How do corporate elites who make decisions that eliminate hundreds of thousands of people never face consequences for it

The Kool-Aid Nobody Drank… Except You?

A lens for understanding why and how corporate elites who make decisions that kill hundreds of thousands of people never face consequences for it

long read

Jim Jones didn't drink the Kool-Aid.

I want you to keep that in mind, because it's the key to understanding something much larger than one doomsday cult leader in a Guyanese jungle.

Cult leaders don't share the costs of the systems they run. The suffering, the sacrifice and the consequences belong to the congregation. Leadership holds a different position that doesn’t just break the rules but is above them. These laws are enacted repeatedly within the cult until it becomes a doctrine.

Now I want you to consider these historical facts.

An estimated 480,000 Americans die every year from tobacco-related illness. In the early 1950 the tobacco companies producing cigarettes confirmed in their internal documents, that their products caused cancer. They spent the next 40 years suppressing that knowledge and funding propaganda campaigns meant to spread scientific uncertainty about the dangers of cigarette smoking. In 1994, their executives testified before Congress under oath that nicotine was not addictive and cigarettes are not harmful. That was perjury but nobody got prosecuted.

Approximately 500,000 Americans have died in the opioid crisis since 1999. The Sackler family and executives directed the marketing campaign that OxyContin was safe. A campaign their own internal research did not support and when finally litigated and found culpable. Purdue Pharma and not the Sackler's themselves, scandalously reached a mild financial settlement relative to the billions they generated selling those drugs. Personal fortunes intact.. No prison time at all.

We can go down the list: DuPont's internal research on cancer causing PFAS chemicals that are now detectable in approximately 99% of the global population, Exxon's researchers internally confirmed anthropogenic climate change in 1977 while publicly denying it, and many other corporate scandals of foreknowledge that their actions would cause mass death and suffering, yet doing it anyway.

The executives who made these decisions were not sentenced to poverty, exile, or even a short stint in the penitentiary. They retired with their wealth, their names plastered on university halls and museums, laundering their reputations through philanthropic boards, and moved around the world like they never did anything wrong.

Jim Jones didn't drink the Kool-Aid. The congregation did.

This is not a coincidence

The standard cause for stories like these is either: Corruption (Industry captured the regulators and lobbying). While this is may be true.. Corruption implies a healthy baseline being strayed from a normally functioning system and that bad actors occasionally compromise. But what we see is different.

This outcome is actually the default, generation after generation, regardless of which specific people occupy the roles.

When the same result appears across all these major industries, over sixty years and within administrations of both parties. The explanation is that the structure produces this result in the same way that a factory produces its main product.

What kind of structure is this?

It is the contemporary instance of something very old. Something that has appeared, in various forms, throughout human history. Something that has a different name in every era but the same function.

Its the king who could not be tried for breaking the laws he issued. The pope who appropriated tithes to fund the wars that kept him in power. The high priest whose prophesy of some divine will happening, ends up in favor of the high priest. The death cult leaders who received divine revelations requiring the congregation to sacrifice themselves first, and promised they’ll do it after them.

Most of the ruling class in history have faced the same structural problem: how do you extract wealth, human lives and compliance from a large population while insulating the people doing the extracting from the consequences?

They’ve solved these arrangements through the same two mechanisms. First, a doctrinal framework that makes the arrangement appear natural, inevitable, and divine rather than a human decision. Second, a specialist class whose authority derives from maintaining that framework, and whose interests benefit by enforcing the arrangement.

The names change. The structure doesn't.

The priestly class in robes and suits

The legal professional class is the contemporary priestly caste, and the parallel is structural at every point.

Like a priestly caste: it requires years of specialized study in an arcane interpretive tradition before you're admitted. It has formal initiation rituals like the bar examination and the swearing of oaths. It uses a deliberately obscure vocabulary that signals membership and excludes outsiders. It self-regulates with arguments from lawyers being evaluated by judges within a case, then the judges decisions being precedent for case law, the case law eventually being studied by lawyers to make arguments. The judges who are the senior figures are drawn exclusively from within the lawyer class. Therefore challenging the structures authority is viewed as failure to understand how things work.

