The following verbiage is Billthedrill's contribution to our thread on Part 2, Chapter 6, the chapter that introduces Directive 10-289.
Dr. Ferris suggests off-handedly that the death penalty be applied to industrialists who vanish after the practice meted out to military deserters, but Kinnan stops him. They weren’t quite that reluctant in Soviet Russia, which is where Rand learned most of this process. And once it started they weren’t reluctant in the least. For those for whom words have no meaning, “death” is one of those words – as long as it happens to somebody else. For the elite death is simply another of those abstractions that may be played with like counters on a board, an unfortunate necessity – no, not always that, but a necessity – for the building of an imagined world whose inhabitants are as abstract as the words that denote them: bourgeoisie, capitalist, counter-revolutionary, wrecker, spy. Kulak. Jew. Not real people, merely abstractions. This is a culture of death, and Rand calls it by name. “The death of one man is a tragedy,” famously observed Stalin, “the death of millions, a statistic.”
#39 is right on the money