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If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.

Milton Berle

"What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume, we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders – and even by victims themselves – as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization)" (Scheper-Hughes & Burgois, 2004, p. 22).