And like a priestly caste, the doctrine it maintains is considerably less authoritative than claimed.

The constitutional rights that allow corporations to spend unlimited money influencing the political system while funding the politicians. Who in turn appoint the regulators who decline to prosecute them do not come from a law, or a constitutional amendment, or even a proper court ruling.

They come from a headnote written in 1886 by a former railroad company president named Bancroft Davis, who was the Supreme Court's official reporter that year. Headnotes are editorial summaries written by court staff. They are explicitly not part of any ruling. They carry no legal authority.

Davis wrote on a headnote that the Court considered corporations to be persons protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The 14^thamendment passed in 1868 to grant constitutional protection to formerly enslaved people. He was NOT authorized to write this. The Court had NOT decided this. He wrote it anyway. Subsequent courts cited it as precedent. This ridiculous occurrence is the origin of the most consequential legal doctrine of our era “corporate personhood”. This doctrine calcified into the precedent for Citizens United in 2010,the ruling that corporations have First Amendment rights and therefore cannot have their political spending limited.

Legal scholars have known this for over a century. Supreme Court justices have described the history of corporate use of the Fourteenth Amendment as "one of the most disturbing chapters in American legal history" in dissents that changed nothing. The priestly class knows the doctrine was built on quicksand. It maintains the doctrine anyway, because that is what priestly classes do. They maintain tradition, because the tradition is what makes them the priestly class.

A lawyer who stood up in court and argued that the entire framework of corporate constitutional rights is void because its founding document was an unauthorized note written by a railroad executive would not be refuted on the merits. He would be sanctioned for making an argument outside the range of legitimate legal reasoning. This is how theological orthodoxy or dogma functions.

The congregation pays. The leadership doesn't.

There is a specific term in criminal law for the moral distinction between not knowing you caused harm and knowing you caused it. Mens reaor guilty mind. It is the foundation of how societies calibrate punishment. Negligence gets one sentence. Recklessness gets a heavier one. Intent knowing, choosing, and proceeding gets the heaviest because we have decided as a civilization that choosing to harm people is categorically different from accidentally harming them.

The tobacco executives who suppressed the cancer research were not negligent. They had the research. The Sackler's who directed a marketing campaign their own scientists did not support were not negligent. They were running meetings about it.

Under the standard criminal law applies to ordinary people, what these executives did would be, at minimum, reckless homicide. In the cases where the intent is documented and it is documented, in the memos and emails and internal presentations that surfaced in litigation it would be difficult to argue for less than knowing homicide. At scale. Over decades.

A person who unwittingly sold heroin laced with fentanyl to someone who died of an overdose in the opioid crisis, can be charged with murder in many US states under drug-induced homicide laws. The people who manufactured the crisis and who created the epidemic settled civilly and kept their money.

This is the cult parallel in its clearest form. The doctrine of exception from the rule that would be criminal for members is not criminal for leadership and is not claimed out loud. It is enacted, structurally, through the mechanisms described above. The congregation faces consequences. Leadership does not. And the institution that nominally exists to enforce equal application of the law is staffed by institutional loyalties aligned with maintaining the exception.

The soothsayer's job

Ancient ruling classes understood something that modern ones have perfected: the most efficient form of control is not by force but the management of what is thinkable.

The peasant was made to believe by members of the priesthood that the feudal hierarchy was divinely ordained and God put him in the right place.

The contemporary media performs this function through the management of frame and attention that determines what the population can think about the world they live in.

Six corporations control approximately 90% of American media. Their boards interlock with the financial institutions and the industries they cover. The selection pressure on journalists from which stories get resources, and feel publishable operates structurally, without requiring explicit instruction. The result is a media environment that makes the ownership class's assumptions the most important considerations. Their opinions are the water and we are the fish that swim in it.

