Modern rational society enabled systematic genocide and discredited impulsive mass violence

Evidence

Rage and fury are pitiably primitive and inefficient as tools of mass annihilation. They normally peter out before the job is done. One cannot build grand designs on them. Certainly not such designs as reach beyond momentary effects like a wave of terror, the breakdown of an old order, clearing the ground for a new rule. Ghengis Khan and Peter the Hermit did not need modern technology and modern, scientific methods of management and co-ordination. Stalin or Hitler did. It is the adventurers and dilletantes like Ghengis Khan and Peter the Hermit that our modern, rational society has discredited and, arguably, put paid to. It is the practitioners of cool, thorough and systematic genocide like Stalin and Hitler for whom the modern, rational society paved the way. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 261

Categorization

• XREF: The contrast of pre-modern adventurer versus modern administrator is a framework for describing political violence in subsequent readings. — connects to: Modern execution technologies fused democratic equality with mass-scale killing. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 50; Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 583; Potent technology plus designed-order ambition produced modern genocide — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 620 (+10 more)

Related

• Modern mass murder is rational, calculated, and free of spontaneity (similarity 0.86)
• Genocide required replacing collective rage with bureaucratic obedience (similarity 0.86)
• Instrumental rationality cannot prevent mass atrocities and normalizes social engineering. (similarity 0.85)
• Modern genocide functions as social engineering toward a perfect society (similarity 0.85)
• Genocide is a normal potential of modernity, not its malfunction. (similarity 0.84)
• Modern genocide requires bureaucracy meeting a rationally engineered social design (similarity 0.84)
• Potent technology plus designed-order ambition produced modern genocide (similarity 0.83)
• Genocide combines ordinary modern factors that are usually kept apart (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.82)
• Genocide kills for non-fit with the perfect society’s scheme (similarity 0.82)
• Nazi and Stalinist genocide expressed rather than betrayed modernity’s spirit (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality, not a rupture from it. (similarity 0.82)
• Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Modern genocide requires bureaucracy meeting a rationally engineered social design #corroborates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 309
• Genocide combines ordinary modern factors that are usually kept apart #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 274
• Genocide kills for non-fit with the perfect society’s scheme #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 269
• Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence #expands (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 284