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🪵 The Threshold

Hate propaganda alone cannot socially isolate a target group

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tagsja-picks, xref, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@bauman_modernity_1989, loc. 354

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Hate propaganda alone cannot socially isolate a target group

Evidence

There were, however, limits to the effectiveness of the antisemitic gospel. Many people proved immune to the propaganda of hatred or, more generally, to the irrational interpretation of the world that propaganda demanded that they should accept. Many more still, while conceding with little protest the official definition of Jewishness, refused to apply it to the individual Jews they knew. Were the antisemitic propaganda the only means of ‘sealing off the Jews from communal life, it would be likely to fail – resulting at best in the splitting of the population into the camp of rabid Jew-haters and a perhaps less well integrated, and more poorly organized, yet reasonably effective mass of non-collaborators and active defenders of the ‘unduly victimized’. It certainly would not suffice to remove the Jews ‘from the hearts and minds’ of the Germans radically enough to render the subsequent physical destruction of the Jews unopposed and unresented. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 354

Categorization

  • XREF: Relevant to Islamophobia readings on whether anti-Muslim discourse alone generates exclusion versus needing structural measures; also echoes theories of why dehumanizing propaganda fails against personal acquaintance. — connects to: Denying a bigotry’s existence enables it to spread unchecked; Popular hatred was insufficient to drive the Holocaust — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 212

Broader Connections

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