Modern mass persecution targets identity rather than belief or action

Evidence

The trouble arose when it appeared that the new categories of persecuted were far too numerous to be handled by an unofficial practice destined for exceptional cases. Moreover, the majority could hardly qualify for the right of asylum, which implicitly presupposed political or religious convictions which were not outlawed in the country of refuge. The new refugees were persecuted not because of what they had done or thought, but because of what they unchangeably were—born into the wrong kind of race or the wrong kind of class or drafted by the wrong kind of government (as in the case of the Spanish Republican Army). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 717

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The shift from persecuting what one has done to persecuting what one unchangeably is marks the modern turning from political to ontological exclusion — dense and paradigm-defining.
• XREF: Foreshadows the biopolitics/necropolitics lineage and connects to the construction of the racialized ‘Other’ in the Islamophobia readings.