Within the world of the far left, individuals have no value.  Only the state matters.  That is why the modern American statist devalues individual achievement and wealth.  If, as in the socialist world of Marx, Engels, and Adolf Hitler (yes, Hitler, as I will explain later), God does not exist and humans have no souls, then the state determines the value of a human life.  This philosophy leads to an ominous conclusion.

But it was the issue of race, above all, that for half a century has prevented National Socialism (the Nazi party) from being seen as socialist.  The assumption that socialism was never racist can now be seen as a misunderstanding.

The proletariat may have no fatherland, as Lenin said.  But there were still, in Marx view, races that would have to be exterminated.  That is a view he published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" in Marx journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler.  It is now becoming possible to believe that Auschwitz was socialist-inspired.  The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to capitalism, must in turn be superseded by socialism.  Entire races would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed.  They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.

Socialism offered a blank check to violence, and its license to kill included genocide.  In 1933, in a preface to On the Rocks, for example, Bernard Shaw publicly welcomed the exterminatory which, to his profound satisfaction, the Soviet Union had already adopted.  Socialists could now take pride in a state that had at last found the courage to act, though some still felt that such action should be kept a secret.  In 1932 Beatrice Webb remarked at a tea-party what "very bad stage management" it had been to allow a party of British visitors in the Ukraine to see cattle-trucks full of starving "enemies of the state" at a local station.

I brought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. You know, we become responsible for administrating, you know, 250 million people. And there was no answer. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people? The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States. They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education in the Southwest where we would take all of the people who needed to be re‑educated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be. I asked, "Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can't re‑educate, that are die-hard capitalists?" And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated and when I pursued this further, they estimated that they'd have to eliminate 25 million people in these re‑education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill 25 million people. I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious.