The power to imagine massive exterminationist and eliminationist projects.

I read a very interesting book, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Below is a quote that I found to be very interesting in light of the rising political tensions today.

"Those governing societies must deal with people’s desires to shape their own destinies and to influence their political systems. They can incorporate people into politics and accept social and cultural pluralism. Or they must repress and reduce pluralism that threatens them, which has a self-reinforcing propensity to make them want to reduce pluralism further.

What great power does first is make it plausible for political leaders, and even for common people, to imagine massive exterminationist and eliminationist projects and to imagine them in a new way, as something doable. In no previous era have political leaders dreamed of disposing of hundreds of thousands, millions, or tens of millions of people, which political leaders of our time – and not just Hitler, Stalin, and Mao – have routinely done, whether by killing them or by some other eliminationist means. They have the capacity: So they dream. Then plan. Then act."


Will America's political leaders "incorporate people into politics and accept social and cultural pluralism; or will they repress and reduce pluralism that threatens them?"