Genocide is creative weeding, not destructive hatred

Evidence

Modern genocide, like modern culture in general, is a gardener’s job. It is just one of the many chores that people who treat society as a garden need to undertake. If garden design defines its weeds, there are weeds wherever there is a garden. And weeds are to be exterminated. Weeding out is a creative, not a destructive activity. It does not differ in kind from other activities which combine in the construction and sustenance of the perfect garden. All visions of society-as-garden define parts of the social habitat as human weeds. Like all other weeds, they must be segregated, contained, prevented from spreading, removed and kept outside the society boundaries; if all these means prove insufficient, they must be killed. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 268

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘weeding as creative act’ inversion could anchor an essay on how extermination is framed as purification in modern politics.
• XREF: connects to: Prejudice is neither necessary nor sufficient for genocide — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 702; Public indifference, not hatred, greased the machinery of genocide — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 215; Heterophobia and boundary anxieties do not directly cause genocide. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 232 (+9 more)

Related

• Genocide’s victims die for what the perfect order ought to be (similarity 0.86)
• Genocide is a normal potential of modernity, not its malfunction. (similarity 0.85)
• Heterophobia and boundary anxieties do not directly cause genocide. (similarity 0.83)
• Genocide kills for non-fit with the perfect society’s scheme (similarity 0.83)
• Modern genocide functions as social engineering toward a perfect society (similarity 0.82)
• Genocide required replacing collective rage with bureaucratic obedience (similarity 0.80)
• Traditional antisemitism negatively correlates with willingness to perpetrate genocide (similarity 0.80)
• Genocide combines ordinary modern factors that are usually kept apart (similarity 0.80)
• Prejudice is neither necessary nor sufficient for genocide (similarity 0.79)
• Nazi and Stalinist genocide expressed rather than betrayed modernity’s spirit (similarity 0.79)
• Ordinary genocide aims at community destruction, not total annihilation. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Genocide is a normal potential of modernity, not its malfunction. #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 332
• Genocide combines ordinary modern factors that are usually kept apart #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 274