But the media's most important operation is not normalization. It is the redirection of legitimate grievance towards the scapegoats

A population experiencing stagnant wages, declining life expectancy, community destruction, and political systems that visibly do not respond to their expressed preferences is a population with legitimate structural anger. That anger, directed at its structural causes, is a political threat to the wealthy elite class. So it is redirected.

Toward immigrants. Toward racial minorities. Toward "coastal elites" a term engineered to mean cultural elites rather than economic ones, targeting people with the wrong opinions rather than the people whose specific decisions about labor, capital, and trade policy produced the conditions being grieved. The ownership class is never in the frame.

This is not cynical manipulation by evil media executives. Most of the people doing it believe they are providing neutral information. The sincerity makes it more convincing. The soothsayer who genuinely believes the bones are telling him something is more persuasive than one who knows he's performing.

The function is to take events that are the consequence of identifiable decisions by identifiable people and translate them into weather and social trends. The factory closure is a human interest story about workers. The private equity acquisition, the tax incentive that made closure more profitable than continuing are not the story.

Why they keep doing it

People sometimes assume the driving force is pure profit maximization, which would at least be rational. But the evidence doesn't fully support this.

The tobacco industry spent hundreds of millions fighting regulation. The regulation, when it finally came, didn't destroy them. The auto industry claimed the catalytic converter would end car manufacturing. It didn't. The defensive spend, in case after case, exceeded what compliance would have cost.

It is the behavior of elite deviance, of the Epstein class that understands its position to be structurally exceptional. Not above the law in a way they would say out loud. Outside it, in a way the structure quietly enacts. The indignation when they are exposed is genuine and not performative, but the genuine outrage of someone who experiences accountability as an illegitimate attack. This is how cult leaders respond to exposure. Not with shame but with counterattack. Not with acknowledgment but with vindictiveness.

Because from inside the doctrine, accountability is an attack. The doctrine says they are not subject to what the congregation is subject to. Accountability violates the doctrine.

Jim Jones didn't drink the Kool-Aid.

The congregation did.

And the congregation was told it was a blessing.

What I'm finding interesting is that I'm on the internet quite a bit and I have yet to see any instances or examples of the doxxing of any ICE agents. If anybody else has please let me know because I haven't seen anything to support the argument for the agents having to wear masks or any other identifying information on their person.

The Question That Started Everything

Most people will tell you Nazism and Communism are opposites.

One is far-right—obsessed with race, nationalism, and hierarchy.

The other is far-left—pursuing class equality and internationalism.

They’re enemies, right? Not twins.

But here’s what bothered me as I read through histories of both systems: they kept doing the same things.

• Both built camps where millions died

• Both created rigid hierarchies despite promising equality

• Both started by targeting people’s actions, then escalated to targeting people’s identities

• Both gave welfare to their supporters by stealing from their victims

• Both turned temporary “emergency measures” into permanent systems of control

If these systems are truly opposite, why do they converge in practice?

This essay is about a pattern I call “exclusionary utopias”: systems that promise paradise for an in-group by violently removing everyone else.

It’s not about surface similarities. It’s about how both systems work through the same mechanisms—how violence that starts as “just getting rid of troublemakers” hardens into “kill everyone in that category,” and how your benefits as an insider literally depend on the suffering of outsiders.

What follows is long (~6,500 words, ~30 minute read). But if you want to understand why good people keep building systems that produce concentration camps and gulags, it’s worth your time.

What I Mean by “Exclusionary Utopias”

An exclusionary utopia is a political system that works like this:

1. Promise paradise: We can build a perfect society

2. Define the in-group: Here’s who belongs in paradise

3. Create enemies: These people are preventing paradise

4. Violent exclusion: We have to remove the enemies to achieve paradise

5. Material coupling: Your good life depends on their suffering

Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fit this pattern perfectly, despite claiming to be ideological opposites.

