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| Everything that you might want to know about conservatism but were afraid to ask. |
The advice [offfered by contemporary exponents of Burke's thought] focused on the prudent management of unavoidable change in order to limit its social disruptiveness. Less was said about the hard part of identifying which values had to be defended. Burkeanism of this second-order kind is rightly thought of as a historically relative Utilitarianism, cast in negative terms: minimize disruption according to what the standards of the day find disruptive.
To understand the meaning of totalitarian terror, we have to turn our attention to two noteworthy facts that would appear to be completely unrelated. The first of these is the extreme care that both Nazis and Bolshevists take to isolate concentration camps from the outside world and to treat those who have disappeared into them as if they were already dead.
