Categorical condemnation

I don't know when it was I last read anything by Paul Johnson, but I just did read something by him. My goodness. I don't think I'll be hurrying on to his next piece. Johnson is against killing people when it is just because of the broad category they belong to, and he is therefore against terror - utopian, aimed at entire classes, or racial groups, or 'enemies of the state' (but irrespective of individual guilt), and so on. One can see his point. However, he highlights one particular type of culprit in the production of this mass-murdering terror and that culprit is... the intellectual. How so? This is how: intellectuals don't care about individual people.

If people get in the way of ideas they must be swept aside and, if necessary, put in concentration camps or killed. To intellectuals, individuals as such are not interesting and do not matter. Indeed individualism is a hindrance to the pursuit of ideals in an absolute sense.

Does he mean intellectuals as an entire category? I don't know. Later on Johnson writes of 'intellectual fanatics', which does narrow things down a bit. But he tends towards broader identifications: intellectual - interest in ideas - not caring about individuals - utopianism - terrorists - mass murder. It's a wonderfully simple mode of historical analysis.