Modern genocide requires bureaucracy meeting a rationally engineered social design

Evidence

Bureaucracy is intrinsically capable of genocidal action. To engage in such an action, it needs an encounter with another invention of modernity: a bold design of a better, more reasonable and rational social order – say a racially uniform, or a classless society – and above all the capacity of drawing such designs and determination to make them efficacious. Genocide follows when two common and abundant inventions of modern times meet. It is only their meeting which has been, thus far, uncommon and rare. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 309

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definitional claim of Bauman’s scaffold: genocide as a conjunction of two specifically modern inventions, not a return to barbarism.
• XREF: Directly portable to the Islamophobia readings — the same structure of rationalized administration plus a utopian social design applies to other exclusionary projects. — connects to: Modern execution technologies fused democratic equality with mass-scale killing. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 50; Potent technology plus designed-order ambition produced modern genocide — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 620; Instrumental rationality cannot prevent mass atrocities and normalizes social engineering. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 83 (+13 more)
• QUESTION: Bauman says this meeting has been ‘uncommon and rare’ — worth asking what factors keep it rare, since he doesn’t specify drivers.

Related

• Modern bureaucracy already contains everything needed for genocide without structural revision. (similarity 0.89)
• Genocide required replacing collective rage with bureaucratic obedience (similarity 0.87)
• Modern genocide functions as social engineering toward a perfect society (similarity 0.86)
• Potent technology plus designed-order ambition produced modern genocide (similarity 0.85)
• Grand design, state bureaucracy, and social paralysis together are the recipe for genocide. (similarity 0.85)
• Genocide combines ordinary modern factors that are usually kept apart (similarity 0.85)
• Instrumental rationality cannot prevent mass atrocities and normalizes social engineering. (similarity 0.84)
• Genocide is a normal potential of modernity, not its malfunction. (similarity 0.84)
• Modern rational society enabled systematic genocide and discredited impulsive mass violence (similarity 0.84)
• Social engineering ambition combined with concentrated power produced the Holocaust (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.81)
• Racist worldviews require modern bureaucracy to implement extermination (similarity 0.81)
• Systematic bureaucratic destruction replaced spontaneous atrocity in the camps (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality, not a rupture from it. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Genocide can be achieved by reinforcing communal structures rather than destroying them #complicates (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 348