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đŸȘ” The Threshold

One can save lives while endorsing the killer's category hierarchy

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tagsja-picks, deepthinking, question, contrarian_or_surprising, trade, singleton, xref, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@bauman_modernity_1989, loc. 371

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One can save lives while endorsing the killer’s category hierarchy

Evidence

What was morally so disastrous in the acceptance of these privileged categories was that everyone who demanded to have an ‘exception’ made in his case implicitly recognized the rule, but this point, apparently, was never grasped by these ‘good men’, Jewish and Gentile, who busied themselves about all those ‘special cases’ for which preferential treatment could be asked 
 Even after the end of the war, Kasztner [a leader of the Hungarian Jews who negotiated with the Nazis an exemption of some of his wards from death camps] was proud of his success in saving ‘prominent Jews’, a category officially introduced by the Nazis in 1942, as though in his view, too, it went without saying that a famous Jew had more right to stay alive than an ordinary one. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 371

Categorization

  • DEEPTHINKING: Kasztner’s unintentional internalization of Nazi categories even after liberation — complicity surviving the regime.
  • QUESTION: What does this imply for humanitarian rescue work that operates within state-defined categories of deservingness today?
  • XREF: connects to: Representation itself determines who is acknowledged as dying and how; Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 349; State classification of a killing can erase the antisemitic motive witnesses identify — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding
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