This year’s conference, The Holocaust: The Legacy of Fascism, is dedicated to the effort to present and interpret the mechanisms, or mechanisms, on the basis of which the Third Reich recognized and discriminated against those others who did not fit its image of a desirable or generally worthy person. Whether it was the racially degraded, ideologically or sexually “wrongly” oriented, “professional criminals”, “asocials” or “lazy”, the mentally ill, the homeless or beggars, pacifists and emigrants or alcoholics and prostitutes, all of them were not worthy, at best, to exist in the public space of a model state, and at worst, on the face of the world.

For all of them there was a special mark in the form of a triangle made of fabric of different colors, which were attached to the jackets or trousers of prisoners in the camps, thus making it easier for the guards to recognize them and treat them accordingly. This careful category testifies to the will to precisely define the boundaries of those who deserve to live and those of the Others. The latter are subject first to theoretical condemnation, then to ordinary, and then to legally organized state persecutions. What need did such exclusive treatment satisfy and what, perhaps, still satisfy today? Who and on what basis decided, and still decides, in the game of social inclusion and exclusion? What justifications can be offered, and what have been offered, for the disqualification of entire social groups? And what theoretical challenge is possible to such acts, and what practical defense against them is even possible? We will try to answer all these and the questions connected with them through three lectures, one debate, one school lesson and one confession of someone who was a victim of that fanatically consistent and destructive logic of exclusion…

Program available in serbian here.