Modernist urges toward social perfection, not barbarism, powered totalitarian atrocities

Evidence

The most extreme and well documented cases of “social engineering” in modern history, all their attendant atrocities notwithstanding, were neither outbursts of barbarism, not yet fully extinguished by the new rational order of civilization, nor the price paid for Utopias alien to the spirit of modernity. On the contrary, they were legitimate offspring of the modern spirit, of that urge to assist and speed up the progress of mankind toward perfection that was throughout the most prominent hallmark of the modern age - of that “optimistic view, that scientific and industrial progress in principle removed all restrictions on the possible application of planning, education and social reform in everyday life,” of that “belief that social problems can be finally solved.” Nazi vision of harmonious, orderly, deviation-free society drew its legitimacy and attractiveness from such views and beliefs already firmly entrenched in the public mind through the century and a half of post-Enlightenment history, filled with scientistic propaganda and the visual display of the wondrous potency of modern technology. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 398

Categorization

• XREF: Quadruples with already-vaulted material on racial formation as product of Enlightenment rationality and on the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental reason and nature-domination.
• DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-level claim that genocide is not modernity’s failure but its logical offspring — a dense inversion of common assumptions that resists easy summary.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 398