The Holocaust’s lesson is reduced to survival as competitive zero-sum value

Evidence

The wider repercussions of the cult of survival contain dangers of potentially formidable proportions. Time and again, in this place and that, the lessons of the Holocaust are reduced for popular consumption to a simple formula, ‘who strikes first, survives’; or to an even simpler one, ‘the stronger lives’. The awesome, two-pronged legacy of the Holocaust is, on the one hand, the tendency to treat survival as the sole, or at any rate the topmost value and purpose of life, and, on the other, to the positing of issue of survival as that of competition for a scarce resource, and so of survival itself as a site of conflict between incompatible interests – a kind of conflict in which the success of some depends on the defeat of others in the race to survive. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 665

Categorization

• XREF: The zero-sum survival framing parallels the demographic-threat and replacement rhetoric the reader studies in Islamophobic discourse.