Modern mass slaughter is justified through racial threat rather than religious demonism

Evidence

Race, in short, grants embodiment to the will to power. If religion is a project of inherent self-servitude, of subjection to God’s will, then religion’s supposedly secularizing repression under modernity by killing off God is a project of self-liberation, an abolitionist project. God is done away with in the name of humanity’s self-willed power. But it is a humanism that coterminously constrains its extension, delimiting its license to those just like me, the familiar and familial. The family of man previously conceived in and by religious order is now animated by the absolutes of racial representation. Where group slaughter was hitherto prompted directly in the name of religious demonism, for the modern project mass slaughter becomes mediated through the motivating threat of racial termination. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1347

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Goldberg’s broader argument in earlier chapters about racial classification as a modern replacement for theological order; also resonates with Zamyatin’s ‘We’ on the logic of collective purification. — connects to: Death concerns strengthen appeals to kill culturally designated evil groups. — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory: Implications…, 68