Modern society’s self-image as inherently antiprejudicial may itself be false

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. … 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

• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that the modernity of the Holocaust challenges the self-congratulatory view of modernization as inherently prejudice-reducing is a dense, paradigm-shifting claim worth sitting with.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the Enlightenment’s shadow’ — why societies that pride themselves on rational antiprejudice are precisely the ones capable of bureaucratic genocide.