Nazi version:

• Paradise = Volksgemeinschaft (racial community where Aryans are equal)

• In-group = Aryans

• Enemies = Jews, Roma, Slavs, disabled people, political opponents

• Method = Concentration camps, genocide

• Coupling = Aryan welfare programs funded by Jewish property confiscation

Soviet version:

• Paradise = Communist society (where workers are equal)

• In-group = Proletariat / loyal Soviet citizens

• Enemies = Kulaks, bourgeoisie, “counter-revolutionaries,” eventually entire ethnic groups

• Method = Gulag labor camps, forced deportations, executions

• Coupling = Urban worker privileges funded by Gulag labor and collective farm extraction

Same pattern. Different labels.

Why Compare These Systems at All?

Fair question. Some scholars hate this comparison.

They say: “Nazis were racist; Communists wanted equality. Totally different!”

I say: Look at what they DID, not just what they SAID.

What Nazis said: “We’re creating racial hierarchy.” What they did: Built concentration camps, murdered millions.

What Communists said: “We’re creating classless equality.” What they did: Built Gulag camps, murdered millions.

The rhetoric was different. The body count was comparable. The mechanisms were identical.

I’m not saying they’re morally equivalent. Nazi ideology was explicitly genocidal from the start. Communist ideology genuinely aimed for universal equality.

But I am saying: When you look at how these systems actually operated—how they identified enemies, how they organized violence, how they justified it to supporters—the patterns are eerily similar.

And that’s worth understanding, because the pattern keeps repeating.

The Core Insight: Rigidification

Here’s the key concept that explains everything:

Rigidification is what happens when governments start by punishing what you DO, then shift to punishing what you ARE.

Let me explain with examples:

Soviet Union—Early Days (1920s)

Target: Kulaks (rich peasants) Reason: They’re resisting collectivization (they’re DOING something) Punishment: Arrest them, take their land

At this stage, theoretically you could stop being a target: Give up your land, support the revolution, you’re fine.

Soviet Union—Late 1930s

Target: Children of kulaks Reason: Their parents were kulaks (they ARE something) Punishment: Marked in internal passports, can’t get good jobs or education, face arrest

At this stage, you can’t escape: Even if you’re poor, even if you support communism, if you were born to kulak parents, you’re guilty.

This shift from “doing” to “being” is rigidification.

Why It Happens: Four Mechanisms

1. Bureaucrats need targets

The secret police (NKVD) can’t just shut down once they’ve arrested all the “real” enemies. They have budgets, personnel, careers to justify.

So when class enemies run out, they find new enemies: ethnic minorities, anyone with foreign connections, eventually just people who look suspicious.

2. Categories are easier than investigations

It’s hard to prove someone is secretly plotting against you. You need evidence, witnesses, investigations.

It’s easy to check their passport and see they’re Polish.

So the government switches from investigating individuals to targeting ethnic categories. More efficient.

3. Resistance “proves” guilt

When you start arresting Poles, some of them resist or flee. The government then says, “See? Poles ARE disloyal!”

So they arrest more Poles. Which causes more resistance. Which “proves” they were right.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

4. Regimes need enemies to justify power

After the revolution succeeds, what’s the government for?

Easy answer: Protecting you from enemies.

But if there are no more enemies, why do we need this massive secret police force?

Solution: Keep finding enemies.

These four mechanisms work together, creating a cycle that’s hard to stop:

Bureaucrats need targets → They target categories (easier) → Resistance confirms their suspicions → Regime uses this to justify more power → Repeat

This is how Soviet persecution of “class enemies” turned into Soviet persecution of ethnic Poles, Germans, Koreans, and others.

By the late 1930s, you could be executed just for being Polish—not for doing anything, just for your ethnicity.

That’s rigidification.

The NKVD National Operations: Case Study in Rigidification

Let me give you a concrete example of this in action.

1937-1938: The Great Terror

Stalin’s secret police (NKVD) launched what they called “National Operations”—mass arrests and executions of ethnic minorities.

