Only atrocities against Europeans, not colonial ones, were held to discredit civilization-talk.

Evidence

It is commonly argued that wartime atrocities made legal distinctions between civilised and uncivilised societies anachronistic. From this perspective, the UDHR’s affirmations of human equality indicated that chastened European powers had renounced racial and civilisational hierarchies in favour of universal humanism. But the view that the horrors of the war destabilised the distinction between the civilised and the uncivilised tacitly accepts that only atrocities committed against Europeans, and not colonial genocide, massacre and slavery, were sufficient to render European claims to civilisational superiority suspect. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 103

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Césaire’s charge of selective moral outrage; connects to the reader’s theme of how moral-reform rhetoric selectively includes/excludes victims, as in Islamophobia-reading project. — connects to: The West claims anti-imperialist language only when victims are white. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1179; Europe only acknowledged racism when it was located elsewhere, in South Africa or America — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 854; Official colonial histories sanitized violence by omitting European atrocities and labor grievances. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1227
• SEED: Essay angle: which atrocities are treated as delegitimizing a universalist moral order versus which are normalized — a selective-memory test of moral panics.

Broader Connections

• The West claims anti-imperialist language only when victims are white. #corroborates (0.90) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1179
• Official colonial histories sanitized violence by omitting European atrocities and labor grievances. #corroborates (0.78) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1227
• Europe only acknowledged racism when it was located elsewhere, in South Africa or America #expands (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 854