Nazi extermination was a legitimate offspring of the modern spirit, not a regression

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. The Nazi vision did not jar with the audacious self-confidence and the hubris of modernity. It merely offered to do better what other modern powers dreamed of, perhaps even tried but failed to accomplish: What should not be forgotten is that fascist realism provided a model for a new order in society, a new internal alignment. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 398

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This inverts the standard narrative that the Holocaust was a rupture of civilization. Genocide treated as the logical endpoint of Enlightenment’s belief that social problems can be finally solved is genuinely paradigm-shifting — the totalizing ‘belief that social problems can be finally solved’ as the genocidal premise needs sustained unpacking.
• XREF: Directly parallels Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust; also resonates with the reading list’s The Defeat of the Spanish Armada in that it treats belief systems as having their own historical weight.