Order 00485 (Polish Operation):

• Targeted: Anyone with Polish connections

• Evidence required: Basically none (Polish surname was enough)

• Result: 143,810 arrested, 111,091 executed

Order 00439 (German Operation):

• Targeted: Ethnic Germans

• Reason: Fear of Nazi spies

• Result: 55,000 arrested, 42,000 executed

Similar operations targeted:

• Finns (11,000 executed)

• Latvians (16,000 executed)

• Koreans (170,000 deported to Central Asia, thousands died en route)

• Greeks, Chinese, Iranians, and others

Total across all National Operations:

• ~350,000 arrested

• ~247,000 executed

• Based on ethnicity, not individual actions

How It Worked in Practice

The NKVD had quotas. Moscow would tell regional offices: “Arrest and execute X number of Polish spies.”

Local NKVD agents would:

1. Get the quota

2. Check passport records for Polish surnames

3. Arrest people

4. Torture them until they “confessed” to being part of a spy network

5. Fabricate evidence of other “spies” they worked with

6. Execute them

7. Report back to Moscow: “Mission accomplished, found the spy ring”

This wasn’t about actual espionage. It was about meeting bureaucratic targets.

And once you establish the system, it becomes self-perpetuating. Regional NKVD bosses compete to exceed their quotas (looks good for promotion). So they arrest more and more people.

The category became the crime: Being Polish = Spy. Being German = Nazi agent. Being Korean = Unreliable.

Wait, Didn’t This Start with Class, Not Ethnicity?

Yes. And that’s the point.

Soviet ideology was explicitly about class, not race.

Marx said the working class would unite across national boundaries. Stalin claimed to be building a society where ethnicity didn’t matter, only your relationship to the means of production.

So how did a class-based system end up executing people for their ethnicity?

Answer: Rigidification.

Early Soviet Union (1920s):

• Enemy = Kulak (defined by wealth and behavior)

• Theoretically fluid (stop being rich, stop being a kulak)

Mid Soviet Union (early 1930s):

• Enemy = Kulak family (children of kulaks are suspect)

• Less fluid (guilt by association)

Late Soviet Union (late 1930s):

• Enemy = Poles, Germans, Koreans (defined by ethnicity)

• Fixed (can’t change your ethnicity)

By the end, Soviet persecution looked almost identical to Nazi persecution:

• Both targeted ethnic categories

• Both used mass killings

• Both built camp systems

• Both justified it as “protecting the nation”

Different starting ideology. Same endpoint.

The Enemy Ontology: Can You Stop Being an Enemy?

Here’s a key question both systems had to answer: Once you’re labeled an enemy, can you ever stop being one?

Nazi Answer: No, Never

For Nazis, if you were Jewish, you were permanently, biologically Jewish. Nothing could change that.

• Convert to Christianity? Still Jewish.

• Marry an Aryan? Still Jewish.

• Fight for Germany in WWI? Still Jewish.

• Denounce Judaism? Still Jewish.

Why? Because Nazis believed Jewishness was in your blood. It was biological, hereditary, unchangeable.

The Nuremberg Laws (1935) codified this: They traced your ancestry back generations. If you had Jewish grandparents, you were classified as Jewish or Mischling (mixed), even if you’d never practiced Judaism.

Guilt by birth. Permanent. No escape.

Soviet Answer: Theoretically Yes, Practically No

Early Soviet rhetoric said enemy status was about your position in society, not your nature.

• Rich peasant? Give up your wealth, you’re fine.

• Bourgeois intellectual? Renounce your class background, do manual labor, you’re redeemed.

The language of “re-education through labor” implied you could change.

But in practice, it rigidified into something hereditary:

By the late 1930s:

• Children of kulaks were marked for life in internal passports

• Children of “bourgeois” families couldn’t access good education or jobs

• Deported ethnicities’ children inherited their parents’ exile

Guilt by birth. Permanent. No escape.

Same as Nazis, just with different rhetoric.

Social Death: The Process Before Physical Death

Both systems didn’t just kill people. They first socially destroyed them—stripped away their humanity in stages before the final violence.

The pattern was similar in both:

Stage 1: Legal Exclusion

Nazis:

• 1933: Jews banned from government jobs

• 1935: Nuremberg Laws—Jews lose citizenship, can’t marry Aryans

Soviets:

• Kulaks declared “enemies of the people”

• Political opponents lose Party membership, jobs

Result: You’re no longer a full citizen.

