Cultural bestialization made the Holocaust conceivable.

Evidence

At no point of its long and tortuous execution did the Holocaust come in conflict with the principles of rationality. The ‘Final Solution’ did not clash at any stage with the rational pursuit of efficient, optimal goal-implementation. On the contrary, it arose out of a genuinely rational concern, and it was generated by bureaucracy true to its form and purpose. We know of many massacres, pogroms, mass murders, indeed instances not far removed from genocide, that have been perpetrated without modern bureaucracy, the skills and technologies it commands, the scientific principles of its internal management. The Holocaust, however, was clearly unthinkable without such bureaucracy. The Holocaust was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-eradicated residues of pre-modern barbarity. It was a legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who would not be at home in any other house. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 82 (#complicates, via linked claim)

It suggests that the role of modern civilization in the incidence and the perpetration of the Holocaust was active, not passive. It suggests that the Holocaust was as much a product, as it was a failure, of modern civilization. Like everything else done in the modern – rational, planned, scientifically informed, expert, efficiently managed, co-ordinated – way, the Holocaust left behind and put to shame all its alleged pre-modern equivalents, exposing them as primitive, wasteful and ineffective by comparison. Like everything else in our modern society, the Holocaust was an accomplishment in every respect superior, if measured by the standards that this society has preached and institutionalized. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 256 (#complicates, via linked claim)

As I noted above, a leading student of modernity, Zygmunt Bauman, argues that the Holocaust stands as the essence of modern bureaucratic rationality. Writer Edwin Black (2001) has recently argued that the Holocaust could not have assumed its systematic and mechanical shape without the card punch and sorting devices that were manufactured for the Third Reich by IBM and its European affiliates and adapted for use in tracking death camp populations. Dominick LaCapra (1994, 1998) suggests that the mechanized death of Nazi concentration camps reveals the way that bureaucratic and scientific rationality remains deeply joined to the ritual spheres that it was supposed to displace. Michael Taussig (1997) characterizes the foundations of the nation-state as magical; state hegemony ultimately rests, he argues, on the circulation of ritual means for invoking the dead. In referring to the twentieth century as “an age of genocide,” Rogers Smith (1987) seems to suggest that these events are not isolated, accidental, or atypical but shape the very core of high modernity. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 258 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Modernity’s institutions actively enabled and supplied the Holocaust — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 251; The Holocaust extended colonial logic to Jews as a colonizable species; Modern civilization was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Holocaust. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 71 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. #complicates (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 82
• The Holocaust was a product of modern civilization, not merely its failure #complicates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 256
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality rather than an anomaly #complicates (0.79)
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality, not a rupture from it. #complicates (0.79) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 258
• The Holocaust resulted from distinctly modern social and political conditions #complicates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 170