The Holocaust was orchestrated by the Nazis of Germany. What is not said enough is that the entire West was complicit. Certain regions of Europe collaborated in the Nazi extermination project by assisting in the deportation of their Jewish population – we can particularly think of France. Others simply refused to open their borders to people seeking to escape Nazi horrors, unless they were, for example, exceptional academics or artists. We can think here of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.
Too little has been told here of the story of MS St. Louis. The ship left Hamburg, Germany, with 937 asylum seekers on board, almost all of them Jewish. After being refused admission to Cuba, the United States and Canada, the passengers were forced to return to Europe, where a significant proportion were killed in the Holocaust.
After the Second World War, attention turned – rightly so – to the Nuremberg trials. The story has since been told as that of a clash between the evil Nazis and the defenders of freedom that were the democratic countries. In doing so, we avoid examining the share of culpability of liberal democracies in the horrors of anti-Semitism. By making racist violence an intrinsically German problem, we avoid drawing our own lessons from it.
We thus avoid thinking, in particular, about the Balfour Declaration. The British promised, in 1917, to support the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, a territory over which they had just taken control, thanks to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The document is one of the founding pillars of Israel. But we must understand that its support among the non-Jewish European population has its source in particular in anti-Semitism. To get rid of the “Jewish problem” of the continent, nothing better than to find a land outside of Europe for this community…
Complex. This is probably the best word to describe the links between European anti-Semitism, its contemporary ramifications, the State of Israel and the difficulty of the Western political class in naming as such the horrors committed for more than 100 days now in Gaza. . Complex, and therefore impossible to understand without an examination of the most symbolically charged pages of 20th century historye century.
We know that violence which is not named as such by those responsible or by its victims tends to be reproduced from one generation to the next. In this refusal to carry out this perilous but necessary exercise of reflection there are the sources of cyclical violence. Bad conscience and repression always end up catching up with those they haunt.
An example. Namibia is one of the most vocal supporters of South Africa, which accuses Israel of “acts of genocide” before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), based in The Hague. Its president, Hage Geingob, took to the barricades in reaction to Germany’s decision to intervene as a third party in support of Israel in the trial. For what ?
Because the Germans committed in Namibia what many historians agree to call the first genocide of the 20th century.e century, against the Herero and Nama populations of what was then their colony. In 1904, German soldiers were ordered to shoot all Hereros because they refused to cede their land to German settlers. Thousands died of hunger and thirst in the desert where they fled. Others lost their lives in the first German concentration camps. From the systematic rape of Namibian women by German soldiers came mixed-race children studied to support the racist pseudoscience that would become the ideological cornerstone of Nazism.
For decades, Germany refused to recognize the genocide that killed around 80% of the Herero population and 50% of the Nama population between 1904 and 1908, according to historians’ estimates. The official apology only came in 2021, and Berlin still refuses to give legal and financial consequences to its regrets.
We can understand that Namibia reacted strongly when Germany positioned itself as a sort of authority on the question of genocide before the ICJ… with its habit of committing it.
Basically, not only is the memory of the Holocaust beginning to recede, but also, in fact, awareness of these events has always been partial. Europe does not yet see clearly how the horrors which were then deployed on its territory are in fact the result of technologies of death, torture and control developed in a colonial context, well before, but also well after the Second World War, on mainly non-European populations.
Aerial bombings that decimate communities, famine and thirst as tools of political submission, the confinement of populations in tightly controlled areas, collective punishment or the denigration of the rights of an entire ethnic or religious group: this violence can be too often justified as “collateral damage”, “security precautions” or “inevitable tragedies” if their targets are not Western, but the weapons are. We saw it in Namibia, Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, Iraq, Gaza.
There is still an active resistance to thinking, in many schools of thought close to Euro-American power, about the link between genocidal violence, colonization and its legacy. In this context, we cannot have the tools to understand the word “genocide”, and we will refuse most applications of it.
To see which regions of the world have a completely different political tradition of reflection on the question of genocide and colonial violence, it is enough to see where the support of both States and populations is found for the South African approach. South before the Court of The Hague.
Anthropologist, Emilie Nicolas is a columnist at Duty
and to Release. She hosts the podcast Detours for Canadaland.