Social engineering ambition combined with concentrated power produced the Holocaust

Evidence

The murderous compound was made of a typically modern ambition of social design and engineering, mixed with the typically modern concentration of power, resources and managerial skills. In Gordon’s terse and unforgettable phrase, ‘when the millions of Jewish and other victims pondered their own imminent deaths and wondered “why must I die, since I have done nothing to deserve it?” probably the simplest answer would have been that power was totally concentrated in one man, and that man happened to hate their “race”.’ — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 224

Categorization

• XREF: The murderous compound formula maps directly to the reader’s biopolitics/garden-culture theme. — connects to: The Holocaust demonstrated how to liquidate minority and statelessness problems; Potent technology plus designed-order ambition produced modern genocide — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 620; Manipulating Holocaust memory threatens the future’s human habitability — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 708 (+19 more)

Related

• Potent technology plus designed-order ambition produced modern genocide (similarity 0.88)
• The Holocaust resulted from an unchained state wielding violence and engineering ambitions (similarity 0.86)
• Modern genocide functions as social engineering toward a perfect society (similarity 0.86)
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.86)
• The Holocaust reveals civilization’s capacity for industrialized destruction as inseparable from its progress. (similarity 0.85)
• The Holocaust demonstrated how to liquidate minority and statelessness problems (similarity 0.85)
• The Holocaust is a by-product of runaway modernist design (similarity 0.84)
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality applied to maximum-efficiency ends. (similarity 0.83)
• Genocide combines ordinary modern factors that are usually kept apart (similarity 0.83)
• Modern genocide requires bureaucracy meeting a rationally engineered social design (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.83)
• Instrumental rationality cannot prevent mass atrocities and normalizes social engineering. (similarity 0.83)
• Genocide kills for non-fit with the perfect society’s scheme (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust fused antisemitism with social and political mechanisms of an entirely different character. (similarity 0.82)
• Theoretical antisemitism matters through its link to state social-engineering ambitions. (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Modern genocide functions as social engineering toward a perfect society #corroborates (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 264
• Modernity’s institutions actively enabled and supplied the Holocaust #corroborates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 251
• Modern genocide requires bureaucracy meeting a rationally engineered social design #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 309