Comparing racisms can perversely shield perpetrators by pitting victims against each other.

Evidence

It is true, as Libby Saxton points out, that analogies between different racisms can sometimes be used to pit victims against each other—as with the lawyer Jacques Vergès, whose position was pole one at its most crude, since his main line of defence at the 1987 trial of his client Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo ‘Butcher of Lyons’, was to argue that France had no right to put Germans on trial for doing to Jews what France had itself done to Africans and Arabs. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1382

Categorization

• XREF: Vergès’s Barbie defense is a vivid case of weaponized comparative suffering—echoes questions of which victimhood claims get heard, relevant to the reader’s work on shared racisms.
• QUESTION: Curious whether Vergès’s ‘comparative atrocity’ defense strategy was later reused in other trials—would be a good thread to pull.