Genocide’s moral invisibility recruits far more participants than conscience-stifling does

Evidence

So far we have tried to reconstruct the social mechanism of ‘overcoming the animal pity’; a social production of conduct contrary to innate moral inhibitions, capable of transforming individuals who are not ‘moral degenerates’ in any of the ‘normal’ senses, into murderers or conscious collaborators in the murdering process. The experience of the Holocaust brings into relief, however, another social mechanism; one with a much more sinister potential of involving in the perpetration of the genocide a much wider number of people who never in the process face consciously either difficult moral choices or the need to stifle inner resistance of conscience. The struggle over moral issues never takes place, as the moral aspects of actions are not immediately obvious or are deliberately prevented from discovery and discussion. In other words, the moral character of action is either invisible or purposefully concealed. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 96

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the second, more sinister social mechanism of genocide: moral invisibility rather than moral overcoming. Core distinction for the theory toolkit.
• XREF: This invisibility-of-morality mechanism is the template later Islamophobia readings will apply to bureaucratic exclusion and casual prejudice. — connects to: Prejudice is neither necessary nor sufficient for genocide — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 702; Moral inhibition is neutralized by making victims remote and invisible — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550; Ideological commitment requires willed moral blindness to human suffering (+5 more)

Related

• Heterophobia and boundary anxieties do not directly cause genocide. (similarity 0.81)
• Prejudice is neither necessary nor sufficient for genocide (similarity 0.81)
• Moral inhibitions do not act at a distance and depend on proximity (similarity 0.80)
• Majority ambivalence toward Jews, not indifference, enabled genocide (similarity 0.80)
• The absence of active anti-anti-Semitism enabled complicity with genocide. (similarity 0.80)
• Public indifference, not hatred, greased the machinery of genocide (similarity 0.80)
• The Nazi accomplishment was neutralizing universal moral inhibition against killing (similarity 0.79)
• Authorization, routinization, and dehumanization erode moral inhibitions against violence (similarity 0.79)
• Genocide is a normal potential of modernity, not its malfunction. (similarity 0.79)
• Moral inhibition is neutralized by making victims remote and invisible (similarity 0.79)
• Moral suspension, not mobilization, enables ordinary people’s participation (similarity 0.79)
• Civility coordinated the genocide and prompted bystander passivity rather than resistance (similarity 0.79)
• Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction (similarity 0.79)
• Nazi and Stalinist genocide expressed rather than betrayed modernity’s spirit (similarity 0.78)
• The Holocaust required neutralizing popular attitudes, not mobilizing them (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Moral inhibition is neutralized by making victims remote and invisible #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550
• Ideological commitment requires willed moral blindness to human suffering #complicates (0.80)