Intelligent, principled revolutionaries accept that 'we build on corpses, but we build,' trading conscience for results like factories rising out of deserts. That same logic later turns on them, until they see themselves as 'dead men under a reprieve.' Each one has helped kill off or allowed the killing of the others, so the system that consumes them is partly their own work.
Mass repression needs no futuristic tools, only committees, dossiers, interrogations and routine decisions made by unremarkable people. Through this ordinariness horror becomes part of daily life, alongside women queuing for potatoes and sour bread. Truth itself becomes whatever the bureaucracy determines it to be.
Once the machinery of repression starts, who is ruined, exiled or shot has little to do with character, and nothing to do with innocence or guilt. Guilt is declared collective, so belonging to a suspect category is enough. Even outsiders cannot work out why one person is destroyed and another, equally implicated, is spared.
A lone, nearly accidental killing by a nobody gives the state a pretext to invent a vast plot. Within three days dozens are arrested, from senior diplomats to shabby nonentities, and the investigation spreads like ripples across a lake to other countries. The machine needs conspirators it can try in public, not the one real culprit acting out of private disgust.
A party that claims to 'reconcile thought and action for higher efficiency' allows no opposition, so any independent thought becomes treason. Its authority narrows into a single worshipped leader whose name gets stamped on schools. It demands everything of its members and promises them nothing in return.