Andrew – I think you make a truly excellent and fair point about technology being a — or perhaps the — key restraint on some previous genocidal campaigns. Lord knows how much worse off, say, the Huguenots might have been if the Gatling gun had been around. But while I’m no student of pre-modern genocide, it seems to me that a lack of technology hasn’t stopped some mass murderers from getting away with, uh, murder. Rwanda had no Auschwitz.

And I guess we agree on much else as well. I think you’re probably right to look at what unites genocidal movements rather than the ideas they profess to hold. I guess what interests me for the purposes of this discussion is that so many of the forces of “reason,” truth, light and progress which were allegedly unleashed by the Enlightenment in general and the French Revolution in particular were in fact used as ruses for horrors as bad as any which came before — and in some cases worse — and were all the more horrific because they were commited by the most “enlightened” elements of society.

This, in the modern era, is the crucial distinction I was trying to highlight. It is one thing to believe in an actual religion which puts God and the hereafter permanently in the hereafter. It is another to use the passions of religion in an attempt to bring heaven to Earth. I agree that fanatics of authentic religions have attempted to do just that with bloody results. But the deadliest cults in the modern era have tended to hide behind the language of reason, or The People, or “social justice” or “the Proletariat.” And even some religious movements are really religious in name only. Much of al Qaeda’s schtick is really just warmed-over anti-colonialism and nationalism with a thick Islamic varnish to make it more attractive to the rubes who blow themselves up in order to get their 72 first dates.