Racism emerges only under design of a perfect society
Evidence
Racism comes into its own only in the context of a design of the perfect society and intention to implement the design through planned and consistent effort. In the case of the Holocaust, the design was the thousand-year Reich – the kingdom of the liberated German Spirit. It was that kingdom which had no room for anything but the German Spirit. It had no room for the Jews, as the Jews could not be spiritually converted and embrace the Geist of the German Volk. This spiritual inability was articulated as the attribute of heredity or blood – substances which at that time at least embodied the other side of culture, the territory that culture could not dream of cultivating, a wilderness that would be never turned into the object of gardening. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 192
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘heredity or blood embodying the other side of culture’ echoes the nature/culture boundary that also shaped colonial race-thinking, relevant to later Islamophobia readings on biological vs cultural racisms. — connects to: Racism is a thoroughly modern weapon serving pre-modern struggles — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 181
- ADDENDUM: The gardening metaphor for perfecting society connects to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s theme of engineering living orders — here society itself is the garden being weeded.
Related
- Racism is a thoroughly modern weapon serving pre-modern struggles (similarity 0.80)
- Racism is defined by its practice, not by intensity or rationalization (similarity 0.79)
- Nazi racism was consonant with modern social-engineering worldviews rather than a medieval relapse (similarity 0.79)
- Nazi design treated Jewish absence as instrumental to a perfect world (similarity 0.78)
- The Nazi movement’s novelty was organizing the racial idea, not inventing it (similarity 0.78)