Colonial genocide in the Congo preceded and prefigured Nazi genocide

Evidence

This is the “work of the Belgians” in the name of exploration and science, naturalizing racial necessity and civilizing superiority. It is all but matched at the time by the German colonial power’s project to obliterate the Ovaherero, Nama, and Khoikhoi between 1904 and 1907 in what today is Namibia. If the brutes fail to deliver their quota, “exterminate all the brutes,” as Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz exhorts in the scribbled postscript to his Report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. The heart of a chillingly cold and brutal darkness, the “laboratory of modernity” indeed, as Ann Stoler has aptly characterized it. The “scientific exploration of Africa” provides as strong an exemplification as one might find of the significant relationship Paul Gilroy points to in Against Race “between the sometimes genocidal brutality of the colonies and the later Nazi genocide in Europe.” Every documentation of civilization indeed coterminously the inscription of barbarism. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 898

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gilroy’s Against Race and Ann Stoler’s ‘laboratory of modernity’; links to the broader argument about racial Europeanization underpinning this chapter. — connects to: Nazi ethnic cleansing radicalized earlier nationalist population policies into genocide — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 49
• SEED: Article angle: tracing the intellectual line from Congo ‘scientific exploration’ to the Holocaust as a continuum of European racial projects rather than separate horrors.
• CANDY: “Every documentation of civilization is coterminously the inscription of barbarism” is a punchy, shareable line.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 898