History performs civilization and progress into mass-mobilizing illusions that precede genocide.

Evidence

History thus rides on the back of the Comtean concepts of civilization and progress, yet it is through it—in what we might call now performative discourse—that these concepts acquire their “illusory” meaning. History, in other words, gives force to the imaginaries of “civilization” and “progress” and makes them “suitable for imposing on a mob,” at least in moments of “collective hallucination,” what the historian Dirk Moses aptly described as a “genocidal moment.” Needless to say, this understanding anticipates Hannah Arendt’s critical philosophical and political elaborations on Nazi atrocities, as well as her more sophisticated analysis of the political concepts of “masses” and “mob”; but for Guénon history is already seen as informing politics as much as it is informed by it. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 303

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘genocidal moment’ as performative discourse-of-civilization links to the reader’s sacrifice book: states legitimize mass violence through civilizational self-image — same structuring logic as sacrificial ideology stabilizing stratification.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that history-writing itself — not just propaganda — manufactures the collective hallucinations that make genocide possible is a dense, paradigm-level argument about scholarship’s complicity in atrocity.