Perverted tolerance of the ‘racially predestined’ flips into liquidation
Evidence
The moralistic judgment as a crime of every departure from the norm, which fashionable circles used to consider narrow and philistine, if demonstrative of inferior psychological understanding, at least showed greater respect for human dignity. If crime is understood to be a kind of fatality, natural or economic, everybody will finally be suspected of some special predestination to it. “Punishment is the right of the criminal,” of which he is deprived if (in the words of Proust) “judges assume and are more inclined to pardon murder in inverts and treason in Jews for reasons derived from …racial predestination.” It is an attraction to murder and treason which hides behind such perverted tolerance, for in a moment it can switch to a decision to liquidate not only all actual criminals but all who are “racially” predestined to commit certain crimes. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 259
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: This is the hinge Arendt needs to connect the decorous salon tolerance of exception Jews to the later extermination — relevant to how Islamophobia’s ‘good Muslim/bad Muslim’ tolerance can itself become deadly.