The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created

Evidence

The Holocaust was a unique encounter between the old tensions which modernity ignored, slighted or failed to resolve – and the powerful instruments of rational and effective action that modern development itself brought into being. Even if their encounter was unique and called for a rare combination of circumstances, the factors that came together in that encounter were, and are still, ubiquitous and ‘normal’. Not enough has been done after the Holocaust to fathom the awesome potential of these factors and less still to paralyse their potentially gruesome effects. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 32

Categorization

• XREF: This frames the scaffolding claim that the Holocaust is not an aberration but an expression of modernity — directly the through-line the Islamophobia readings will assume about modern racism and administrative exclusion. — connects to: All Holocaust scholarship is ultimately a debate over modernity’s self-image. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 631; The Holocaust is a product of modern rational society, not a Jewish problem alone — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 21; The Holocaust resulted from an unchained state wielding violence and engineering ambitions — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 29 (+11 more)
• SEED: The ‘rare combination of circumstances’ framing is an article angle: bureaucratic rationality as the enabling condition for mass atrocity, generalizable beyond the Holocaust.

Related

• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.91)
• The Holocaust is a product of modern rational society, not a Jewish problem alone (similarity 0.90)
• The Holocaust resulted from an unchained state wielding violence and engineering ambitions (similarity 0.89)
• The Holocaust must be read as integral to modernity, not as its aberration. (similarity 0.88)
• Modernity’s institutions actively enabled and supplied the Holocaust (similarity 0.88)
• The Holocaust is a by-product of runaway modernist design (similarity 0.88)
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality applied to maximum-efficiency ends. (similarity 0.88)
• All Holocaust scholarship is ultimately a debate over modernity’s self-image. (similarity 0.87)
• The Holocaust reveals civilization’s capacity for industrialized destruction as inseparable from its progress. (similarity 0.87)
• The Holocaust functions as a laboratory test revealing modernity’s hidden capacities. (similarity 0.87)
• The Holocaust was a product of modern civilization, not merely its failure (similarity 0.87)
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.86)
• The Holocaust resulted from distinctly modern social and political conditions (similarity 0.86)
• The Holocaust fused antisemitism with social and political mechanisms of an entirely different character. (similarity 0.86)
• Normalizing the Holocaust as one genocide among many also defuses its challenge to sociology (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• Modernity’s institutions actively enabled and supplied the Holocaust #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 251
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality applied to maximum-efficiency ends. #expands (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 425
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 207
• Social engineering ambition combined with concentrated power produced the Holocaust #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 224
• The Holocaust functions as a laboratory test revealing modernity’s hidden capacities. #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 68
• The Holocaust is a possibility modernity contains, not its paradigm #qualifies (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 49