Dat stelt de wereldberoemde Pools-Britse socioloog Zygmunt Bauman. Hij vindt het dan ook hoog tijd om eindelijk lessen te trekken uit de Holocaust. De voertaal is Engels.

De geschiedenis van de mensheid heeft veel genocides gekend maar de Holocaust was bovenal een modern fenomeen. Zij onderscheidde zich van eerdere volkerenmoorden door de bureaucratische manier waarop zij werd uitgevoerd en door het onderliggende streven om een perfecte samenleving te creëren door alle ‘hinderlijke' elementen onschadelijk te maken.

De voertaal is Engels.
Enkele citaten uit de lezing van Zygmunt Bauman:

"The demons haunting and harrowing the twentieth century were gestated in the course of the resolute efforts to complete the task at which the modern era aimed since its very beginning: to bring the world of humans into order."

"The modern era was a journey towards perfection. For the same reasons, the modern era was also an era of destruction."

"Nazi-inspired exercises were conducted in the very heart of European civilization, science and art - in lands priding themselves of having come closest to fulfilling Francis Bacon's dream of the ‘House of Solomon': a world under undivided and unchallenged rule of reason."

"The Nazi and communist visionaries were not primitive savages, whom modern civilization failed or neglected to civilize, but an avant-garde of the modern army, reaching where other units of that army were too shy, too scrupulous, too cowardly, too poorly armed, or just lacking in courage matching their zeal to venture."

"In every genocidal undertaking, as in any categorial discrimination or prosecution, its victims are punished for what they are and for being what they are suspected of being capable of doing - not what they do or have done."

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