Zygmunt Bauman Holocaust Quotes

The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.

فقد وقعت هذه الجريمة "بعيدًا هناك" ، في زمن آخر وبلد آخر. وكلما أُلقي اللوم "عليهم" ، كلما كنا "نحن" في أمان، وكلنا قل أضطرارنا إلى الدفاع عن هذا الأمان

To understand how that astounding moral blindness was possible, it is helpful to think of the workers of an armament plant who rejoice in the 'stay of execution' of their factory thanks to big new orders, while at the same time honestly bewailing the massacres visited upon each other by Ethiopians and Eritreans; or to think how it is possible that the 'fall in commodity prices' may be universally welcomed as good news while 'starvation of African children' is equally universally, and sincerely, lamented.

t was not illiterate savages, but graduates of the finest educational systems of the West who designed the gas chambers used to burn millions of innocent men, women and children in Germany.

Moderne kultur er en hagekultur. Den definerer seg selv som et utkast til det ideelle liv og en perfekt innredning av menneskelivet. Den bygger sin egen identitet på mistro til naturen. Den definerer egentlig seg selv og naturen, og forskjellen mellom dem, ved sin inngrodde mistro til spontaniteten og dens lengsel etter en bedre, og nødvendigvis kunstig orden.

Moderne folkemord, liksom moderne kultur generelt, er gartnerarbeid.

At the Einsatzgruppen stage, the rounded-up victims were brought in front of machine guns and killed at point-blank range. Though efforts were made to keep the weapons at the longest possible distance from the ditches into which the murdered were to fall, it was exceedingly difficult for the shooters to overlook the connection between shooting and killing. This is why the administrators of genocide found the method primitive and inefficient, as well as dangerous to the morale of the perpetrators. Other murder techniques were therefore sought — such as would optically separate the killers from their victims. The search was successful, and led to the invention of first the mobile, then the stationary gas chambers; the latter —the most perfect the Nazis had time to invent— reduced the role of the killer to that of the 'sanitation officer' asked to empty a sackful of 'disinfecting chemicals' through an aperture in the roof of a building the interior of which he was not prompted to visit.