Modern society’s own attributes can enable holocaust-style genocide, not just racial prejudice.

Evidence

The Holocaust - the murder of about six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies, committed during World War II - was an ultimate expression of genocidal tendency present in race and ethnic hatred. It was also a peculiar case of genocide to an extent which prompts many historians to present it as unique. What was peculiar or unique was the systematic and methodical fashion in which the extermination of men, women, and children classified as members of a particular - undesirable - race was conducted over many years, and the enormous number of people involved in the perpetration of the murder in their various professional capacities. It is this peculiarity that renders insufficient the routine explanations of the Holocaust as another, even if extreme, case of racial and ethnic genocide. It is true that the Holocaust is a most dramatic demonstration of the murderous potential of race or ethnic hatred; this is, however, not the only, and neither a particularly novel nor the most seminal of lessons which could be derived from its experience. Another lesson, drawing on the peculiarity of the Holocaust among other cases of genocide, seems to be as unique as the Holocaust itself and eminently important because of its bearing directly on the nature of the society in which this particular genocide was conceived and committed. That other lesson is addressed directly to the possible link between the holocaust-style genocide and certain attributes of modern society. If the first lesson sends us back to the familiar issue of racial prejudice and its morbid consequences, the second prompts us to rethink the routine, confident, and often self-congratulatory opinion of the essentially antiprejudicial impact of modernization. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 366

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the analytic distinction between the Holocaust as racial-ethnic genocide versus as a modernity-induced phenomenon — a definitional fork relevant to how ‘genocide’ and ‘racialization’ get used.
• XREF: Resonates with Frankfurt School analyses of instrumental reason and the culture of rationality enabling industrialized murder.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 366