False Truths: It isn't available on-line, but this week's New Republic has an excellent book review by Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag : A History. The review is of Richard Overy's book The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and is titled "How Evil Works." It is an attempt to figure out just why it was that such totalitarian regimes as Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany enjoyed such popularity among the people they ruled. The answer, according to Applebaum, is that they both presented themselves as being founded upon the scientific truths:

The science itself was very different in Soviet and Nazi society, in other words, but its function was essentially the same. The supposed neutrality and incontrovertibility of scientific doctrine gave both regimes a good part of their intellectual legitimacy. Science, or rather pseudoscience, gave people a moral justification for behavior that had formerly been unthinkable. German concentration camp guards, convinced that their Jewish prisoners were biologically inferiour humans, had few qualms about murdering them. Soviet concentration-camp guards, convinced that their political prisoners were flawed humans who had to be re-educated through hard labor, saw nothing wrong with mistreating them, even if they died in the process.

Indeed, science can be misused just as much as religion.