It was the rational world of modern civilization that made the Holocaust unthinkable.
— Zygmunt Bauman
Modernity, as the late Zygmunt Bauman noted in his magisterially provocative Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) has not necessarily entailed enlightenment, the liberation from immaturity. Since the cave dweller existence, humanity has retained traditional forms of savagery. What mattered was the sheer lethality of it all, driven by a sociopathic rationality: mass murder became industrialised; population control became ever more ruthless.
The zealous could be, essentially, more efficient, thereby doing, as Adolf Eichmann did, a sterling job for his employers in the Nazi death machine. Hitler may have been the fantasist of racial purity, but what his dreams needed were the machine men and women on the ground, the practitioners to make a vision not merely real but grotesquely normal.
The glories of technological discovery could easily be reversed: the radio, becoming a disseminating device for hatred; the television, a dystopian tool for surveillance; the charnel house, the final resting place for millions.
Zauman was better equipped than most to understand that: Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance retains a file documenting his own stint in the country’s communist past as an official of the Internal Security Corps. It was a point that delighted historian Bogdan Musial, who insisted in 2006 that Bauman had actively engaged in the purging of regime…