Genocidal thinking requires race imagery, medicine, and engineering modernity

Evidence

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to arrive at the idea of extermination of a whole people without race imagery; that is, without a vision of endemic and fatal defect which is in principle incurable and, in addition, is capable of self-propagation unless checked. It is also difficult, and probably impossible, to arrive at such an idea without the entrenched practice of medicine (both of medicine proper, aimed at the individual human body, and of its numerous allegorical applications), with its model of health and normality, strategy of separation and technique of surgery. It is particularly difficult, and well-nigh impossible, to conceive of such an idea separately from the engineering approach to society, the belief in artificiality of social order, institution of expertise and the practice of scientific management of human setting and interaction. For these reasons, the exterminatory version of anti-Semitism ought to be seen as a thoroughly modern phenomenon; that is, something which could occur only in an advanced state of modernity. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 210

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the constitutive preconditions of the exterminatory imagination: racialized incurable defect + medical model + engineering approach to society.
• XREF: Carries into biopolitics/necropolitics readings: the medical-surgical vocabulary of society as patient to be excised is the biopolitical imaginary. — connects to: Current ideologies in AI reflect historical eugenics concepts. — Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, The AI Con- How to Fight Big Tech’s…, 396; Racist worldviews require modern bureaucracy to implement extermination — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 223; Modernity’s admired and genocidal faces belong to one inseparable body — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 54 (+10 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: how the medical metaphor (health vs. pathology, surgery, sanitation) silently licenses state violence against entire populations.

Related

• Racist worldviews require modern bureaucracy to implement extermination (similarity 0.82)
• Modern genocide functions as social engineering toward a perfect society (similarity 0.80)
• Genocide is a normal potential of modernity, not its malfunction. (similarity 0.80)
• Nazi racism was consonant with modern social-engineering worldviews rather than a medieval relapse (similarity 0.80)
• Nazi extermination was a legitimate offspring of the modern spirit, not a regression (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.80)
• Social engineering ambition combined with concentrated power produced the Holocaust (similarity 0.79)
• Genocide kills for non-fit with the perfect society’s scheme (similarity 0.79)
• Modernist urges toward social perfection, not barbarism, powered totalitarian atrocities (similarity 0.78)
• Nazi eugenics emerged from modern scientific planning, not medieval barbarism (similarity 0.78)
• Potent technology plus designed-order ambition produced modern genocide (similarity 0.78)
• Racism is a thoroughly modern weapon serving pre-modern struggles (similarity 0.78)
• Nazi and Stalinist genocide expressed rather than betrayed modernity’s spirit (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Modern genocide requires bureaucracy meeting a rationally engineered social design #corroborates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 309
• Potent technology plus designed-order ambition produced modern genocide #corroborates (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 620
• Racist worldviews require modern bureaucracy to implement extermination #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 223
• Nazi racism was consonant with modern social-engineering worldviews rather than a medieval relapse #exemplifies (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 197
• Modernity’s admired and genocidal faces belong to one inseparable body #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 54
• Current ideologies in AI reflect historical eugenics concepts. #expands (0.78) — Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, The AI Con- How to Fight Big Tech’s…, 396
• Science’s value-freedom dismantled normative barriers to genocidal co-operation #expands (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 315
• Evolutionist doctrines translated middle-class ambition into biological race hierarchy #expands (0.76)
• Racism operates through biological and cultural registers that reinforce each other #expands (0.75)
• Ideological scientificality overrides factual reality in totalitarian action #expands (0.74)
• Philosophy and intelligence justify both egalitarian and exterminationist positions #expands (0.74)
• Doctrines of civilizational decay are intimately connected with race-thinking #expands (0.72)