Mass violence requires seeing victims as categories, not persons

Evidence

Treating others as separate beings endowed with personal virtues or vices would fail to serve such purposes: essentialization is indispensable, and the modern power of abstraction comes in handy. The abstracting powers simultaneously underlie and overtop the other accoutrements of modernity without which the Holocaust, that exquisitely modern form of genocide, would have been inconceivable. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 426

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to vault definitions of dehumanization as enabling atrocity — parallels the manipulative-type and anti-Semitic interchangeability claims from the Frankfurt School chapter. — connects to: Excluding people from the human community precedes mass violence. — Emanuele Castano, On the Perils of Glorifying the…, 33
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 426