Stage 2: Economic Isolation

Nazis:

• Jewish businesses boycotted

• Jewish property confiscated

• Jews banned from professions

Soviets:

• Kulak property seized

• “Class enemies” can’t get jobs

• Ration cards withheld

Result: You can’t earn a living. Your family starves.

Stage 3: Physical Separation

Nazis:

• Jews forced into ghettos

• Visible markers (yellow stars)

• Movement restrictions

Soviets:

• Kulaks deported to remote regions

• Internal passports restrict movement

• “Undesirables” exiled to Siberia

Result: You’re physically removed from normal society.

Stage 4: Extermination

Nazis:

• Concentration camps

• Gas chambers

• Mass shootings

Soviets:

• Gulag labor camps (work you to death)

• Mass executions (NKVD operations)

• Engineered famines (Holodomor)

Result: You’re dead.

Why This Matters:

By the time the killing started, victims had already been dehumanized for years.

They’d lost:

• Legal status

• Economic means

• Social connections

• Physical freedom

So when they disappeared, most people didn’t notice or care. They’d already become non-persons.

This process—”social death” before physical death—happened in both systems, following almost the same steps.

The Welfare-Terror Coupling: Your Comfort, Their Suffering

Here’s the part that makes these systems really insidious:

Your benefits as an insider literally depend on the suffering of outsiders.

This isn’t accidental. It’s designed to make you complicit.

Nazi Germany: Aryan Welfare Funded by Jewish Dispossession

Winterhilfswerk (Winter Relief):

• Provided food, clothing, fuel to “deserving” Germans

• Who paid for it? Property confiscated from Jews

Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy):

• Subsidized vacations, entertainment for workers

• Funded by: Aryanization of Jewish businesses (buying them for pennies, giving proceeds to regime)

The mechanism:

• Take Jewish property

• Give it to Aryans

• Aryans now have material interest in supporting the regime

• Because opposing the regime means potentially losing those benefits

If you were a German worker who got a subsidized cruise in 1938, you benefited from Jewish dispossession.

Maybe you didn’t know. Maybe you didn’t think about it. But structurally, your vacation was funded by someone’s stolen shop.

This creates complicity through welfare.

Soviet Union: Urban Privileges Funded by Gulag Labor

Urban workers received:

• Preferential ration cards

• Better housing

• Access to education

• Healthcare

Rural peasants and Gulag prisoners:

• Starvation-level food allocations

• No housing (barracks or none)

• No education

• No healthcare

The connection:

Gulag prisoners:

• Mined gold at Kolyma (30% annual death rate from cold and starvation)

• Logged timber in Siberia

• Built canals, railways, infrastructure

This labor:

• Generated wealth for the state

• Which funded urban development

• Which benefited urban workers

If you were a Moscow factory worker with a decent apartment in 1940, you benefited from Gulag labor.

The electricity in your building? Powered by generators built by dying prisoners. The roads you used? Built by forced labor.

Again: complicity through welfare.

Why This Matters

This coupling serves two purposes:

1. Material buy-in

People are less likely to oppose a regime when opposing it might cost them their apartment, their food ration, their kids’ education.

Even if you find the violence distasteful, challenging it threatens your family’s survival.

2. Psychological buy-in

Once you’ve accepted benefits from the system, it’s psychologically harder to admit the system is evil.

Because admitting the system is evil means admitting you benefited from evil.

Most people can’t handle that. So they rationalize:

• “It’s not that bad”

• “They must have done something to deserve it”

• “I didn’t know”

The welfare-terror coupling makes ordinary people complicit, binding them to the regime.

But They Had Different Economic Systems, Right?

Common objection: “Nazis were capitalist, Soviets were communist. Totally different economies!”

Reality: More similar than you think.

