Enemies’ crimes often reveal something essential about an ideology

Evidence

When Communists declare that Stalinism wasn’t really communism or when Christians and Muslims say that the horrific things some Christians and Muslims have done in the name of their religion isn’t really Christianity or Islam, what are they doing? They are protecting their ideology or the religion from the terrible things that occur in its name. They claim only the good stuff. What gets lost in all of this is that the bad stuff may very well tell us something important about communism, Christianity, or Islam—that there may be something in the ideology and in the traditions themselves that gives rise to the ugly and horrific things some people do in its name. (Minimally, it shows us that these traditions are hotly fought over and never that stable to begin with.) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 94

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘claim only the good stuff’ purge parallels the Frankfurt School’s critique of how intellectual traditions get cleansed of their embarrassing content during revision; also echoes the instinct to separate an ideology from its crimes that comes up constantly in American founding myth.
• SEED: An essay angle: applying the ‘bad stuff tells you something’ test symmetrically to challenge how we exonerate the American founding from slavery as mere stain rather than constitutive feature.