Politics & Power Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Genocide, Dworkin insists, doesn’t start with machetes or camps; it starts with an idea that sounds, to its believers, like plain common sense. The sentence is built to mock the self-importance of that idea. “However improbably” needles the reader: yes, it feels absurd that a tidy theory about “biological distinction” could end in mass death, but history keeps proving the absurdity operational. Dworkin’s target isn’t only overt hatred; it’s the smug certainty that nature has already made moral and political decisions for us.

Her phrasing exposes the machinery of dehumanization as bureaucratic and self-legitimating. “Indisputably” is the key tell: the violence begins when a claim becomes unfalsifiable, when “biology” is invoked as a conversation-stopper that launders prejudice into necessity. “Sanction” sharpens the indictment. Discrimination isn’t just excused; it’s authorized, given the aura of law, science, and inevitability. The line sketches a pipeline: classification becomes hierarchy; hierarchy becomes policy; policy becomes permission.

Context matters: Dworkin wrote as a feminist critic with a lifelong preoccupation with how societies naturalize domination, particularly through gender. Her warning scales beyond feminism without abandoning it. The subtext is that the first atrocity is epistemic: a culture deciding that certain bodies come pre-labeled with lesser rights. Once that premise is accepted, the rest can be presented as administration, not cruelty. Dworkin’s bleak power is in treating genocide not as a rupture of civilization but as one of its logical outcomes when “biology” is made into destiny.