The theology of progress normalizes structural genocide while exceptionalizing the Holocaust

Evidence

Wolfe may have added that the persistence of the meaning of genocide as a singular occurrence of mass and summary killing (that is, as an event) is also due to the modern discursive practices of normalizing structural genocide. In fact, it is the standard received academic and popular wisdom in the modern world, especially among the current descendants of the peoples of former colonies and their modern institutions, that their history over the last two or three centuries was an inevitable process, a “natural” course on the path of progress. This was possible not only because they have not seen or experienced anything else (and are thereby left bereft of a comparative perspective) but also because these have been nurtured as true believers, like their Western counterparts, in the theology of progress, which was in turn one of the most essential and potent tools of imperialism. My point here is that the very strategy of the theological discourse of progress that made the Holocaust an exception worked concurrently to make structural genocide integral to the normativity of modern history, whereby the totalizing act of decimating “traditional” cultures comes to be regarded as a “natural” development. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 422

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense two-part mechanism: progress-narratives naturalize colonial destruction while exceptionalizing the Holocaust, and how these twin moves render descendants unable to see their own history as contingent.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno and post-Holocaust critical theory on progress as ideology, and to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history reading of progress’s wreckage. — connects to: Enlightened progress remains entangled with domination and cruelty — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 200
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 422