Modernity and the Holocaust

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Zygmunt Bauman

Published:

2023

Mass destruction was the extreme form of antagonism and oppression, yet not all cases of oppression, communal hatred and injustice are ‘like’ the Holocaust. 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. Modern culture as a garden culture constructs its own identity out of distrust of nature. In fact, it defines itself and nature, and the distinction between them, through its endemic distrust of spontaneity and its longing for a better, and necessarily artificial, order. The Holocaust is a by-product of the modern drive to a fully designed, fully controlled world, once the drive is getting out of control and running wild. For many years now historians of the Holocaust have been split into the ‘intentionalist’ and the ‘functionalist’ camps.

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