Things like this are difficult to read, but important enough that they should be read no matter how horrifying. It's not really comprehensible to me. One of my favorite Milan Kundera lines, from the character "The Bear" speaking to Paul in Immortality: "You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than the arguments to justify the rule of nonthought. I experienced it with my own eyes and ears after the war, when intellectuals and artists rushed like a herd of cattle into the Communist Party, which soon proceeded to liquidate them systematically and with great pleasure. You are dong the same. You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers."
That's a great quote. I often wonder at how at the conception of parties that commit atrocities there are always intellectuals. I suppose among some circles, particularly in the West, it is an intellectual fault if you don't harbor a notion that has the potential to cure the ills of man. For me, to be receptive to such a notion is evidence of the opposite. What is particularly horrific about 'isms' is rarely the 'ism' itself, but the laying of the groundwork by human beings.