It is true that the Fascists focussed on destroying Europe’s Jews, for obvious reasons, but for the Western Axis Europe was simply the minimum. If the Axis won the war, it’s reasonably possible that they would have taken their ambitions much further: the Fascists made so many references to a supposed global Jewish conspiracy that providing citations is unnecessary, but here is an example from Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe, pages 84–5:
Jewish Bolsheviks were bloodstained terrorists. […] And they were deceitful enemies on a mission to impose Jewish rule over the world. Hitler believed it was the German people’s historic calling to protect the world from Judeo-Bolshevik evil. German annihilation would leave the entire world helpless before this great enemy.
As he wrote in Mein Kampf: “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.”2
Holocaust education sadly tends to be very Eurocentric. This isn’t entirely unjustified (again, for obvious reasons), but it’s misled otherwise well informed people into conclusions like ‘Fascism was just colonialism directed at other white people’, which is an oversimplification at best. In reality, Jews from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, Libya, and likely elsewhere in Afrasia were unsafe from Fascist antisemitism.
Unsurprisingly, when somebody called this antisocialist out on her bullshit, she moved the goalposts:
The Nazis did not have a global presence. Islamofascism does, which is why Hezbollah was able to execute terror attacks against Jews in Argentina, for example.
Now, I don’t know if that claim about Hezbollah is true, but it is worth noting that Argentinian neofascists regularly assaulted and tormented Jews. It would indeed be an exaggeration to claim that the Third Reich had a global presence, but it had more than a few sympathizers in, for example, North America and El Salvador; there were Axis sympathizers on every continent during the early 1940s.
Oh, and Hamas’s supposed antisemitism? Nowhere to be found.
The Nazis did not have a global presence. Islamofascism does.
What is this "Islamofascism" stuff? Is it 2003 again?
Man, looks like I gotta break out my back issues of National Review and start reading all the Jonah Goldberg editorials. Also boot up my Windows ME PC, and start swearing every time it crashes (twenty minute intervals are what I remember).
boot up my Windows ME PC, and start swearing every time it crashes (twenty minute intervals are what I remember).
I think there is a subconscious urge in settler-brained westerners to insist that the cornerstones of their existence---colonialism, imperialism, slavery, genocide, etc. at extremely large scales---are not unique to the western world and can also be found, sometimes in even worse form, among the oriental savages.
Of course there is the propaganda angle here to slander Hamas but there is also a prominent aspect of Nazi apologia and whitewashing the Holocaust here. It is very easy to falsely vilify their enemies without apologising for Nazis but they do it anyway.
I was arguing with friends about Uygur genocide and I mentioned that there is no evidence for mass killings (where are the graves?) And one of my friends responded that were still finding mass graves of Indigenous children in Canada and I just responded "Why are you assuming everyone is barbaric as us, China isn't a settler colonial state, Canada is". They kind of bowed out of the conversation after that. There is an urge to universalize the horrors of colonialism as though it's a normal thing everyone engages with, and not a practice located in the conditions of settler colonialism. Even among people who are left leaning and acknowledge the specific evils of settler colonialism. Like obviously mass killings are a theme of human society, but that doesn't mean literally everyone is doing it all the time.
are not unique to the western world and can also be found, sometimes in even worse form, among the oriental savages
I think it's important not to get too contrarian when countering this. Those things did exist in various forms outside of Europe; to say they didn't is to fall into the "noble savage" trope.
The reasons why that doesn't matter are:
- Whether some people enslaved (for instance) other people in the distant past under a now-defunct political system is an academic question. What matters to people living today is ongoing injustices and the effects of past injustices that can still be felt.
- We should be trying to do less horrific things today, not looking to past horrors and saying "well that's how it's always been."
- The scale and refinement of those practices by European colonial powers adds to the gravity of the crimes (much like a methodical serial killer is worse than someone who shoots two people in a robbery).
- While these practices did occur outside of the imperial core, they were not universal -- just like modern governments commit varying degrees of crimes and are better or worse because of it, pre-colonial governments were not all guilty of the crimes of the worst pre-colonial governments.
Those things did happen but they was never at the scale at which European colonialism operated. I am not implying that there is something unique to the European genealogy which permitted this. It's just that the imperial core is operating planet-scale meat grinders using ahistorical idiosyncrasies to assuage the guilty conscience.
The scale and refinement of those practices by European colonial powers adds to the gravity of the crimes
I'm agreeing with you.
I'm really sorry. I did not mean to say that you disagreed with me.
