The Congo genocide functioned as a precursor to Nazi extermination methods

Evidence

This is the “work of the Belgians” in the name of exploration and science, naturalizing racial necessity and civilizing superiority. It is all but matched at the time by the German colonial power’s project to obliterate the Ovaherero, Nama, and Khoikhoi between 1904 and 1907 in what today is Namibia. If the brutes fail to deliver their quota, “exterminate all the brutes,” as Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz exhorts in the scribbled postscript to his Report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. The heart of a chillingly cold and brutal darkness, the “laboratory of modernity” indeed, as Ann Stoler has aptly characterized it. The “scientific exploration of Africa” provides as strong an exemplification as one might find of the significant relationship Paul Gilroy points to in Against Race “between the sometimes genocidal brutality of the colonies and the later Nazi genocide in Europe.” Every documentation of civilization indeed coterminously the inscription of barbarism. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 898 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Leopold’s rule in the Congo arguably offers the initial example of intense genocidal practice that has come to mark the twentieth century. This was rule through racial terror, the active pursuit and more or less conscious and executed design of extermination. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 69 (#expands, via linked claim)

In a sustained effort to convert Algeria into a capitalist creature, the French engaged in direct appropriation and exploitation of the agricultural and mineral resources of the country. The problem, as the French saw it, was that too many Muslims lived in the country and that these “natives” were in control of the lands necessary for commercial exploitation and capitalist economy. As genocide involving a population of over two million natives was—at least at the time—not a practical option for the colonial authorities, freeing the land from the grip of the natives by other means dominated all considerations, in the legal field no less than in the political. This option would also afford the opportunity to exploit cheap labor, which would be lost if genocide were to be carried out. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 234 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Nazi ethnic cleansing radicalized earlier nationalist population policies into genocide — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 49; Colonial genocide in the Congo preceded and prefigured Nazi genocide — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 898; Leopold’s Congo initiated the twentieth century’s genocide pattern — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 69 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial genocide in the Congo preceded and prefigured Nazi genocide #corroborates (0.98) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 898
• Leopold’s Congo initiated the twentieth century’s genocide pattern #expands (0.94) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 69
• French colonial dispossession of Algerian land substituted for genocide as a practical option #complicates (0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 234