The Holocaust succeeded partly through victims’ rational actions.

Evidence

It was because the ultimate objective of the Holocaust operation defied all rational calculation that its success could be built out of the rational actions of its prospective victims. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 386

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox — a goal beyond rational logic turned the victims’ own reason into the engine of their destruction — is a dense, paradigm-shifting counterintuitive claim.
• XREF: Reverses the standard assumption that victims’ collaboration was irrational; connects to Milgram’s obedience studies and to Arendt’s banality of evil. — connects to: Totalitarian complicity is made total by implicating victims in the crimes — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1015; Nazi power operated by crafting a rational make-believe world for victims — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 580; Victims’ rational conduct was engineered to serve their own destruction — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 95 (+5 more)

Related

• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality applied to maximum-efficiency ends. (similarity 0.87)
• Nazi power operated by crafting a rational make-believe world for victims (similarity 0.87)
• Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction (similarity 0.86)
• Victims’ rational conduct was engineered to serve their own destruction (similarity 0.85)
• Exploiting victim rationality was cheaper than controlling them through fear (similarity 0.85)
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.85)
• Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime (similarity 0.83)
• Victim cooperation made the Holocaust bureaucratically feasible and historically distinctive. (similarity 0.83)
• Instrumental reason’s slaughter continued after the Holocaust on the same scale. (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.82)
• Rationality of the actor and of the action can diverge, making reason self-destructive. (similarity 0.81)
• Victim cooperation was itself a rational strategy, not a lapse of judgment (similarity 0.81)
• Rational self-interest alone suffices for evil to operate unchallenged. (similarity 0.80)
• Rationality itself can be weaponized against the rational agent (similarity 0.80)
• Modern civilization was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Holocaust. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality applied to maximum-efficiency ends. #corroborates (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 425