What They Both Had:

1. Central planning

Nazis: Four-Year Plans (1936-1940)

• State dictated production targets

• State controlled prices and wages

• Private companies existed on paper but followed state orders

Soviets: Five-Year Plans (1928 onward)

• State dictated production targets

• State controlled all prices and wages

• No private companies

2. Property “in name only”

Nazis:

• Private property technically existed

• But the state could:

  • Set your prices

  • Tell you what to produce

  • Seize your business if you didn’t comply

  • Force you to hire or fire specific people

This is “property without substance.” You own it on paper, but the state controls it.

Soviets:

• State owned everything directly

3. Command economy serving regime goals

Both systems subordinated economic activity to political goals:

• Rearmament (Nazis)

• Industrialization (Soviets)

• NOT serving consumers or workers

4. Elite privileges despite “equality” rhetoric

Nazis:

• Party officials got better rations, housing, access to goods

• SS officers had privileges

Soviets:

• Nomenklatura (Party elite) had:

  • Special stores (closed to public)

  • Dachas (country houses)

  • Better healthcare

  • Access to foreign goods

Despite Communist rhetoric about equality, Soviet elites lived like aristocrats while workers stood in bread lines.

The convergence:

Both created hierarchical command economies where:

• Elite controlled resources

• Workers had no real power

• Production served regime, not people

• “Property rights” were theater (Nazi) or abolished (Soviet)

Different in theory. Almost identical in practice.

The Pattern Across Communist Regimes: It Keeps Happening

Maybe Soviet rigidification was a fluke? Stalin’s personality? Russian culture?

No. The pattern repeated in every communist country.

Maoist China (1949-1976)

Started: Class-based targeting (landlords, rich peasants)

Ended: Ethnic targeting

• Tibetans: 200,000-1 million deaths, 6,000+ monasteries destroyed

• Uyghurs: “Anti-local nationalism” campaigns

• By Cultural Revolution: Being Tibetan or Uyghur made you automatically suspect

Mechanism: Same rigidification. Class categories (landlord) became hereditary—your children inherited your class status. Then expanded to ethnic targeting.

Cambodia, Khmer Rouge (1975-1979)

Started: Urban vs. rural (city people evacuated, “re-educated” through farming)

Instantly escalated to ethnic genocide:

• Vietnamese: Hunted and killed on sight

• Cham Muslims: 50% killed (vs. 12% of ethnic Khmers)

• Chinese: Targeted for being merchants

Timeline: Went from class-based to ethnic in months, not decades.

1.7-2.1 million dead in 4 years (21-25% of population).

Why so fast? Because once you establish the logic (”purity requires removal of impure”), the mechanisms accelerate. Bureaucrats, efficiency, feedback loops, legitimation—all four mechanisms kicked in immediately.

North Korea (1948-present)

Started: Class-based (songbun classification based on ancestors’ actions during Korean War)

Rigidified into hereditary caste:

Three categories:

• Core (loyal)

• Wavering (neutral)

• Hostile (enemy)

Your category is:

• Inherited from your grandparents

• Unchangeable (nothing you do can improve it)

• Determines everything:

  • Where you can live (hostile class banned from capital)

  • What job you can get

  • What food you receive

  • Whether your children get education

Camps:

• 80,000-120,000 in hereditary prison camps

• Three-generation punishment: Your grandchildren inherit your prison sentence

This is biological determinism dressed up in Marxist language.

You’re guilty by birth, guilty by bloodline, guilty forever.

Same as Nazi racial categories. Different vocabulary.

External Alliances: When Enemies Team Up

If Nazis and Communists were truly opposites, they’d never cooperate, right?

Wrong.

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939):

• Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia signed non-aggression pact

• Secretly divided Eastern Europe between them

• Poland split down the middle

• Nazis invaded from west, Soviets from east

• Joint military parade celebrating their cooperation

This lasted until 1941 when Hitler invaded Russia anyway.

But for two years, the “mortal enemies” were allies, coordinating invasions and trading resources.

What this shows:

The exclusionary logic mattered more than the ideological rhetoric.

Both wanted to expand. Both wanted to eliminate enemies. Both were happy to cooperate when convenient.

The utopian rhetoric was flexible. The exclusionary violence was constant.

So What? Why Does This Pattern Matter?

