Every totalitarian experiment

It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought...In every totalitarian experiment, therefore, you will find that the first act of the centralized power is to single out certain groups for punishment...One function of the ideology is to tell an elaborate story about the target group, showing it to be less than human, unjustly successful and intrinsically worthy of punishment...totalitarian ideologies invariably divide human beings into innocent and guilty groups.

Roger Scruton