The violence of the Second World War represents a complete rupture in human history: not only did states confront each other with an unprecedented level of industrial power, but they also transformed death into a method, a technique, an organized system. It was no longer merely battles between armies; it became the systematic destruction of entire populations, civilian or military, in the name of ideologies that justified annihilation. This was a form of violence that invaded everything: starving bodies, razed cities, scattered families, shattered minds. It did not simply kill; it dehumanized, reducing the other to a category, a number, a target to be eliminated. It is the moment when we understand that modernity—trains, factories, bureaucracy, science—can be used to save lives, but can also be turned toward organizing the disappearance of millions of human beings. And that is what marks it so deeply: the Second World War reveals that humanity can transform itself into a machine of total destruction, capable of unleashing a violence in which death is no longer an accident of battle, but an intention.
The violence of the Second World War represents a complete rupture in human history: not only did states confront each other with an unprecedented level of industrial power, but they also transformed death into a method, a technique, an organized system. It was no longer merely battles between armies; it became the systematic destruction of entire populations, civilian or military, in the name of ideologies that justified annihilation. This was a form of violence that invaded everything: starving bodies, razed cities, scattered families, shattered minds. It did not simply kill; it dehumanized, reducing the other to a category, a number, a target to be eliminated. It is the moment when we understand that modernity—trains, factories, bureaucracy, science—can be used to save lives, but can also be turned toward organizing the disappearance of millions of human beings. And that is what marks it so deeply: the Second World War reveals that humanity can transform itself into a machine of total destruction, capable of unleashing a violence in which death is no longer an accident of battle, but an intention.