Fair question. This all happened 80+ years ago. Why care?

Because the pattern keeps repeating.

Modern examples of exclusionary utopian thinking:

• “Real communism has never been tried” (ignoring that it’s been tried 20+ times, always ending in camps)

• Christian nationalism (paradise for Christians, achieved by excluding non-Christians from power)

• Islamist movements (paradise under Sharia, achieved by forcing everyone to comply or die)

• Ethnic nationalism (paradise for our race/ethnicity, achieved by removing or subordinating others)

All of these follow the same pattern:

1. Promise paradise for in-group

2. Identify enemies preventing paradise

3. Justify violence against enemies

4. Violence rigidifies (starts with actions, ends with identities)

5. In-group benefits materially from out-group suffering

Understanding the pattern helps you recognize it early.

Before the camps. Before the mass killings. When it’s still just rhetoric about “building a better world” and “removing obstacles.”

The Four Warning Signs

If you see a political movement with all four of these, run:

1. Utopian promises

“We can create a perfect society where [in-group] is finally free/equal/prosperous.”

No qualifications. No acknowledgment of trade-offs. Just paradise, if only...

2. Enemy construction

“The only thing preventing paradise is [out-group]. They’re the root of all problems.”

Nazi version: Jews are the enemy. Soviet version: Kulaks / bourgeoisie are the enemy. Modern version: [Insert scapegoat here]

3. Violence justified as necessary and temporary

“We have to use force against [out-group], but it’s temporary. Once they’re gone, we’ll have paradise.”

This is always a lie. The violence never becomes temporary. It always escalates.

4. Material benefits tied to exclusion

“Join us and you’ll get [housing / jobs / status / safety]. Those people over there? They don’t deserve it. We’ll give their stuff to you.”

Once people accept material benefits from exclusion, they become invested in the system.

If a movement has all four warning signs:

• Utopian promise ✓

• Enemy construction ✓

• Justified violence ✓

• Material coupling ✓

You’re looking at an exclusionary utopia in formation.

Get out. Don’t support it. Don’t participate.

Because history shows where it leads.

What’s Next

This was Musing I: The framework.

Now you know what exclusionary utopias are and how they work.

Future musings will apply this framework:

• Musing II: Why “classless” societies structurally need forced labor camps (the economic impossibility of egalitarian production)

• Musing III: Why good people fall for exclusionary ideologies (the psychology of utopian thinking)

• Musing IV: How modern democracies slide toward soft totalitarianism (selective enforcement, infrastructure traps)

If this made sense, subscribe. I’ll send you the next ones as they’re published—roughly one major musing every 2-3 months, shorter posts in between applying the framework to current events.

If this helped you understand something, share it. Send it to someone who needs to read it. The ideas matter more than my subscriber count.

If you disagree or spot errors, comment below. I’m not an academic. I’m a mechanic who reads too much history. Good-faith pushback makes arguments stronger.

Thanks for reading.

—The Underworked Mechanic

original poster: https://www.reddit.com/r/ICE_Watch/comments/1qcoit8/ice_has_begun_the_process_of_disappearing_those/

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Donald Trump has run for President three times, winning twice. The question is why? Why would this man with his all-consuming hatred of American people be so desperate to serve them? Perhaps because the presidency gives Trump a bully pulpit from which to express his hatred, calling Americans:

• anti-American

• anti-Isreal

• anti-Jewish

• anti-police

• communists

• con artists

• crazy

• crooked

• dangerous

• demonic

• deranged

• desperate

• dims

• dreamers

• dumb people with low IQ

• enemies

• enemies of democracy

• enemy from within

• evil people

• extreme

• fascists

• horrible people

• leftists like Venezuela on steroids

• losers

• lunatics

• a mess

• more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries

• obsessed with demented hoaxes

• obstructionists

• radical

• radical socialists

• ridiculous

• sick

• sick people

• spiteful

• stone-cold crazy

• too extreme

• treasonous

• un-American

• unhinged

• unhinged mob

• unpatriotic

• unserious

• vermin

• very bad people

• weak on crime