Sony Thăng : The holocaust exception
They will tell you the Holocaust was the exception.
The aberration. The moment Europe lost its mind, was seized by a peculiar madness, produced a unique evil that has no connection to the broader tradition of European civilization.
The Holocaust happened in Europe. To Europeans.
That is the exception.
The method: racial categorization, systematic dehumanization, organized mass killing, bureaucratic record-keeping of the dead, did not originate in 1933.
It had been practiced for four hundred years on every other continent.
The scholars who have written this most clearly, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt herself, have documented the line:
What Europe did to the rest of the world, it eventually did to itself.
The techniques perfected in the colonies came home.
The Holocaust was not an interruption of Western civilization.
It was Western civilization encountering, for the first time, what Western civilization had been doing to everyone else.
The difference was the victims were European.
That is the only thing that made it, in European memory, unforgivable.
The unforgivable part was Russian Commies defeating it. Europeans always had slaves, servants and an underclass just like in the colonies. It was never any different if you were on the bottom no matter where you were born in the world. They exported colonialism because they had already perfected it… Read more »