Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction

Evidence

‘Ordinary’ genocide splits the actors unambiguously into the murderers and the murdered; for the latter, resistance is the only rational response. In the Holocaust, divisions were less clear. Incorporated in the overall power structure, given an extended set of tasks and functions within it, the doomed population had apparently a range of options to choose from. Co-operation with their sworn enemies and future killers was not without its own measure of rationality. The Jews could therefore play into the hands of their oppressors, facilitate their task, bring closer their own perdition, while guided in their action by the rationally interpreted purpose of survival. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 349

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting move: rationally interpreted survival motives deployed as resources by the oppressing bureaucracy — resists one-sentence compression.
• XREF: The core mechanism for later readings on how targeted populations’ own rational strategies are absorbed into systems of exclusion. — connects to: Resilience-based responses wrongly shift blame from society onto individual victims — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us…, 337; Exploiting victim rationality was cheaper than controlling them through fear — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 581; Memory of genocide can teach victims to become future victimizers. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 670 (+11 more)

Related

• Victims’ rational conduct was engineered to serve their own destruction (similarity 0.88)
• Exploiting victim rationality was cheaper than controlling them through fear (similarity 0.87)
• Forcing survival to require soiled hands manufactures accomplices over time (similarity 0.87)
• The Holocaust succeeded partly through victims’ rational actions. (similarity 0.86)
• Victim cooperation was itself a rational strategy, not a lapse of judgment (similarity 0.84)
• Memory of genocide can teach victims to become future victimizers. (similarity 0.84)
• Even the condemned were left a rational choice among death options (similarity 0.82)
• Nazi power operated by crafting a rational make-believe world for victims (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.81)
• Rationality of the actor and of the action can diverge, making reason self-destructive. (similarity 0.81)
• Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime (similarity 0.81)
• Rationality itself can be weaponized against the rational agent (similarity 0.80)
• Rational choices today can make rational choices tomorrow impossible. (similarity 0.80)
• Victim cooperation made the Holocaust bureaucratically feasible and historically distinctive. (similarity 0.80)
• Modern mass murder is rational, calculated, and free of spontaneity (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• The Holocaust succeeded partly through victims’ rational actions. #exemplifies (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 386
• Forcing survival to require soiled hands manufactures accomplices over time #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 406
• Survival under extremity can require moral transformation #expands (0.82) — Alexis Okeowo, A Moonless, Starless Sky, 15