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« History of the 20th Century
The twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history: besides the tremendous expansion of human technical capabilities that marked the century, death camps and mass murders were also typical of it. It is not that humankind’s morality had deteriorated, but simply that developments of civilization that held unforeseeable consequences aided in the creation of forms of tyranny well suited to evil inclinations, and in causing suffering to others. These types of tyranny were set up by means of the mass society; hand in hand with them went humankind’s scientific and technological development, the twisted emblem of which was a hitherto unknown settlement in Poland called Oswiecim-Auschwitz. There, during the Second World War, German fascists used the techniques of heavy industry (corresponding, in other words, to the human technical capacities of the age) to murder groups of people regarded as targets by modern scientific racism and anti- Semitism: primarily Jews, but others as well. There have been genocides, albeit not such “scientific" ones, since then – indeed before that time as well (as the Armenian Genocide at the beginning of the century’s second decade), but Auschwitz has become the symbol of the evil face of modern humanity. We should also not forget that Soviet Stalinism also produced its own horrific, totalitarian gallows and camps.
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