Totalitarian solutions remain tempting wherever misery resists worthy alleviation

Evidence

To be sure, thanks to the late modern surfeit of mutually cancelling authorities and due to the irredeemable polyvocality which goes together with political democracy and the weakening grip of state powers, the chances of such players gaining an upper hand and deploying the absolute powers of the state to set a Holocaust-style ‘solution’ in motion are slim and remote. Yet to say with any degree of self-assurance that the forces eager for an Endlösung type of action, and either the necessary or the sufficient conditions for them acting in that way, are no longer present today would be equally premature and imprudent. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 654 (#expands, via linked claim)

And the swarm of mosquitoes — born from the ashes of the blood-drinking monster — flew off into the world. And they carried with them the monster’s old craving: the hunger for the blood of human beings. … The lesson, the storytellers say with a rueful smile as they slap at a mosquito, is partly just a clever and funny explanation for why these annoying insects exist and why they crave our blood — but it carries also a deeper, wiser note: that great evils, even when defeated, are not always so easily disposed of; that in destroying a great harm, we may accidentally scatter it into many small ones; and that some troubles, once loosed upon the world, can never be entirely gotten rid of, but must simply be endured. — , A Year of World Stories, 10132 (#responds-to, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Conditions enabling genocide remain while absolute-state deployment grows less likely — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 654; Defeating a great evil can merely disperse it into many smaller persistent ones — , A Year of World Stories, 10132

Related

• Conditions enabling genocide remain while absolute-state deployment grows less likely (similarity 0.82)
• Defeating a great evil can merely disperse it into many smaller persistent ones (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Conditions enabling genocide remain while absolute-state deployment grows less likely #expands (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 654
• Defeating a great evil can merely disperse it into many smaller persistent ones #responds-to (0.75) — , A Year of World Stories, 10132