Memory of genocide can teach victims to become future victimizers.

Evidence

An at least equally probable outcome of martyrdom is the tendency to draw an opposite lesson: that humankind is divided into victims and the victimizes, and so if you are (or expect to be) a victim, your duty is to reverse the tables. We come across that perverse logic time and time again: we watch it today (making little or no effort to cut the vicious loop) in the seesaw of violence in Rwanda; all over the part of Europe known until recently under the name of Yugoslavia; also in Sudan, Congo, Somalia, Angola, Sri Lanka, Afganistan and countless other places. It is this lesson that the spectre of the Holocaust whispers into many ears; some Israeli political leaders lifted that lesson to the rank of an official policy of the state and crowning argument of its diplomacy. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 670

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘reverse-the-tables’ logic of hereditary victimhood that recurs through this chapter.
• XREF: Connects directly to necropolitics and how victimhood memory can be weaponized — a mechanism Islamophobia readings will encounter re: Holocaust memory politics. — connects to: Memory of past victimization is weaponized to legitimize new genocides — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 666; Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 349; Genocide can be achieved by reinforcing communal structures rather than destroying them — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 348 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle: how memory of collective suffering is converted into an entitlement to inflict suffering in several contemporary conflicts.

Related

• Memory of past victimization is weaponized to legitimize new genocides (similarity 0.86)
• Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction (similarity 0.84)
• Hereditary victimhood operates through imagined memory, not genetic or family ties. (similarity 0.81)
• Genocide can be achieved by reinforcing communal structures rather than destroying them (similarity 0.80)
• Historical victimhood narratives can be mobilized to incite new genocides (similarity 0.78)
• Ordinary genocide aims at community destruction, not total annihilation. (similarity 0.78)
• Hereditary victimhood functions as a blank cheque for moral righteousness (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Oppression does not confer virtue but breeds potential violence in victims #corroborates (0.95) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 737
• Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction #qualifies (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 349
• Genocide can be achieved by reinforcing communal structures rather than destroying them #expands (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 348