Mob violence alone could never execute genocide on a national scale
Evidence
Consider the numbers. The German state annihilated approximately six million Jews. At the rate of 100 per day this would have required nearly 200 years. Mob violence rests on the wrong psychological basis, on violent emotion. People can be manipulated into fury, but fury cannot be maintained for 200 years. Emotions, and their biological basis, have a natural time course; lust, even blood lust, is eventually sated. Further, emotions are notoriously fickle, can be turned. A lynch mob is unreliable, it can sometimes be moved by sympathy – say by a child’s suffering. To eradicate a ‘race’ it is essential to kill the children. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 259
Categorization
- SEED: The arithmetic of scale — 200 years at 100 deaths per day — could anchor an essay on why genocides require bureaucratic infrastructure.
- XREF: connects to: Prejudice is neither necessary nor sufficient for genocide — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 702
Related
- Genocide required replacing collective rage with bureaucratic obedience (similarity 0.82)
- Systematic bureaucratic destruction replaced spontaneous atrocity in the camps (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Prejudice is neither necessary nor sufficient for genocide
#expands(0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 702