Totalitarian legal theory replaces juridical accountability with fate and life-laws

Evidence

By and large, all rulers can count on rationality being on their side. But the Nazi rulers, additionally, twisted the stakes of the game so that the rationality of survival would render all other motives of human action irrational. Inside the Nazi-made world, reason was the enemy of morality. Logic required consent to crime. Rational defence of one’s survival called for non-resistance to the other’s destruction. This rationality pitched the sufferers against each other and obliterated their joint humanity. It also made them into a threat and an enemy of all the others, not yet marked for death, and granted for the time being the role of bystanders. Graciously, the noble creed of rationality absolved both the victims and the bystanders from the charge of immorality and from guilty conscience. Having reduced human life to the calculus of self-preservation, this rationality robbed human life of humanity. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 583 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Totalitarian police erase victims’ existence rather than merely kill them; Totalitarian ideology transforms stabilizing law into law as motion; Totalitarian rule substitutes insight into the law of movement for principles of action — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1057 (+3 more)

Related

• Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime (similarity 0.88)
• Nazi law reversed the presumption of rights to presume universal rightlessness at birth. (similarity 0.85)
• Older Nazi officials retained moral qualms the genocidal machine overrode (similarity 0.81)
• Totalitarian ideology transforms stabilizing law into law as motion (similarity 0.80)
• Moral judgment survived the Holocaust only outside all existing rules (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime #expands (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 583