Genocide is both an old practice and a hallmark of high modernity

Evidence

This statement continues to inform twentieth-century constructions of genocide. Here Lemkin displaces genocide into the past as “an old practice” at the same time that he makes it an essential part of our definition of high modernity. One of the marks of the modern, for Lemkin, is “a long period of evolution in civilized society” from wars of extermination against populations to wars against nation-states and armies (p. 80). For him, as for many writers, the Holocaust was so exceptional as to challenge the foundations of modernity by uniting “barbarous practices reminiscent of the darkest pages of history” with “an elaborate, almost scientific system” for creating death (p. 90). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 256

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lemkin’s own framing of genocide as simultaneously ancient and definitively modern — the conceptual tension at the heart of the term.
• SEED: The paradox that industrial modernity made genocide more ‘civilized’ in form while more lethal in scale could anchor an essay on how efficiency tools serve extermination.
• XREF: connects to: Contemporary piety has sacralised atrocities beyond what 1960s culture achieved. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 194; Genocide is a recurring feature of human history with a uniquely bloody twentieth century. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 302