Strip a people of their historical sanctity to make them killable without dignity
Evidence
There is not a community anywhere on earth without a sense of inviolable sanctity to its collective identity, history, culture—all resting on certain iconic sets of evidence, from the Hebrew Bible to the American Constitution. It is that sanctity, integral to a people’s sense of dignity, that Ibn Warraq wants to steal from Muslims— thus preparing them to become what Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer, “naked life”, so that when they are massacred in multitudes, not event the dignity of the word “Palestinians” will be attached to their slaughtered numbers. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 518
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to critiques of Orientalism and Agamben’s homo sacer concept; parallels the mechanism of dehumanization before mass violence. — connects to: Rebuilding culture after mass murder is itself barbaric negation. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 69
- DEEPTHINKING: Compresses a full theory — that attacks on a people’s origin narratives are a precondition for their slaughter — into one startling image.