The violations of hubris and of xenophobia

The insanity that was the ruthless exercise of absolute, raw power by the Nazis or the Soviets developed from the careful and thoughtful energies of groups of revolutionary thinkers and actors who were trying to resolve the issues of their day. 

It was not merely that Hitler or Stalin were some insane geniuses who misled an unsuspecting population mass; it was rather the slow, systematic evolution of a ferocious ideology that was willing to violate some of the most well known and time honored strictures of the human polity – the violations of hubris and of xenophobia. 

The logic that propelled these 'evils as policy' resembled the logic of their less extremist cousins – fascism and socialism – and, at bottom, afforded gentle sentiments of caring and concern to the forgotten and the downtrodden in modern, enlightened, Western European societies whose ruling elites had become effete and degenerate.