Progressive scientific rhetoric supplied the conceptual step toward extermination

Evidence

There was but a short step from this verdict to the application of the weeder. As it happens, the step was never taken. But there was little in Wells’ declaration, and in the scientific ambitions in the name of which he wrote it down (though arguably not in some other segments of his profuse legacy) to prevent it from being taken. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 411

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a humane liberal’s worldview contained everything needed — except actual commission — for genocide is a genuinely disturbing analytic insight about the relationship between ideas and action, not just a well-made point.
• XREF: Directly engages the guard’s ongoing interest in silence/absence — here it is the absence of a single act (the step was never taken) that separates a worldview from atrocity.