Nazi design treated Jewish absence as instrumental to a perfect world

Evidence

From the point of view of those who designed and commanded the mass murder of the Jews, Jews were to die not because they were resented (or at least not primarily for this reason); they were seen as deserving death (and resented for that reason) because they stood between this one imperfect and tension-ridden reality and the hoped-for world of tranquil happiness. As we shall see in the next chapter, the disappearance of the Jews was instrumental in bringing about the world of perfection. The absence of Jews was precisely the difference between that world and the imperfect world here and now. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 220

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s grafting/infrastructure and sacrifice modules — modernity as ‘garden-type culture’ engineering a perfected social order. — connects to: The Holocaust is a by-product of runaway modernist design — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 272; Nazi power operated by crafting a rational make-believe world for victims — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 580; The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 207 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle: how instrumentalist utopian design legitimizes elimination of those who stand between present imperfection and imagined perfection.

Related

• The Holocaust is a by-product of runaway modernist design (similarity 0.86)
• Nazi racism was consonant with modern social-engineering worldviews rather than a medieval relapse (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust is a product of modern rational society, not a Jewish problem alone (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust reveals civilization’s capacity for industrialized destruction as inseparable from its progress. (similarity 0.81)
• The Nazi movement’s novelty was organizing the racial idea, not inventing it (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust fused antisemitism with social and political mechanisms of an entirely different character. (similarity 0.80)
• Social engineering ambition combined with concentrated power produced the Holocaust (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.80)
• Modernity’s institutions actively enabled and supplied the Holocaust (similarity 0.80)
• Society preferred unassimilated Jews precisely because their alienness fed its imagination (similarity 0.79)
• Nazi extermination was a legitimate offspring of the modern spirit, not a regression (similarity 0.79)
• The Holocaust must be read as integral to modernity, not as its aberration. (similarity 0.79)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.79)
• Nazi and Stalinist genocide expressed rather than betrayed modernity’s spirit (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 207
• The Holocaust is a by-product of runaway modernist design #corroborates (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 272
• Social engineering ambition combined with concentrated power produced the Holocaust #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 224
• Nazi racism was consonant with modern social-engineering worldviews rather than a medieval relapse #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 197
• Nazi power operated by crafting a rational make-believe world for victims #responds-to (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 580