Holocaust memorialization lets Europe deny its colonial racial past

Evidence

This stress on the Holocaust, however, does account for what Stuart Hall has characterized as historical amnesia, the now deafening silence in Europe concerning its colonial legacy. Colonization, on this view, was a settler phenomenon, the Holocaust a local one. Colonialism implicated at most some European states and populations, the Holocaust marked them all, one way or another. The languages of colonialism were English, Spanish, French, largely; Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Italian a little less so; Auschwitz, as Agamben points out, was witness to all of Europe’s languages. Natives are just that, native to other places, alien, foreign. Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals were Europe’s other, its own strangeness, its own crippling limb it sought to amputate. Mainland Europeans were largely though obviously not nearly universally complicit. Hence the silence about race today, its censoriousness, its denial. Race is an embarrassment. A family past that has passed, or must be made to pass. Better that it not be mentioned, that it not have to be thought or thought about. Only it doesn’t comply, it won’t cooperate, it refuses to remain silent. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 826

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Europe’s Holocaust-centric memory silences its colonial legacy as race denial. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 826; Europe’s Holocaust focus erases its colonial race history — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 823; Centering the Holocaust erases Europe’s own colonial history — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 823 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Europe’s Holocaust-centric memory silences its colonial legacy as race denial. #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 826
• Europe’s Holocaust focus erases its colonial race history #corroborates (0.93) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 823
• Centering the Holocaust erases Europe’s own colonial history #corroborates (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 823
• The Holocaust’s singularity framing obscured its colonial continuity #expands (0.85) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 890
• Europe denies its racism by recasting racial exclusion as class cultural or religious problems #expands (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 946
• Europe’s colonial past is irreversible and constitutive of its present identity #expands (0.72) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 826