Welcome back to Circa 1945: Breaking the Machine,

the podcast about genocide as infrastructure,

and the counter-infrastructure we build to prevent it.

Today we turn our attention to something subtle,

something that rarely arrives with warning labels:

eliminationist rhetoric.

It doesn’t begin with open hatred.

It doesn’t begin with violence.

It begins with a dream —

one that uses all the right words:

freedom, liberation, justice, homecoming.

But the truth of a dream

lies not in its vocabulary

but in its engine.

And that engine often reveals itself

not in what the dream imagines for its own people,

but in what it imagines for the people standing next to them.

To explore this gently,

we begin with a parable.

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