Europe tolerated and cultivated Nazism while it only targeted non-European peoples
Evidence
Racism is not “an exception to” but “the rule of” European colonialism, and what has promoted and sustained it is not any innate inferiority on the part of “the natives” (thus nativized) but its promotion by the best “Western civilization”, as invoked by Hirsi Ali, Nafisi, Rushdie, and so on. Until and unless the cutting edge of European racism is turned inward against itself, Europeans will remain blind to it. Fanon implicates the entirety of Western civilization in its global barbarities by quoting Aime Cesaire: “And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect, the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.” Their mutual point is that when the victims of European barbarism were in faraway Asia, Africa, and Latin America the European Hochkultur did not mind; only once its wrath turned inward toward the Europeans (especially Jewish Europeans) themselves did they begin to wonder where the monster had come from. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 180
Categorization
- XREF: Boomerang thesis echoes the reader’s notes on moral panics and how out-group demonization rebounds on the in-group.
- SHARE: For a friend who studies settler colonialism and the European roots of Nazi race science — this is the cleanest formulation of the boomerang argument.