Military technology is a symptom of sovereign violence, not its cause

Evidence

This structure of thought had established with society and with early technological science an extensive and, one might say, an organic dialectic. Earlyas well as late-modern military technology, including Holocaust-like uses of technology, was all symptoms and tools, not causes of sovereign violence, the kind that routinely produced horrific, unprecedented holocausts, genocides, and colonialisms in the twentieth century. A strong penchant for violence was the lot of humanity since time immemorial, and to this extent the moderns, Nazis included, have not distinguished themselves over their predecessors. What is new is an added layer of cataclysmic violence that created a new quality. Modern sovereign will, including will to violence, is an epistemology and a way of seeing the world that commensurately created the new atrocious weapons. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 249

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that weapons are symptoms, not causes, of sovereign violence — and that the Nazis did not exceed their predecessors in penchant for violence — inverts a reflexive technological-determinist reading of genocide. Dense enough to sit with.