror

Perhaps you won't take my word for it, but you don't need to - the truth isn't hard to find. I can guarantee you 100% that almost everyone involved with both these systems of terror was completely drenched in, convinced by, and in thrall to the ideologies they served.

General Blokhin, for example, single-handedly murdered a substantial percentage of the Polish aristocracy. As he is doing so, is his mind a blank? Or does he conceive himself as freeing the Polish workers and peasants from the grip of the alien, rapacious hereditary nobles? What do you think? With every bullet in the back of some stuck-up count's neck, he's bringing Poland closer to equality.

You'll no doubt agree on the ideological nature of Nazi crimes. The "ordinary men" of Reserve Police Battalion 101 are in exactly the same boat - in their minds, as they slaughter the Jews of Poland, they think: the Jews caused this war, we are freeing Germany from Jewish oppression.

Likewise, as American airmen incinerate hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians, they are thinking: the Huns and the Japs caused this war, now they're paying the price.

We cannot know the mind of any of these individuals. However, the collective propaganda mind of World War II is very easy to recall - all we have to do is read the texts. There is no shortage of American and Soviet propaganda that, read in context, is just as horrifying as anything Goebbels produced. Do you want to hear FDR sneering, raving, and lying like something out of Hitler's Greatest Hits?

http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/timeline/411027awp.html

So should we excommunicate it all? Or do you not like that word? Too Catholic, perhaps?

No. I see systems of power-hungry humans manipulating other humans by whatever means they can to achieve their ends. Propaganda and ideologies are usually just vectors - potent vectors - for the transmission of instrumental power. Humans, in the large, are like packs of rabid dogs; it takes very careful social and institutional design to balance force against force and prevent single individuals gaining too much power. I believe the emergence of a dictator, along with the mass murder of opponents, as a natural outcome for a large population starting out otherwise unorganized.

Words like communist, fascist, capitalist, are useful shorthands for communication, but they are labels, and as labels they risk short-circuiting thought. Some thing A is labeled as X, some thing B is labeled as X, and you naturally start to think that A and B have some connection.

When I said "pragmatic principle", I'm joining together two concepts; the pragmatic, by which I mean ends rather than means; and principle, by which I mean a rule governing personal behaviour. But I am not an absolute consequentialist; rather, I hold that the systemic consequences of deontological positions should be considered. One should usually be deontological on an individual basis, but adopt certain things as principles - i.e. not necessarily justified under deontology - on a consequentialist basis.

I think you see a parallel between discussion of ideologies associated with 20th century atrocities, and discussion of race as some kind of determinant. And if I deny the latter, that I must deny the former; and since denying the former seems absurd, my position, by analogy, is absurd.

But I don't think that's the right parallel to draw. The parallel of discussion of 20th century atrocities is discussion of racism, not race as a determinant. The parallel of race as a determinant might be an enthusiastic discussion of how Jews run media, banking, etc. - a discussion which is similarly abhorrent and taboo.