Mass murder can be driven entirely by classification rather than deeds
Evidence
Decent Germans were forbidden to have their own decent Jews — decent because “their own”: the next-door neighbors, 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 like, 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 of the same appearance, language, and religion as their killers, but meant to kill rather than be killed, simply according to the entries in their passports. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 424
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: The Rwanda comparison parallels genocide scholarship on how categorical identity markers override shared appearance and language.
- SEED: An essay angle on how bureaucracy’s power to classify is the enabling precondition for mass atrocity, from the Holocaust to Rwanda.
Related
- Bureaucratic classification, not conduct, determines who mass murder targets. (similarity 0.93)
- Genocide targets a category, so victims must first be abstracted. (similarity 0.78)