Holocaust perpetrators were normal and their institutions socially non-pathological

Evidence

That most of the perpetrators of the genocide were normal people, who will freely flow through any known psychiatric sieve, however dense, is morally disturbing. It is also theoretically puzzling, particularly when seen conjointly with the ‘normality’ of those organizational structures that co-ordinated the actions of such normal individuals into an enterprise of the genocide. We know already that the institutions responsible for the Holocaust, even if found criminal, were in no legitimate sociological sense pathological or abnormal. Now we see that the people whose actions they institutionalized did not deviate either from established standards of normality. There is little choice left, therefore, but to look again, with eyes sharpened by our new knowledge, at the allegedly fully understood, normal patterns of modern rational action. It is in these patterns that we can hope to uncover the possibility so dramatically revealed in the times of the Holocaust. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 89

Categorization

• XREF: This is the foundational ‘banality of evil’ turn that the Islamophobia field’s critique of bureaucratic exclusion builds on — connects to Arendt’s Eichmann, and later to how modern state rationality rather than abnormal psychology enables mass violence. — connects to: Holocaust perpetrators were ordinary citizens acting without personal anti-Jewish resentment. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 682; Antisemitism explains victim selection, not the crime’s nature — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 703; The Holocaust resulted from an unchained state wielding violence and engineering ambitions — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 29 (+5 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The move of relocating the source of genocide from pathology to the ‘normal patterns of modern rational action’ itself is paradigm-shifting — it indicts modernity rather than aberrance.

Related

• Holocaust perpetrators were ordinary citizens acting without personal anti-Jewish resentment. (similarity 0.89)
• The Holocaust’s perpetrators were ordinary educated men of their era, not deviants. (similarity 0.88)
• Every ingredient enabling the Holocaust was normal for modern civilization (similarity 0.87)
• The Holocaust required neutralizing popular attitudes, not mobilizing them (similarity 0.83)
• Scholars shifted Holocaust study from Hitler to the bureaucratic middlemen (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust resulted from an unchained state wielding violence and engineering ambitions (similarity 0.83)
• Normalizing the Holocaust as one genocide among many also defuses its challenge to sociology (similarity 0.82)
• Modernity’s institutions actively enabled and supplied the Holocaust (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.82)
• Extreme evil can stem from meticulous order rather than its breakdown (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust must be read as integral to modernity, not as its aberration. (similarity 0.82)
• Most genocide-conducive factors are normal features of every modern society (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust is a product of modern rational society, not a Jewish problem alone (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• The Holocaust’s perpetrators were ordinary educated men of their era, not deviants. #corroborates (1.00) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 236
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress #expands (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 207