The Holocaust was a product of modern civilization, not merely its failure

Evidence

It suggests that the role of modern civilization in the incidence and the perpetration of the Holocaust was active, not passive. It suggests that the Holocaust was as much a product, as it was a failure, of modern civilization. Like everything else done in the modern – rational, planned, scientifically informed, expert, efficiently managed, co-ordinated – way, the Holocaust left behind and put to shame all its alleged pre-modern equivalents, exposing them as primitive, wasteful and ineffective by comparison. Like everything else in our modern society, the Holocaust was an accomplishment in every respect superior, if measured by the standards that this society has preached and institutionalized. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 256

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that efficiency standards themselves valorize the extermination — is a paradigm-shifting claim about how modernity’s own metrics apply to genocide, difficult to summarize without flattening it.
• XREF: connects to: The Holocaust must be read as integral to modernity, not as its aberration. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 630; The Holocaust is a product of modern rational society, not a Jewish problem alone — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 21; Every ingredient enabling the Holocaust was normal for modern civilization — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 59 (+9 more)

Related

• Modernity’s institutions actively enabled and supplied the Holocaust (similarity 0.91)
• The Holocaust is a by-product of runaway modernist design (similarity 0.90)
• Modern civilization was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Holocaust. (similarity 0.90)
• The Holocaust must be read as integral to modernity, not as its aberration. (similarity 0.90)
• Every ingredient enabling the Holocaust was normal for modern civilization (similarity 0.89)
• The Holocaust is a possibility modernity contains, not its paradigm (similarity 0.89)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.89)
• The Holocaust resulted from distinctly modern social and political conditions (similarity 0.88)
• All Holocaust scholarship is ultimately a debate over modernity’s self-image. (similarity 0.88)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.87)
• Both dominant readings of the Holocaust leave sociology’s theory of modernity unchallenged (similarity 0.86)
• The Holocaust rendered Western civilization itself incomprehensible, not just the event. (similarity 0.86)
• The Holocaust functions as a laboratory test revealing modernity’s hidden capacities. (similarity 0.86)
• Marginalizing the Holocaust silences its message about modern institutions (similarity 0.86)
• Modernity’s institutional safeguards against violence all failed during the Holocaust (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• Modernity’s institutions actively enabled and supplied the Holocaust #corroborates (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 251