Fighting for exemptions tacitly legitimizes the general exclusionary rule.
Evidence
The opportunities to add authority to the rule through fighting for exemptions (and in the end reinforcing the rule by deploying it as an entitlement to seek individual privileges) were ample and varied. They had been offered, though in changing forms, at all stages of the Holocaust. In the case of German Jewry such opportunities were particularly profuse and elaborate. The Jews who fought on the German side in the Great War, who were wounded in battle, who had been decorated for bravery, were proclaimed a special case and for a protracted period kept free from most restrictions applied to their less meritorious brethren. This benevolent ruling took attention away from the much more sweeping rule from which it provided an exception. Whoever saw in the ruling a personal chance could claim the benefits only while simultaneously accepting the assumption that warranted both the general rule and the exceptions: that ‘normal’ Jews, Jews ‘as such’, did not deserve the ordinary rights offered by German citizenship. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 372
Categorization
- DEFINE: Core mechanism of ‘individualization’ in Bauman’s account: exception-seeking reinforces rather than challenges the rule by validating its underlying assumption.
- XREF: Connects directly to Gramsci’s hegemony and ‘common sense’ in the reader’s Scaffolding Module — how consent is manufactured through accommodating partial interests. — connects to: Contesting exceptions legitimates the very rule being fought — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 370; Civil-liberties-versus-security framing normalizes sacrificing minority rights.
Related
- Contesting exceptions legitimates the very rule being fought (similarity 0.84)
Broader Connections
- Contesting exceptions legitimates the very rule being fought
#corroborates(1.00) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 370 - Civil-liberties-versus-security framing normalizes sacrificing minority rights.
#expands(0.80)