African colonialism taught aspiring Nazis that peoples are actively converted into races

Evidence

African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite. Here they had seen with their own eyes how peoples could be converted into races and how, simply by taking the initiative in this process, one might push one’s own people into the position of the master race. Here they were cured of the illusion that the historical process is necessarily “progressive,” for if it was the course of older colonization to trek to something, the “Dutchman trekked away from everything,” and if “economic history once taught that man had developed by gradual steps from a life of hunting to pastoral pursuits and finally to a settled and agricultural life,” the story of the Boers clearly demonstrated that one could also come “from a land that had taken the lead in a thrifty and intensive cultivation…[and] gradually become a herdsman and a hunter.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 533

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s ‘peoples converted into races’ is the generative statement of race as process rather than essence — carry forward to Islamophobia readings on the construction of racialized Muslims.
• QUESTION: The Boers regressing to ‘savage’ level while remaining masters — worth chasing the full account of how regress and domination cohere.