Genocidal potentials remain present in modern society despite democratic constraints

Evidence

To be sure, thanks to the late-modern or postmodern surfeit of mutually canceling authorities, and due to the irredeemable polyvocality which goes together with political democracy and the weakening grip of the state powers, the chances of such political players gaining an upper hand and deploying the absolute powers of the state to set Holocaust-style “solutions” in motion are slim and remote. Yet to say with any degree of self-assurance that the forces eager for an Endlbsung (final solution) type of action, and either the necessary or sufficient conditions of their acting in that way are no longer present today, would be equally premature and imprudent. Over fifty years after the military rout of Hitler’s Germany, evidence continues to arrive of the tendency of the endemic tensions of Risikoleben and endemic modernization to condense in the projects of “cleaning-up” operations, of ethnic and/or racial purity, of transparent order with nothing to obscure or cloud the harmonious and homogenous native unity. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 440

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bauman’s ‘Modernity and the Holocaust’ thesis about genocide stemming from modernity’s drive for order, contra Goldhagen’s monocausal antisemitism argument.
• SEED: Article angle: how contemporary anti-immigrant populism recycles the ‘cleaning up’ rhetoric of genocidal projects — tracing rhetorical continuity from ethnic purity campaigns to modern border politics.