• oliveoil [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    90·
    3 days ago

    The crime of Adolf Hilter wasn’t the genocide, the repression, the ethnic supremacism, or the cruelty.

    The crime was that he did it in Europe. He brought all of those things to which Germany was experienced in down in Africa and had been doing the whole time.

    And then I grow up hearing people talk about Adolf Hitler as if he were an evil one step above Satan himself. Because he did to the Europeans what they were doing to others. Meanwhile Otto Von Bismarck, or any other European genocidaire, is given a clear slate.

    The metropolitan Germans couldn’t fathom what was happening to their country and where this depravity was coming from. The same way Americans are somehow surprised at their country today.

    They lived in an elevated society with women’s rights, gay rights, trans rights, the best scientists - all far away from the empire’s periphery and violence.

    • ComradeRat [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      3 days ago

      First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl isremovedd and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated”, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

      And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

      People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

      Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the Coolies of India, and the Negroes of Africa.

      And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been—and still is—narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.

      I have talked a good deal about Hitler. Because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see things on a large scale and to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics. Whether one likes it or not, at the end of the blind alley that is Europe, I mean the Europe of Adenauer, Schuman, Bidault, and a few others, there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.

      — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

    • Rojo27 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      19·
      3 days ago

      I think about this more and more everyday. Europeans in general don’t get enough shit for their crimes against humanity, but especially not for the crimes against the Global South. I mean, just looking at WW2, how many people talk about the Italian’s genocidal campaign in Ethiopia? Or Japan’s (the ‘honorary Westerners’) genocidal campaign in Manchuria?

  • ClathrateG [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    53·
    3 days ago

    “When I fought alongside the imperialists during one of their campaigns of imperial aggression, I never could have believed the imperial aggression could ever be directed my way, can’t they see we’re white??!” fell-for-it-again

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    49·
    3 days ago

    I’ve been seeing a bunch of rah-rah saber rattling posts about how if Trump invades Greenland it will trigger WW3 and just… no. No. The vassals will whine and roll over and appease him because ultimately they know they don’t really have a choice. NATO will trundle along just fine as it still fulfills its true purpose (omnipresent military threat against China and Russia). I don’t think there will be an invasion just because they’ll find some keys to jingle in front of his face long enough to distract him from it. But if there is it won’t change shit. A bunch of Europeans will be embarrassed to find that the fig leaf is off and the true nature of their continent’s relationship with us is laid bare. That’s it.

  • Samsuma@lemmy.ml
    10·
    2 days ago

    “please excuse the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that were murdered thanks to European + European-Settler invaders. Those were just colatteral. Woopsies!”

    What’s often forgotten about the invasion of Iraq, or at the very least criminally understated, is NATO members’ involvement, basically other European countries (despite NATO claiming to not have any “official involvement” to obfuscate their DIRECT ties to the invasion, which I call BS considering the amount of assistance provided, itself being listed in their own damn article about it, and that more than enough NATO members joined in to practically say that they were involved regardless).

    Eurolibs genuinely believe in their own “bastion of democracy, totally different from America” hubris like they haven’t created the settler-colony in the first place.

  • KoloradoKoolAid75
    17·
    3 days ago

    We definitely need more EuroKraKKa slander memes. I can’t offend them enough with the memes targeted to AmeriKraKKas.