SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: the Holocaust was colonialism coming home

https://x.com/nxt888/status/2082474263576281550

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Here is the question that European civilization has never answered:

At what point, in the five hundred years of colonial practice, should a European person have been expected to know that what was happening was wrong?

Not 1945. That is too easy, and too convenient.

1904, when the German Empire issued a written extermination order against the Herero people and generals carried it out and soldiers followed orders and administrators recorded the deaths and the skulls were shipped to universities for racial science.

At that point, should someone have known?

1890, when the systematic amputations in the Congo were being photographed by missionaries and the photographs were being published in European newspapers and reformers were raising the alarm and Leopold II was receiving those reformers in his palace and explaining that the civilizing mission required certain difficult measures.

At that point?

1830, when the Trail of Tears was a policy debated in the United States Congress and approved by elected representatives and challenged by lawyers and litigated to the Supreme Court, which ruled against it, and then carried out anyway.

At that point?

1619?

1492?

The question matters because the defense of European civilization against the charge that the Holocaust was colonialism coming home always rests on the assumption that colonial violence was invisible, unexamined, a product of its time.

It was not invisible.

It was photographed and debated and reported and litigated.

It was chosen.

At every decision point, by specific people with names and offices and moral agency, the choice was made to continue.

The Holocaust produced Nuremberg because the victims were European and the defendants were the enemies of the victorious powers.

The colonial period produced nothing comparable because the victims were not European and the defendants were the victorious powers.

That is the only reason one has a trial and the other has a museum of natural history.

Same civilization.

Same logic.

Different documentation.