Genocide targets a category, so victims must first be abstracted.

Evidence

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 first be obliterated and faces must be melted into the uniform mass of the abstract category. Julius Streicher, the infamous editor-in-chief of the equally infamous Der Stürmer, had a hard time trying to make the exceedingly popular stereotype of the ‘Jew as such’, forged and disseminated by his paper, stick to the concrete Jews the readers knew from their daily intercourse; while Himmler found it necessary to reprimand even the selected and tested elite of his SS henchmen: ‘“The Jewish people is to be exterminated,” says every party member. “That’s clear, it’s part of our programme, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we’ll do it.” And then they all come along, the eighty million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew.’ Decent Germans were forbidden to have their own decent Jews – decent because ‘their own’: the next-door neighbours, caring doctors or friendly shopkeepers. Up to six million Jews were murdered wholesale not for what any of them had done but for how they had all been classified – just as, quite recently, in another hour of ultimate triumph of all-defining, all-classifying modern bureaucracy, the armed gangs of Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda set off their victims from the others who shared the same look, language and religion, but who were meant to kill rather than be killed, simply according to the entries in their passports. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 646

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines genocide as distinct from murder precisely by having an abstract category for its object.
• XREF: Connects to the construction of the abstract ‘Jew’ in Orientalist representation and to Rwandan passport classification as bureaucratic identity. — connects to: Genocide’s victims die for what the perfect order ought to be — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 266; Persecution separates victims and begins massacres short of outright genocide — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 16
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the sacrifice article’s theme of category-versus-individual targeting in state violence.

Related

• Genocide requires victims to be reduced to an abstract category before killing. (similarity 0.89)
• Genocide requires victims to be dehumanized into an abstract category first (similarity 0.87)
• Persecution separates victims and begins massacres short of outright genocide (similarity 0.82)
• Genocide kills for non-fit with the perfect society’s scheme (similarity 0.81)
• Genocide’s victims die for what the perfect order ought to be (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Genocide’s victims die for what the perfect order ought to be #expands (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 266