European moral solidarity’s boundaries exclude colonial violence but include internal slaughter.

Evidence

Let me explain: Tony Judt powerfully argues that the idea of Europe stands as a convenient suppressor of collective memories of the widespread collaboration with Nazi crimes in East and West alike, as well as of mass brutalities and civil cruelties for which all states were directly or indirectly responsible. His account has nothing to say, however, about violence perpetrated in this period by Europeans outside Europe—in colonial Africa, say, or in the Middle East. No mention is made even of Algeria, which was, after all, an internal department of France. I stress that my comment here is not moralistic but descriptive. It has to do with how the conceptual boundaries of moral and legal solidarity are actually traced. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 783

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s core vault concern: secular-European moral categories quietly exclude the colonial/non-European, paralleling how Cooper’s secular-left categories code Christian norms as neutral. The ‘myth of Europe’ is a boundary-tracing device.
• SEED: Angle: How moral panics and memory-commemoration function as boundary-drawing practices — which brutalities get museums and which get silence, tracked across Europe and the settler-colonial world.
• ADDENDUM: Supports ‘On Sacrifice’ piece: how communities draw the line around which deaths count as sacred/mourned and which as mere casualties, parallel to Algeria’s exclusion from Judt’s culpability map.