Genocide requires victims to be dehumanized into an abstract category first

Evidence

Nazi legislation, propaganda, and management of social setting went out of their way to separate the one and only “abstract Jew” from the many concrete Jews known to the Germans as neighbors or workmates; and to cast all “concrete Jews,” through exclusion, deportation, and confinement, into the position of abstract ones. Genocide differs from other murders in having a category for its object. Only the abstract Jews could be subjected to genocide - the kind of murder oblivious to differences of age, sex, personal quality, or character. For genocide to be possible, personal differences must be first obliterated and faces must be melted in the uniform mass of the abstract category. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 422

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the law-merchant and social-capital material on how categories and abstraction enable impersonal treatment.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that genocide is categorically distinct from murder — its object is a category, not a person — is a paradigm-shifting lens for understanding bureaucratic atrocity.

Related

• Genocide requires victims to be reduced to an abstract category before killing. (similarity 0.95)
• Genocide targets a category, so victims must first be abstracted. (similarity 0.87)
• Mass violence requires seeing victims as categories, not persons (similarity 0.84)
• Racialization enables genocide and genocide shapes racial constructions (similarity 0.79)
• Collective violence requires dehumanizing victims into abstract categories (similarity 0.79)
• Persecution separates victims and begins massacres short of outright genocide (similarity 0.79)
• Dehumanization laid the foundation for the Nazi genocidal mission (similarity 0.78)