Modern civilization produces its own barbarians from within rather than from outside

Evidence

The danger in the existence of such people is twofold: first and more obviously, their ever-increasing numbers threaten our political life, our human artifice, the world which is the result of our common and co-ordinated effort in much the same, perhaps even more terrifying, way as the wild elements of nature once threatened the existence of man-made cities and countrysides. Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer likely to come from without. Nature has been mastered and no barbarians threaten to destroy what they cannot understand, as the Mongolians threatened Europe for centuries. Even the emergence of totalitarian governments is a phenomenon within, not outside, our civilization. The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 739

Categorization

• XREF: Reframes ‘barbarian’ as an internal product of civilization — bearing on how racialized Others are constructed within the nation-state in Islamophobia discourse. — connects to: The coming barbarism may be the empire of civilization itself. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 887; Civilization is a modern European construction that defines Europeans by excluding their barbarian others — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 33; Modern civilization idealizes itself while being constitutively built on incorporated violence — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 236
• STORYSTEM: The imagery of a civilization forcing millions into ‘savage’ conditions suggests a dystopian setting where the excluded become indistinguishable from the wild they once tamed.